Hello Reddthat-thians!

As always here is our semi-whenever there is news update. I would, as always like to thank you all for being here and for the kind support we received last time I made an update.

We hit a few couple of milestones this last quarter:

  • Our first BTC transaction was received! Thank you anonymous!
  • Lemmy released two versions (which we have yet to update too, more below)
  • I only restarted the services once the whole quarter as I thought we were down/stuck.

Lemmy 0.19.7

The latest update brings some fixes to Lemmy as well as new features such as Private/Invite only communities. I can’t wait to see what this does to help people find safe spaces and to self regulate. Edit: that’s in 0.20.0. The only new features (worth talking about imo) are parallel sending and allowing people to have 1000 characters in their bio.
This update is not live yet as the update requires a 30-60 minute database update that I want to test on a backup to make sure we can safely update. Other big instances have already done the update and most things went successfully so I’m confident that we can update without much fuss but I’d like to actually enjoy my holidays rather than spending 4 hours debugging db migrations! So, testing first.

Users

Something I think we struggle with is our proposition. As we have an opinionated view on what our community should be which doesn’t always resonate when trying to sign up. With “only” 100 users active daily compared to other servers with over 1k it puts into perspective that not everyone agrees with our policies, but there are certainly people who do!

As such I’m open to ideas on growing our userbase or ideas on rephrasing our signup page, and sidebar.

Australian Social Media Laws

Here is the biggest news. Last week the Australian Government passed a new law that requires Social Media to no longer be accessible for kids under the age of 16. As such we will need to design a system & possibly modify Lemmy to be compliant with these laws.

I will not debate whether this is good or bad, because at the end of the day, we only have a few options: comply with these laws, don’t comply and turn off reddthat, sell / handoff to another admin.
This has been a fun side project for me and I want to continue it. As such I’m looking into ways to comply with the local laws to ensure that Australian minors are blocked.

For Reddthat, this law requires social media to take “reasonable” steps to ensure children under the age of 16 are not be given an account. They do not define what reasonable means and leave it up to the social media platforms to define it. Really helpful for those indie social media platforms…

Unfortunately, like myself, I was thinking that we might technically not be defined as a social media platform thus skirting around the rule. The law defines a social media platform as any site whose primary or significant purpose is to connect 2 or more users, allows end-users to link to or interact with other end-users, and that allows end-users to post content.
So Lemmy, Mastodon, Blusky et al will be affected.

Researching it more leads to the idea which puts the onus on social media companies to continually verify accounts, so they take a proactive step to verify accounts that are believed to be accessed by minors under 16. Thus you need to prove you are above 16 years old. The cherry on top? You are not allowed to use a government issued ID to do it.
Thinking back to when you were 16 years old, what forms of identification did you have? A driver’s licence? Maybe a passport? A school ID card? The last one (school ID) would be the only valid id you could use to verify yourself that isn’t government issued in this instance. And good luck if you don’t go to school anymore and started in the workforce when your 16.

Needless to say this is going to be a recurring theme over the next year and I will keep you all informed about it with our updates.

Future Features

A general outline of what I’m hoping to achieve is more controls in Lemmy to:

  • have accounts in a ‘monitored’ state
  • have a way to customise approval processes
  • have accounts use a trust rating based on age, post/comment numbers, etc.
    • this would help with spam as well (obviously this would need a lot of factors)
  • have automod built in (or actually setup correctly for us)

Obviously these are things that will need Lemmy development to help facilitate and I’ll be creating a few issues over the weeks once I’ve fleshed out what a solution might look like.
If you have ideas please share! let’s start the conversation on what the processes would look like to help solve our issues.

Financials

Thanks to the big donation drive from last time I posted we are still looking healthy enough in the financials to last until May next year! Which is good as our server plan renews in April. At that time we will be downgrading to a smaller instance as we may have over exaggerated when purchasing last April. We’ll obviously know more closer to April next year about our financials and what we can afford to ensure we are cost neutral (if possible!).

Our LemmyWorld proxy also is an extra cost that we never budgeted for and has been ticking away successfully. Maybe by April LW will have upgraded to >0.19.5 which will give us parallel sending allowing us to remove the proxy.

Our object storage is humming along but costs are creaping up. I’ll be doing an audit and possible look into doing a cost analysis to see if other object storage solutions would be cheaper. But for less than $20/m it’s probably not even worth my time…

As a reminder we have many ways to donate if you are able. A recurring donation of $5 is worth more to me than a once of $60 donation. Only because it allows me to forecast the year and work out when we need to do donation drives or relax knowing everything in it’s current state will be fine.

Note: while you still can transfer me Bitcoin, I have removed it as an option because of the current transaction fees. Monero or Litecoin offer transaction fees as low as $0.005 so they are the preferred options compared to the $5 transaction fee of Bitcoin.

Conclusion

You are awesome. Posting, Commenting, and interacting with communities on Reddthat or through Reddthat makes it enjoyable every time to write these updates. So keep being awesome, even if you are a lurker!

If I were not hosting in Australia I would still be required to conform to laws if I were to allow Australian people to use Reddthat. Blocking all of Aus would be an option. But we need to ask ourselves does that fall under our values or ideals? (No obviously). Neither does requiring people to verify they are over a certain age. But we’ll see what’s to become.
This is the same as how CPPA or GDPR are still enforcable while we are all the way on the other side of the world.
This doesn’t require a knee jerk reaction but requires serious thinking, whiteboarding and well thought out communication.

As always,
Cheers,

Tiff

PS Happy Holidays!