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Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 13 hours ago

All of the recurring payments with OC are disabled. So no need to worry!

Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thank you! Yes, very lucky. Now we need to build up our recurring donations all over again which will be hard, but I have faith in us all.

We now have goals under liberapay and Kofi and if we hit either of them we'll be sorted!

Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago

Good news! We managed to get all of the donation money! So none of it is lost and we're back in business! 🎉🎉

It seems our host decided to come back online or see our messages? Still no communication from them, but now that we have completed managed to get all our money back we are good to migrate to Librapay without any issues!

Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Thanks a heap! Here's to another year!

Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Thank you for being a part of it!

Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

🥰 Thank you! You are amazing.

Reddthat - Official Funding and Future Plans (Updated: 2024-12-04) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

It has now been over 2 years since I started Reddthat. I've learnt a lot. Met tonnes of new people, and contributed to the fediverse as a whole. I couldn't have done it without you all and am amazed every day another donation comes in, or a nice message gets left as a comment on these updates. You are all amazing.

Here's to 20 more years!

Tiff

48
Reddthat Update: June 2025 (2 Years old! & no longer using Opencollective) (liberapay.com)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
15 comments fedilink
 

Opencollective no more, Hello Liberapay!

Summary:

It has now been 8 weeks since our last contact with our fiscal host on Opencollective and I have made the hard decision to migrate away to Liberapay.

"New" Donation Platform

When I started Reddthat I wanted to show everything that we were doing in a transparent way. We have the modlog which shows eveything that happens on Reddthat and the Lemmy-verse and I wanted to bring that to the financial side of things as well.

So I looked around at the payment processors. Patreon/etc had higher fees than what I expected and as they were donations I really didn't want to lose up-to 8% of your good will! Liberapay was the obvious choice originally but it turns out they are a platform where people can donate directly to people. Everyone needs to link their Paypal, Stripe, or EU Bank account to accept transactions on Liberapay.
This also looked a bit hard and I don't really trust Paypal, especially if out of the blue I started getting $50 "donations". Working in marketing I've head of paypal closing down accounts and holding money for ransom while you have to consistently prove you are who you are and jump through their hoops.
As I was already an "active" member of the wider Fediverse, I looked up how these services managed to accept donations and eventually stumbled upon Opencollective. This was exactly what I wanted. A open and inviting platform to handle all the money side of things while providing a truly transparent account of what is happening.

Opencollective solved all of the things I could hope for while also solving a secondary issue. Taxes. Something I have no idea about when it comes to donations, but will surely need to be up to speed on it within the next month!
After reading a few documents, you need to pick a Fiscal Host on opencollective, or prove you are a "business?" (or something like that, I don't remember) so you can become a fiscal host and accept money. This looked to be extra work on top of getting Reddthat up and running so I went looking for a local Australian fiscal host, and found one who also had 0% fees! They would accept all the donations and then transfer it back to me as a reimbursement, or I could even get them to pay invoices! This ticked all my boxes. Even if the host evidently ended charging a small 1-2% I would have been happy with that as our relationship after these last two years have been great. We even donated back to them for a few months in the early days.

~~Fast forward to today. We now have 2 months I have paid for without being reimbursed by our host. For a total of A$285.49. That would have left A$518.40 in our account for our future months~~

Update: We have managed to get all of our donations back!

Unfortunately since the payment in April I haven't heard anything from them and so we are saying Goodbye to OpenCollective and Hello to Liberapay! I'll hold out hope that they will come back online, or they've gone away for a huge holiday without internet, but this is a lesson we can all learn from.
I would like to continue using OpenCollective but the thought of losing more money the same way through another fiscal host would be too much. And the alternative of having to setup more paperwork to become our own fiscal host, and getting hit with a transaction fee for taking your donations and then "paying" myself just doesn't seem worth it. So Liberapay it is.

I've setup Liberapay and I've setup Stripe. Given them a fair amount of my details ( 😥 ). So you should be able to donate directly to me and we'll never have any of these unfortunate issues relating to other entities holding our money.

I feel like I've let you all down with ~$500+ disappearing into the ether. We can only learn from our mistakes and moving to Liberapay, Ko-Fi, or Crypto, where I hold the funds is the best way forward to ensure stability.

I'd like to remind everyone that donations are completely optional but they certainly help with it comes to a "big" instance like ours. Lemmy is growing every year and it's great to see everyone and all the things they do and the communities we have created!

And now back to the regular update.

June 2025

We've rolled out v0.9.12 for Lemmy which contained a few bugfixes as well as Peertube federation support, so now you should be able to see more peertube videos i that is your thing.

We turned 2 this month. The 6th of June was our birthday and it was an absolute banger! It was so big we all blacked out at the party and forgot it was happened! As June is a busy month for me, I made sure to renew our domain to make sure nothing happened. ;)

Since last update Lemmy World has successfully turned on the Parallel Sending which we (Reddthat) instigated way back when we started lagging behind and we all found out that sending internet traffic from one side of the world to the other sequentially might be bad. This means we no longer have need for our proxy system and it has saved us 4Euro/month (and the extra management overhead).
This also has had the same affect on our sister instances in AU/NZ allowing them to not lag behind too.

I hope you all had a great year and here's to another amazing one!

Cheers,

Tiff (& The Reddthat Admin Team)

PS. I believe I have managed to cancel all recurring donations. So if you wish to keep donating please do come over to Liberapay. <3

PPS. Did I mention that I've enabled Secret Donations for Liberapay, so I won't be able to know who you are!

Weekly thread - How is everyone doing with their communities? Has everyone with a lemm.ee community settled to a new location yet? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Cheers for the ping :)

Weekly thread - How is everyone doing with their communities? Has everyone with a lemm.ee community settled to a new location yet? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Single user? We have 300+ users who actively call Reddthat home and we won't be going anywhere. We are nearly cash flow positive thanks to our amazing users and recurring donations.

I've seen your posts and as your mod on !aom i'd be happy to make you mod of our !rts community to help grow it!

Edit: I know @[email protected] would love the help

1
Root Shell on Credit Card Terminal (stefan-gloor.ch)
1
Beating the kCTF PoW with AVX512IFMA for $51k (anemato.de)
1
How I ruined my vacation by reverse engineering WSC (blog.es3n1n.eu)
Is upgrading the ssd easy enough that it is worth the cost savings? in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Looks easy : https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Steam+Deck+SSD+Replacement/148989

Edit: Is it worth 30-60minutes of your time, the screwdrivers, maybe the spatchula, and reinstalling steamOS onto the drive?

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Backblaze: A Loss-Making Data Storage Business Mired in Lawsuits, Sham Accounting, and Brazen Insider Dumping (www.morpheus-research.com)
 

I'm classing this as an exploit because it sounds like backblaze exploited their shareholders!

We (Reddthat) were going to use them as our object storage provider when we started. Luckily we didn't! It would make me want to migrate asap!

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TikTok VM Reverse Engineering (webmssdk.js) (github.com)
 

I nice write up on the #TikTok VM

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Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken (jan.wildeboer.net)
 

We regularly see this on Reddthat's and my own personal services too.

New Entra "Leaked Credentials" in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Mmmmmmm, I'm triggering PW resets anyway.

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New Entra "Leaked Credentials" (old.reddit.com)
 

I don't usually link to Reddit but damn... Entra leak is a big deal

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Uncovering a 0-Click RCE in the SuperNote Nomad E-ink Tablet (www.prizmlabs.io)
Reddthat Update: April 2025 (v0.19.11 - Unexpected Downtime) in c/[email protected]
[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

🥳🥰 Thanks!

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Reddthat Update: April 2025 (v0.19.11 - Unexpected Downtime) (reddthat.com)
submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink
 

April is here!

So much has happened since the last update, we've migrated to a new server, we've failed to update to a new lemmy version, automated our rollouts, fought with OVH about contracts. It's been a lot.

Strap in for story time about the upgrade, or skip till you see the break for the next section.

So good news is that we are successfully on v0.19.11.

The bad news is that we had an extended downtime.

Recently I had some extra time to completely automate the rollout process so Reddthat didn't rely solely on me being on 1 specific computer which had all the variables that was needed for a deployment.
As some people know I co-manage the lemmy-ansible repository. So it wasn't that hard to end up automating the automation. Now when a new Version is announced, I update a file/files, it performs some checks to make sure everything is okay, and i approve and roll it out. Normally we are back online within 30 seconds as the lemmy "backend" containers do checks on start to make sure everything is fine and we are good to go. Unfortunately it never came back up.

So I reverted the change thinking something was wrong with the containers and the rollout proceeded to happen again. Still not up :'( Not having my morning coffee and being a little groggy after just waking up.

Digging into it our database was in a deadlock. Two connections were attempting to do the same but different which resulted in it being locked up and not processing any queries.

Just like Lemmy World, when you are "scaling" sometimes bad things can happen. re: https://reddthat.com/post/37908617.

We had the same problem. When rolling out the update two containers ended up starting at the same time and both tried to do the migrations instead of realising one was already doing them.

After quickly tearing it all down. We started the process of only having 1 container to perform the migration and then once that had finished starting everything else we were back online.

Going forward we'll probably have to have a brief downtime for every version to ensure we don't get stuck like this again. But we are back-up and everything's working.

Now for the scheduled programming.

OVH

OVH scammed me out of the Tax on our server renewal last month. When our previously 12 month contract was coming to the end we re-evaluated our finances and were found wanting. So we ended up scaling down to a more cost-effective server and ended up being able to pay in AUD instead of USD which will allow us to stay at a single known price and not fluctuate month to month.
Unfortunately I couldn't cancel the contract. The OVH system would not let me click terminate. No matter what I did, what buttons I pressed, or how many times I spun my chair around it wouldn't let me cancel. I didn't want to get billed for another month when we were already paying for the new server. So a week before the contract ended I sent a support ticket to OVH. You can guess how that went. The first 2 responses I got from them after 4 days was "use the terminate feature". They didn't even LOOK at the screenshots clearly outlining the steps I had taken and the generic error... So I get billed for another month... and then have to threaten them with legal proceedings. They then reversed the charge. Except for the Tax. So I had to pay 10% of the fee to cancel our service. Really unhappy with OVH after this ordeal.

Automated rollouts

I spent some time after our migration ensuring that we have another system setup which will be able to rollout updates. So we are not dependant on just me and my one random computer :P All was going very well until an upgrade with database migrations happened. We'll be working on that soon to make sure we don't have unforeseen downtime.

Final Forms

Now that the dust has settled and we've performed the migrations starting next month I'll probably go back to our quarterly updates unless something insane happens. (IE: Lemmy drops v1 👀 )

We also modified our "Reddthat Community and Support" community to be a Local Only community. The original idea for the community was to have a place where only reddthat could chat, but back when we started out that wasn't a thing! So now if you want to voice your opinion to other Reddthat users please feel free too knowing other instances won't come in and derail the conversation.

As a reminder we have many ways to donate if you are able and feel like it! 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.

Cheers,

Tiff

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Max severity RCE flaw discovered in widely used Apache Parquet (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
 

Could be worse, I could be using parquet...

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[Completed] Upcoming Migration to new server 21st/22nd (reddthat.com)
submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
9 comments fedilink
 

We just successfully upgraded to the latest Lemmy version, 0.9.10, probably the last before the v1 release.

This addresses some of the PM spam that everyone has been getting. Now when that user is banned and we remove content it also removes the PMS. So hopefully you won't see them anymore!

Over the next couple days will be planning for our migration to our new server as our current server's contract has ended. I expect the down time to last for about an hour, if not shorter. You'll be able to follow updates for the migration by our status page at https://status.reddthat.com/

Normally this update would be a week in advance and more nicely formatted that turns out the contract ends on the 25th and I don't want to get charged for another month at a higher rate when I just purchased the new server.

See you on the other side,

Tiff

EDIT:

22 Mar 2025 02:42: I'm going to start the migration in 5 mins (@ 3:00)

22 Mar 2025 03:01: that was the fastest migration I've ever done. pre-seeding the server and Infra as Code is amazing!

We've turned off our crypt donation p2pool (as no-one was using it), and two of our frontends, alexandrite and next (for the same reasons)

Time to celebrate with some highly accurate Australian content:

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