We are getting absolutely FLOODED with new join requests from bots the past 2 days. There’s no real way to mitigate this with lemmy’s settings, so my only option is to turn off new applications until it stops.
I’ll check every so often to see if the bots have stopped, but until then, we are an island with no new people joining.
~w0odl
Doing a big update today in versions. Going from 0.19.17 to 0.19.20
This will include some down time, but nothing more than 5 minutes (fingers crossed). This upgrade will start at 13:00 UTC.
Here are the release notes for the updates:
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2026-04-20_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.18
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2026-06-09_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.19
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2026-07-27_-Lemmy_Release_v0.19.20-_Reduced_Memory_Usage
This will also include an intensive update to our bot/AI scrapping deterrents. Turns out, bots and AI really love all of your posts and comments! Let’s get 'em out of here! They bring down the site multiple times per day. Working on a better fix for this.
This also may mean upstream issues like we saw in
https://lemmy.radio/post/14907033 via https://lemmy.radio/post/14120844
Over the next few days/weeks, please let me know if any federating issues appear.
73,
w0odl
Completed with notes:
Update’s done, we’re on 0.19.20.
Downtime came in at about 6 minutes, so a little over what I promised. The database took longer to come back than expected. That’s also been fixed, more below.
What changed:
Lemmy 0.19.17 → 0.19.20. Release notes are in the original post. The big one is reduced memory usage, which this little server very much appreciates.
New bot/AI scraper deterrent. I’d been running a hand-rolled version of this since the summer. We’re now on the properly supported setup, which means it gets maintained and updated along with everything else instead of me babysitting it. The rules are better too: known AI crawlers (GPTBot and friends) now get turned away at the door instead of being made to work for it, and the check that real browsers go through is significantly lighter than what I had before. Most of you shouldn’t notice it at all.
Federation. I know this is the one people care about after last month. I tested it before, during, and after the upgrade and it’s clean, comments flowing in from every instance I checked, arriving within a minute or two. That said, if you spot anything odd with posts or comments from other instances over the next few days, tell me.
Bonus fix: the database hiccup that caused today’s extra downtime was going to happen on every future restart, it just hadn’t bitten yet.R estarts went from several minutes to milliseconds. Future maintenance should be a lot less dramatic.
Last month, I made some changes that were meant to stop bots from harassing our instance. This also created some problems for large instances that push hundreds of thousands of deliveries a day to our /inbox, and made it hard for comments to come through.
(post about the update btw https://lemmy.radio/post/14120844)
Here’s a rundown of what happened and how it’s fixed:
Short version: a misconfigured rate limit on our server was rejecting incoming comments from other instances. It’s fixed. The backlog is refilling now.
What happened: back in July I added some anti-scraper protection to lemmy.radio. That change included a rate limit meant to stop bots from hammering the site, but it was accidentally applied to all incoming traffic, including the ActivityPub deliveries other Lemmy instances use to send us their posts and comments.
The limit was 1 request per second per server. For six weeks nothing broke, because no instance was sending us that much. Around Aug 15, lemmy.world crossed that line and once a server falls behind a limit like that, it can’t recover on its own: the queue drains slower than new comments arrive, and every rejected delivery gets retried, which eats the same budget. By the time I caught it, we were rejecting about 60% of what lemmy.world tried to send us.
Only the three busiest instances (lemmy.world, hexbear.net, lemmy.ml) were affected. The other ~115 servers we federate with were never throttled. Since lemmy.world is where most Lemmy users are, it looked like “comments stopped working” rather than “one server stopped getting through.”
One more thing that was fixed: the same limit also applied to the site’s own stylesheets, so some of you may have seen slow or half-broken page loads, especially on mobile or shared connections. Same root cause, also fixed.
Current status: fixed as of Aug 22. Remote instances are re-sending their backlog now, oldest first, at roughly 5x normal speed. Expect comments from the outage window to keep appearing over the next day or two rather than all at once.
The bad news: some comments from Aug 15–22 are gone for good. Remote servers don’t retry forever, so anything that aged out of their queues won’t arrive. The gap will narrow but probably won’t close completely. If you posted a comment during that window that never showed up that’s why. Please recomment.
I only found out about this because members like you messaged me about it! So let me talk about best ways to get information to me.
https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-radio:matrix.org
This is going to be an ongoing watch as we backfill. Please comment here if you see any other issues!
~w0odl
Heads up: you might see a quick “are you a bot?” page on lemmy.radio now
You may notice a short page that says “Making sure you’re not a bot!” (with a little jackal) when you first visit lemmy.radio. It only lasts about a second, then you’re in. Here’s why it’s there.
The problem: lemmy.radio has been getting swamped by AI scraper bots: automated programs pretending to be real people, loading old posts thousands of times a second to harvest data. It was overloading the site and causing the errors and slowness a lot of you have seen lately.
The fix: I added a free, open-source tool called Anubis that acts like a bouncer at the door. When you arrive, it gives your browser a tiny puzzle to solve… think of it like rolling dice until you hit the right number. Your computer does it automatically in about a second, and then it remembers you for about a week so you won’t see it again for a while.
It’s easy for a real visitor but a nightmare for the bots: they’d have to solve that puzzle millions of times over, which is too slow and expensive to bother with. So real people get in, and the bots get turned away.
What you need to know:
Sorry for the recent hiccups. Things should be much smoother now. Maybe even faster!
As always, please let me know if this causes any issues…
73,
w0odl
We turned 3 today and I have renewed the lemmy.radio domain for another year!
3 years ago, during the great reddit api/mobile move that a lot of people made, I thought it would be nice to have an instance just for hams. And now here we are! I’ve learned so much from the posts here and really enjoy being a part of this instance and maintaining it.
I greatly appreciate all of the people who share their radio knowledge here. I hope you continue to enjoy our special little instance.
73,
w0odl
And of course, if you’d like to celebrate our instances birthday and help keep this place alive: we have a Liberapay setup to help with donations.
(continued from https://lemmy.radio/post/12771575)
Hey all!
From a previous thread/discussion, I have set up a contribution location for anyone wishing to help with costs for this instance.
This is not mandatory or required!
People have reached out to me to say that they enjoy using our lemmy instance and wanted to help, and I’m very thankful for that!
We will be using Liberapay for this and our profile for contributions is:
https://liberapay.com/lemmyradio/
This link and badge can also be found in the sidebar.
Below is a breakdown for how you will be helping with your contributions!
Please let me know how Liberapay is and as always, let me know if you have any questions! I will keep this highlighted on our instance for a week.
* media storage will fluctuate as we use the instance more, but I try to clean up old data/media frequently.
** .radio domains is about to be transferred to a new registrar, sav.com. They have not commented on if pricing will remain the same.
I’ve had it fixed in my head that covering hosting costs is just my job as admin, and I’ve been fine with that. But I’ve been rethinking it lately.
If someone wants to contribute to keeping this place running, who am I to say no? Feels a little rude to cut people out of something they actually want to be part of. lemmy.radio is a community, not my personal project I’m sharing.
I’m looking at Open Collective as a way to do this transparently. You’d be able to see exactly what the instance costs and where any contributions go, but I’d love to hear about other options.
Nothing’s set up yet. Wanted to float it here first and hear what you think. Open to other suggestions too.
FYI I’ve done this so far: https://opencollective.com/lemmyradio
73,
Ben w0odl
(I’m keeping this post open and highlighted for a week, ending 4/18. thank you for your input!)
Edit 4/14:
I received this response back from OpenCollective:
Hi, thanks for your application. We’re going to have to review applications like this in light of the legislation passed in the UK (The Online Safety Act) March 2025.
In light of this, I think I will also look into https://liberapay.com/
lemmy.radio will be down for up to an hour starting at 00:00 UTC 03/26/2026
This is needed for server maintenance. I’ll post here again when we are up and discuss the updates!
~ w0odl
post-downtime notes:
Thanks for putting up with the (un)scheduled downtime!
A status update: for the past 2 years, we have operated using a fairly large size VPS using Akamai/Linode. To be specific, we were using:
This was mostly due to the the large amounts of images, videos, media that we accumulate over the years we’ve been up and running (we’re going to be turning 3 years old very soon btw!)
A few months ago, to help with the large costs of running this site, I moved all of our media to object storage, which TREMENDOUSLY cut down our drive space usage. And…
Today is the day, I actually scaled us back to a “smaller” VPS to help cut down on prices further. We are currently using:
So let’s talk turkey about savings (if you care)
This drops our server fees from about ~$175/month to around ~$90/month
This is the price of the VPS, object storage, .radio domain, and email services we use.
Thank you for putting up with the hour or so we were down. I’m hoping that this will keep us running WELL into the future.
Cheers and 73,
w0odl
Hey all!
This is actually a double upgrade from 0.9.13 -> 0.9.14 -> 0.9.15. This mostly includes moderation feature add. Give them a look at: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-24_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.15_and_Testing_for_1.0
Let me know if any issues arise from the upgrade. Seems like lemmy 1.0 is around the corner!
73,
w0odl
