Dave

TL;DR if you haven't already, please fill in the Lemmy.nz Census (even if your account is on another instance). Skip any questions you aren't comfortable answering!

This is a reminder post to please fill in the 2025 Lemmy.nz census survey if you haven't already.

You can see the previous post here.

None of the questions are mandatory. They cover questions about where you're from in the country/world, who you are (demographic info), how you use Lemmy and the fediverse, and some extras at the end. Skip anything you're not comfortable answering.

Everyone is welcome! If a question doesn't apply to you then just skip it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Answer the Lemmy.nz 2025 Census

The Reserve Bank has revealed a dispute over funding was behind Adrian Orr's abrupt resignation as governor.

A raft of documents - released by the central bank under the Official Information Act - reveal an "impasse" as Orr argued Finance Minister Nicola Willis was not providing enough funding for the next five years.

In an accompanying statement, an RBNZ spokesperson said it became clear in late February that the board - chaired by Neil Quigley - was willing to agree to a "considerably" smaller sum that Orr thought was needed.

"This caused distress to Mr Orr and the impasse risked damaging necessary working relationships, and led to Mr Orr's personal decision that he had achieved all he could as Governor of the Reserve Bank and could not continue in that role with sufficiently less funding than he thought was viable for the organisation."

Both sides engaged lawyers to negotiate an exit agreement, resulting in an immediate departure and "special leave".

On 5 March, the Reserve Bank revealed Orr's sudden resignation, with three years still to run in his five-year term. At the time, Quigley said it was for "personal reasons" but would not be drawn on any details

Possibly related:

I also don't understand why every chat app needs 1GB of RAM to itself.

Widespread internet outages are being felt around the North Island, telecommunications company Voyager says.

It says it has identified an issue affecting "Chorus Wellington UFB (ultrafast broadband) handover".

"This handover services Wellington, Kapiti, Hutt Valley, Palmerston North and through to Napier."

Voyager said Chorus had identified the source of the issue and are working on a fix.

Currently around 90 percent of connections are offline.

TL;DR If you are reading this (regardless of what instance you are on) then please fill in the Lemmy.nz 2025 Census

Last year we did a census to get an idea about the people using Lemmy - both who they are and how they use Lemmy. You can see the results here.

Lemmy.ca did one the year before, which was our inspiration. The results can be seen here.

I had intended to repeat this each year, and so here we are. I have worked with @[email protected] who ran the Lemmy.ca census, with contributions from others, to come up with a refined set of questions that we will keep largely standardised. We also expect to have a LimeSurvey template available that other instances can use if they want to (I can do this right now if someone reading wants it, but it's Lemmy.nz based at the moment so would need tweaks for the specific instance). LimeSurvey is a self-hostable survey tool.

The intent is to catch anyone who interacts with Lemmy.nz. If you see this post, that's you! You're interacting with us by reading our content! Anyone can fill in the survey, it can help us get other insights across Lemmy.

None of the questions are mandatory, so just answer what you are comfortable answering. I expect to leave this open for a while and have some reminders to make sure we get as many responses as possible. I’ll do a results post once the results are in and I have had a chance to analyse them.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Answer the Lemmy.nz 2025 Census

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Three people have been charged with manslaughter in relation to the Loafers Lodge fire that killed five of the building's 92 residents.

The charges follow a two-year investigation by police into the state of the building, and whether the management and compliance of its fire safety systems contributed to the outcome.

A 50-year-old man, who has name suppression, was charged with murder and arson. He pleaded not guilty to the charges and is due to stand trial in August.

On Thursday, Wellington police's area investigations manager Detective Senior Sergeant Timothy Leitch said three other people had been charged with manslaughter in relation to the fire.

The people charged were involved with the management and operation of the building and police allege they were responsible for aspects of the building fire safety, Leitch said.

Those charged are two men aged 75 and 58, and a 70-year-old woman. They appeared in the Wellington District Court on Thursday facing five charges of Manslaughter.

When Helen Clark's Labour government brought in a law that would create waves of undocumented children, even the immigration experts had no idea of the impact it would have on thousands of lives.

The 2006 Citizenship Amendment Act ended automatic citizenship for children born here to overstayers or parents with temporary visas. It was also supported by the National party.

"It is only recent because these children are now finishing high school and realising that their life has now come to an end, they don't have any options as to what to do."

At the time Helen Clark said she was concerned about incidents of people flying to New Zealand for a short time and having babies here to ensure they gained passports, known as "birth tourism".

"Every year now more and more children are going to be coming out of high school and realising that they can't study, they can't go and get jobs because it would be a breach of the law for employers to employ someone who's here unlawfully. So they can't work, they can't study, they can't travel, they just simply cannot do anything."

McClymont says he has not had a satisfactory response from the government to his suggestion that New Zealand follow Australia and Britain by giving children birthright citizenship after 10 years of habitual residence.

"Really, it's hard to see what the justification is for punishing these children. Nobody is making the argument that these children have done something wrong and that they deserve to be punished.

"The only potential argument is that these children are being punished as a deterrent for others against having children here in New Zealand," he says.

"It's just unfathomable as a society that we can actually do this to children and use them for this purpose. There doesn't seem to be any moral justification whatsoever for treating them so badly."

TL;DR Lemmy.nz turns 2 today. I made a video!

There's a mirror here if it doesn't work: https://files.catbox.moe/xca9pn.mp4

Last year I posted a video celebrating Lemmy.nz's first birthday. Today I'm doing it again! No sound, and my video skills haven't got any better, but at this point it's practically a tradition for me to do a bad video and a history write up.

Here's a bit of history of the last year here for those that are unable to watch the video or who just want to know more. If anyone has other memories to add, please do!

Picking up from where the last one left off - we were having trouble with Lemmy.world and had added a second server in Finland that was responsible for collecting the activities from Lemmy.world and sending them in batches to Lemmy.nz so it could keep up. This was a temporary solution until (A) Lemmy got the functionality to send in parallel, and (B) Lemmy.world updated and turned this on. We finally got there just 6 weeks ago on 20 April 2025, and the batcher was turned on 6 May 2024, so we spend almost a full year running the batcher. Luckily it worked really well for us, we were very lucky to have a Lemmy user/contributor able to build such a tool and happy to provide the support to set it up and monitor it.

We participated in Canvas 2024, where everyone places a pixel on a big shared canvas to create art. Here is a post about our NZ contribution, though many of us also contributed to other art on the canvas (and we also had many from outside NZ helping us at times).

We did a census around this time last year, and the results were released about a month after our birthday last year. This year I have been working with Lemmy.ca (who were the inspiration for our census) to create a mostly shared structure so that both of us and any other instances who want to can have a shared set of questions for easier comparison across instances. I expect to have the survey up and running in the coming days so keep an eye out!

The video has a section on some of the news stories across the year, including Dunedin Airport introducing a time limit on hugs, Auckland City Mission distributing meth lollies, a call to police about a realistic looking sex doll, someone leaving flavoured milk at a petrol station, and a guy who did a performance in Wellington where he folded a fitted sheet.

I also included a section on how we do boats good in NZ, with the grounding of the ferry Aratere, the sinking of the navy boat Manawanui, and a commuter ferry sailing through a SailGP practice (I think the ferry was in the right on that one though).

We entered Lemmyvision with the Alien Weaponry song Mau Moko, and got 3rd! Last year we got 5th so that's a pretty good result.

Some things not mentioned in the video:

• There was a migration of hardware of our hosts, moving from owned hardware to leased dedicated hardware as the hardware was aging.

• We now have two lemmy-ui front end containers running load balanced, which should help with errors we were getting sometimes. We've had the two containers a little while now and I do feel like it's helping.

• We are currently piggy-backing on hosting, but the guys giving us hosting are now stepping away from hosting the other services on the shared host (like Mastodon.nz, Pixelfed.nz) and are passing these on to others as they find people willing to take them on. It's likely as this happens we will need to move off to our own hosting, handle donations ourselves, etc. More info will come as plans are sorted.

The last year was certainly a lot less dramatic than the first year. Hopefully the next year will be like that too!

Thanks to everyone for being here!

Last weeks thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

Hi all, I have recently installed Bazzite, after previously being on Nobara.

I have been playing Dave the Diver and DOOM (2016), both through Steam, and I get pretty serious input lag. A second or more delay at times, generally when FPS is struggling.

I'm running on a laptop with integrated graphics, so the struggling integrated GPU is not a surprise, but I didn't have this input lag issue with the same games on Nobara.

Any tips on a setting or something to help this?

I have lowered graphics settings to help with FPS, but ultimately I am not going to be able to avoid occasional FPS dips. The mouse input is instant, it's just an issue with the keyboard.

Any help appreciated!

Edit with solution: it seems the problem is IBus, see this comment: https://lemmy.nz/post/23401044/15684126

Basically the solution is to add IBUS_ENABLE_SYNC_MODE=2 to /etc/environment and restart.

A Christchurch foodbank is "absolutely heartbroken", "mad" and "gutted to the core" after two thieves stole frozen and chilled food meant for hundreds of families in need.

On Sunday night, at 10.20pm, two individuals dressed in balaclavas and gloves broke the locks of Hoon Hay Foodbank's walk-in freezer and chiller.

"You have completely depleted [sic] all supplies of any meat and frozen and chilled items that were going out to hundreds of whānau [sic] who genuinely need the help to put Kai on the table... all you had to do was send a text and book in for a food parcel to access food if you were in need."