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
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Nyaa.social may have been a bit too on the nose (IYKYK). And as you say, Ani.social is more straightforward, so it was a good pick in the end.
No worries on the transfer, but after reading this I am wondering does this mean you plan to migrate away from EU servers once the potential fix scheduled for 1.19.5 is implemented and verified as a fix? Or will you remain on the EU servers for the forseeable future?
I’m glad you think Ani.Social was the better pick!
For migrating away or remaining on the EU, I will likely migrate back to Asia. The biggest benefit is that it’s closer to me and I think having Lemmy in other regions is in line with the decentralization idea behind the Fediverse.
The servers are very cheap in the EU though. Also, most of our traffic is from EU/US. So there might also be a chance we stick around.
I was wondering about traffic and the regional breakdown. I had been guessing it was mostly EU/NA based on the traffic I got to clips I post to the anime community using my own domain. Cloudflare just lists the top 5 countries:
However, I wasn’t sure if that might be influenced by the time of day I am posting them since I am on the East coast of the US. Also included in that image is how much bandwidth the cloudflare cache has saved me in the past month. Posting clips as webms means that cloudflare will cache them automatically and save me >90% of the bandwidth on my VPS (something I didn’t know to start with, but am grateful for).
This is what it looks like for us. I’m pretty sure most of these requests are from other instances.
most of these requests are from other instances
That makes sense. I think a lot of the large instances have centralized in the EU/Finland due to world being there to avoid the exact issues that caused you to move. Also, instance <-> instance communication is probably way more requests than instance <-> user.
I will likely migrate back to Asia.
Yeah I support that idea as well. Having everything in one place sounds like a bad time waiting to happen.
It’s in the post:
We will likely relocate back to Asia in the future when a fix is available.
Just a heads up, if you migrated to an EU datacentre you’re potentially subject to GDPR and other legal requirements. Failure to assess that and comply could have devastating consequences.
I’d suggest the Netherlands if you need to be in that geographic area.
Thanks for the heads up! I heard that privacy laws and such are more strict in the EU so I’m reading up on what other Fediverse instances are doing about that since many of them are located in the EU.
Ah! That’s why I noticed ani.social seemed to “forget” a bunch of federation.
Yup. Sorry about that! I don’t think anything like that happened on the second migration (May 15) only the first (May 12) but if you noticed any, let me know!
I have only ever used hosting providers in the US before, so I wasn’t aware of the documentation requirements for many of the EU providers. Did you have to migrate the object storage as well or was that fine to just stick to where it is as long as the pict-rs configuration and urls all point to the right place?
I have never personally done a big migration like this for any of the services I run as I have usually just done small scale stuff that only I or some friends use. So, in the past I have often just destroyed things and rebuilt from scratch or, at most, just copy/pasted some docker volumes to a new host. It is something I have been thinking about a bit as I am now hosting more publicly facing things like the anime wiki, the image hosting frontend for the clips I post (they get saved to object storage), and @rikka@ani.social which uses an sqlite database. I found that setting up rsnapshot to do hourly snapshots of rikka’s database has actually proven very useful for debugging issues (in addition to having a backup) because I can see the history of the database that led to the current state.
It seems like the migration is working as we made it through a Wednesday with no noticeable federation delays at all. Keep up the good work!
Thank you! I didn’t have to migrate the object storage for pictrs. It’s still in the US I believe (Backblaze put me there for some reason. I don’t remember an option to pick when I made an account.)
Yeah, it’s my first time migrating (and running) something like this. It’s almost been a year and it’s a lot of fun. What I’ve been using for backups is a cronjob and
pg_dump. I heard some people use other tools like barman and backrest which I want to try. I’ll check out rsnapshot too though!
