Ani.Social's 1st Birthday! 🥳

Today Ani.Social is officially 1 year old! It's kind of crazy that it's been a year already. I still remember the days when it was just me posting illustrations of Kurumi. Now there's nearly 1,000 of us and over 50 communities! We've been through a lot this year (defederations, federation issues, migrations, etc) but I'm happy there's a lot of support from the community and even other admins from different instances! I want to say thank you to everyone who has contributed through posts, comments, community tools, reports, funding, and more!

Ani.Social was kind of an experiment to see if hosting a public instance is something sustainable and fulfilling. After a year I can say that it is both! :D Here's to another year!

(Fun fact: We share the same birthday as Gawr Gura from Hololive EN.)

(Fun fact 2: Ani.Social was supposed to be a KBin instance. But because there was not docker container, I settled with Lemmy instead.)

Upgrade to Lemmy ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5

We upgraded to ~~v0.19.4~~ v0.19.5 which brings some new features like the ability to remove stuff you uploaded through your profile page. A full list of changes may be found here. I also want to note that because sometimes upgrading Lemmy doesn't take very long, I might not make an announcement in advance anymore.

Accidental image removal

A few weeks ago, there were some images that were deleted because of a bug from a tool I used to remove old images cached from other instances. I have a long explanation here. This shouldn't happen again (hopefully!).

Verification mails did not send

For about a week in May, email was not working so some people who signed up did not receive an email. I was informed by a user who sent an email at help@ani.social. This has been resolved and anyone who did not receive a verification email can email me to have your account verified.

Random downtimes

You might notice that there are some downtime here and there. Part of this is because of small changes I make to the server (like enabling or disabling certain settings). These usually don't take long (a minute or two of downtime).

Sometimes you might see the instance gone for as long as an hour or two. This is usually caused by our hosting provider. This type of downtime is not really within my control so please bare with it. If the instance is down/inaccessible you can visit https://status.ani.social where I post updates.

Automatic moderation tools

In the near future, I plan to add automatic moderation tools (automod) such as LemmyAutomod and Fedi-safety. Both tools are likely experimental and may remove posts or images wrongly. I'll keep a close eye on them when I deploy them.

Closing thoughts -- one year in the Fediverse

A few days ago I was reading this article called "Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS" which made a lot of interesting points on the Fediverse (duh). Theses 3, 5, and 6 are the most relevant ones in my opinion.

Thesis 3 is relevant for a lot of the political discussions and issues on defederation you see around in the Fediverse. Thesis 5 is relevant for developers, admins, and moderators as it deals with labor. Thesis 6 extends this to users.

Transitioning from corporate social media extends far past from simply "install this app and treat it like Reddit/Twitter/Instagram". It's not just a technical change for most users, it's a new social experience. The social world of the Fediverse is different from corporate social media because of how it operates differently (in policy, labor, etc). More importantly though, a lot of our practices and principles are still experimental so it's interesting to see how these are changing and developing over time (and as mentioned in the article, how these will generate new "userships").

Anyway, I suddenly feel a wave of laziness so maybe I won't write anything more than that. Feel free to read the article because there's a lot to think about.

Again, if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know! Thanks for reading all the way through!

Ani.Social and Lemmy.World federation issues

Due to federation issues between Ani.Social and Lemmy.World caused by geographic distance, Ani.Social has been relocated from Asia to Europe.

Ani.Social was first moved to US on May 12 because EU providers like to ask for my passport and electricity bills. But even in the US, Ani.Social still could not keep up with Lemmy.World. Thankfully, there are smaller server providers in the EU that don't ask for my birth certificate so we migrated there a little over 24 hours ago.

The chart below shows Ani.Social is now on par with other servers in terms of Lemmy.World activity queue in the past 24 hours.

Moving Ani.Social to a region closer Lemmy.World was a last resort option because I'd like to have my servers close to me and to avoid centralizing Lemmy servers in US/EU. However, because a potential fix appears to be scheduled for Lemmy v0.19.5, I felt that we really need to migrate sooner.

I apologize for not announcing the migration and the downtime(s), as I only had time to work on this a few days ago.

We will likely relocate back to Asia in the future when a fix is available.

Lost activities

Because of a problem during the migration, activities (likes, posts, comments, etc) from Ani.Social between May 12 16:31 to 17:47 (UTC) have been lost locally. They may appear in federated instances but cannot be deleted or modified from Ani.Social. This happened because of an unexpected behavior in migrating the database. I apologize for this and I'll carefully review the database restoration steps next time.

(Specifically, I first restored an earlier backup then a later backup after. For some reason, Postgres did not include the changes of the later backup.)

Video uploads

You can now upload videos that are up to 25mb in size and 7200 frames. See example below:

The file size is modeled after Discord's file size limits when uploading files to text channels. Depending on the usage and costs, we may or may not decrease these limits.

Temporarily removing info.ani.social

info.ani.social is the documentation @koyo and I wrote a long time ago but never completed. It contains information about ani.social such as the rules, guidelines, and FAQ. The aim of the webpage was to provide new users all the information they need to navigate Ani.Social and the rest of the Fediverse.

All the important information displayed in info.ani.social has been copied to https://ani.social/legal and the sidebar. Because Ani.Social aims to be accessible and easy to use for new users, I will return the info page as soon as possible (and possibly in the form of a community wiki).

Alternative front ends

Other instances have alternative front ends for Lemmy. Some of these look modern and include new features. We have deployed Photon at https://photon.ani.social if you are interested in trying a new look for Ani.Social. Let me know what you think of Photon and other frontends that you might like.

Nyaa.Social

Did you know that when I chose a domain name for Ani.Social, I had a few other candidates? These include otaku.social, baka.social, and nyaa.social. The first two were taken and I was choosing between nyaa.social and ani.social.

I decided to use Ani.Social for an anime Lemmy server because it was direct and straight to the point. I also felt nyaa.social was more fitting for a microblogging platform.

When I have the time, I want to experiment with a few microblogging platforms or other ActivityPub software for nyaa.social. If you have suggestions, please tell me! Right now I have Misskey and Sharkey in mind.

Questions, suggestions, and feedback

If you have questions, suggestions, or other feedback, don't hesitate to comment, post, or DM!

Thank you for reading this and I hope everyone enjoys their day! :D

UPDATE (4/27): There were two reasons that affected federation between Ani.Social and Lemmy.World.

The first reason was an outgoing activity that got stuck in queue. This was resolved by manually marking that activity as successful.

The second reason was a subsea fiber cut between Europe and Asia which caused incoming activities from Lemmy.World to lag behind.

The original plan was to move Ani.Social closer to Lemmy.World this weekend but seeing the activity queue rapidly dropping over the past two days, it's unlikely this will push through. We will continue to monitor this however.

Again, thanks to @wjs018 for informing me about this and for keeping others up to date in this post's comments. Thank you MrKaplan from Lemmy.World for helping us resolve the issue!

There are ongoing issues between incoming and outgoing activities between Ani.Social and Lemmy.World. Posts, comments, and votes from both instances are not in sync with each other.

The exact cause is to be determined. The instance may experience downtime and interruptions until further notice.

In the meantime, we suggest using an account on an instance that is federated with both Ani.Social and Lemmy.World.

Thanks to @wjs018 for informing me about this issue. Thanks also to MrKaplan from the Lemmy.World team for continuously helping us resolve this issue.

For context on the topic, please read this post.

After reaching out to the Lemmy.ml admins and Lemmy developers regarding the defederation of ani.social from Lemmy.ml and the exclusion of ani.social from join-lemmy.org, they have chosen to remain defederated from ani.social for "[containing] a lot of sexualized images and partial nudity" which goes against their rule against pornography.

However, because they have found no evidence of CSAM in ani.social, they have agreed to merge our pull request to include ani.social in join-lemmy.org.

We'd like to thank the Lemmy.ml admins and Lemmy developers for their careful consideration of our request. Although we had hoped to federate once again with Lemmy.ml, we believe they have valid reasons to remain defederated. We hope that this may be revisited in the future as Lemmy continues to evolve.

We apologize to our local users who regularly visit Lemmy.ml communities. If you wish to continue accessing Lemmy.ml communties, we suggest moving to an instance that is federated with both Lemmy.ml and ani.social.

As of November 7, 2023 09:23 both Lemmy.World and lemmy.dbzer0.com have federated with us again. Thank you for quickly reviewing the situation and reversing your decision.

We hope that Lemmy.ml will follow soon.

Please do not say anything hateful to the Lemmy.ml admins or the developers. Before commenting on this thread, please read the post completely.

We (ani.social) have been defederated from Lemmy.ml a few hours ago presumably for the reason of being "full of CSAM" which I disagree.

What happened?

The Lemmy developers recently launched the new redesigned join-lemmy.org webpage which provides information about Lemmy and a list of servers that people can join. The redesign looks great! It details a lot of new and useful stuff such as a categorized server list and mobile apps. However, I noticed that our instance (ani.social) was not in the list despite previously being there before the redesign.

After looking through the joinlemmy-site code, I discovered that ani.social was added to the "excluded" list in a commit a few weeks ago. I thought that this was a mistake so I made a pull request to remove us from the excluded list (and also to add our instance's category and language).

Unfortunately, the pull request was closed with a comment that reads "No, that is full of CSAM". The thread was locked so I couldn't reply. I tried to reach out to the developers via Matrix, politely explaining that ani.social has a content policy rule against CSAM which reads:

7. Do not submit content depicting a child (both real and virtual) engaged or involved in explicit sexual activities. A child is defined as a person who is under 18 years old; or a person, regardless of age, who is presented, depicted or portrayed as under 18 years old.

Unfortunately, my invitation was rejected and I did not hear back from them.

Shortly after, I discovered that Lemmy.ml had defederated from ani.social. The last post ani.social received from Lemmy.ml was just after the pull request was closed.

What does this mean?

This means that no user from ani.social can interact with communities from Lemmy.ml and vice versa. This affects those who subscribe to communities from that instance.

This also affects the anime community on Lemmy as a whole because the biggest anime discussion community resides on Lemmy.ml (!anime@lemmy.ml) in which their episode discussion bot, @shinobu@ani.social, is hosted here. It's very concerning that as an anime-themed instance, we're now completely disconnected from this community and other related communities.

This also affects ani.social in the long run as our exclusion from the join-lemmy.org webpage will reduce our visibility. The exclusion from join-lemmy.org and defederation from Lemmy.ml may also prompt other instance admins to defederate from us. Generally, ani.social will be seen in a very bad light.

As the admin of ani.social, I genuinely feel heartbroken after what had happened. Not only do I feel like I'm doing a poor job of building ani.social but I also feel like I've disrespected the work of the Lemmy developers. I really apologize to those who are affected by this. I hope that this is just a misunderstanding and I will do my best to resolve this problem.

2023-09-30 16:19

Upgrade complete.

~~We will be upgrading to Lemmy v0.18.5 on 2023-09-30 16:00 CST. During this time, this instance will be temporarily unavailable for approximately two hours as we perform the maintenance.~~

~~You can view the instance status updates here.~~

~~We apologize for any inconveniences.~~

2023-09-17 18:53 CST Update:

The server maintenance is complete.

Original message:

We will be conducting general server maintenance on 2023-09-17 18:00 CST. During this time, this instance will be temporarily unavailable for approximately two hours as we perform the maintenance.

You can view the instance status updates here.

We apologize for any inconveniences.