Hey, friends!

In the last couple weeks I upgraded our instance to run the latest version of Lemmy, and because it was consuming more RAM today I upgraded the VPS to one with 4GB.

This means that the cost for running the instance have gone up. Historically I've been paying around $20 per month out of my pocket to run the instance (after Ko-fi donations), and this will increase to $35 after the upgrade.

Our cost per user is around $0.10/month, so it's not a lot. If you can contribute money, even $1/month, please do, it really helps.

Thanks!

Anyone else using the Woovebox?

I received mine last year, and I'm slowly starting to explore it. It's a full groovebox, with samples, live mode, song mode, multiple synth engines. So small!

Let's wait for the reviews to see if the transport is any good. It would be nice to have a decent quality new walkman on the market!

No major changes, just bug fixes.

Let me know if something's not working.

There has been a shitty incident where someone intentionally posted CSAM to a Lemmy community that unfortunately someone in our instance was subscribed to. Due to federation, the images might have been copied over to our instance storage.

Because of that I've taken the following measures until we understand the problem better:

1. I've defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
2. I've deleted all images uploaded since 2023-08-27 00:00:00 GMT.
3. I've disabled the image server.

I'll post updates when I have them. Thanks for understanding.

Link is also on the sidebar. We'll use it to keep people updated on releases and give support when people can't reach the Lemmy instance.

Also, I'm an IRC kind of person, so forgive my noobness with Matrix. 🙃

Hey, hey!

This morning (Pacific time) I changed the nameservers on lemmy.studio, switching to a service that provides a CDN and a WAF. It's a cautionary measure to protect us from DDOS attacks. That caused some instabilities, sorry for that.

I also noticed that the CDN was too aggressive, caching URLs regardless of the Content-type, and it seems that Lemmy uses content negotiation (the same endpoint can return HTML or JSON depending on the headers). I've fixed the caching to take the headers in consideration, so hopefully you won't be seeing JSON responses when accessing the website on your desktop. If you do, let me know!

On a related note, I created a spreadsheet showing the monthly expenses on the instance, and how much we're making from user donations on Ko-fi. The sheets was shared with the current supporters. If you can spare a dollar (or five) every month to help the instance run smoothly please do, anything helps.

Thanks!

!

> Out of all the legendary albums on this list, I doubt many of them had their origins as an abandoned rock opera. Many arrangements and scraps of Pete Townshend’s abandoned Lifehouse project became the basis for Who’s Next, an album that has no underlying theme or storyline. This sense of freedom allowed The Who to focus on making great individual songs rather than an overarching story. > > The result is The Who growing up in public. The songs combine the hard-hitting energy of the band in their youth with the more experimental elements explored on Tommy. The most noticeable improvement is Roger Daltrey’s voice, reaching heights that were only hinted at in the past. Keith Moon’s drum solo followed by Daltrey’s scream at the end of “Won’t Get Fooled Again” remains as one of rock’s greatest moments. > > While everyone knows about the singles, from the opening keyboard of “Baba O’Riley” to the building acoustics of “Behind Blue Eyes,” every song on this record is a potential hit. Listen to the explosive chorus of “Bargain.” Check out a rare lead vocal from bassist John Entwistle on “My Wife.” With tracks like these, it’s easy to see why Who’s Next moved The Who from a great band of the ’60s to a rock superpower in the ’70s. — Joe Marvilli (2010)

Listen to it here.

Hi, folks!

Since I started lemmy.studio a lot of people have reached out offering help and financial support for our instance. While right now the hosting costs and administration efforts are mostly negligible, I want to make sure the instance can grown in a sustainable way, and I have some ideas on how to do that.

For financial support, I created a Ko-fi page. If you're not familiar with Ko-fi, they're very similar to Patreon, but the fees are optional and they pay creators immediately (not monthly). They also support one-off donations, which is nice. Right now there's a single monthly tier of $1 (though of course people can pay more, if they want).

The current monthly costs for the server, domain, and backups are around $25/month (edit: $45), and we have almost 200 users, so I'm hoping it will be relatively easier to get the costs covered. Any excess income would go towards a reserve to ensure we have a good runway and funds for upgrading the server as we grow. I'm going to create a spreadsheet and share with everyone donating, to keep this transparent.

Second, so far I've been the only administrator in our instance. The volume of reports is still small, usually a handful of spam posts per week, but as we grow we're going to need more people removing spam, banning bad actors, and ensuring we're building a supportive and encouraging culture across our communities. I'm planning to reach out to some "long-term" users that have offered help, but feel free to DM me if you want to help.

(An intermission about culture. This is a music-focused instance, and we're here to share the music we love and the music we make, and also help each other by sharing our process and tools. We're all united by the belief that music makes the world better. So let's put our differences asides, focus on what we have in common, and try to always be kind and supportive!)

Third, I've been also the only sys admin of the instance, responsible for backups and upgrades. Right now the instance is running on a personal team on Digital Ocean, together with other personal projects. My plan is to move the instance VPS to a separate team, so I can invite 1-2 people to share those responsibilities with me. Initially these would have to be voluntary, but I'm hoping that if we get enough support through Ko-fi we can compensate people doing this work.

Finally, for the long run I'd also love to set up a governance model. I'm not sure how this would work, but I'd rather have something where we can make decisions collectively.

Let me know your thoughts!

Edit: I just got my first AWS bill after switching the instance storage to S3, and while it's not bank breaking it caught me by surprise. My monthly bill is around $3-5, last month it was $28.64.

Edit 2: people are migrating to our instance from waveform.social because of malicious activity (DDOS and spurious file uploads), so if you can support the instance please do. I'm planning to move the database to a separate VPS, and maybe look into using CloudFlare to prevent us from being affected, and that will cost more money.

Hi, folks!

Sorry for the latest instabilities in the instance. For some reason we were getting spikes of 100% every now and then, and that would make the instance unstable.

I just finished upgrading to 0.18.3, which was released today. There should be a lot of CPU improvements since 0.18.0, so hopefully the instance will be more stable from now on.

Let me know if you encounter any problems! Since we're usually in the dark during instance upgrades I created a Mastodon account for the instance, so I can post status updates. You can find it here: https://mastodon.social/@lemmystudio

!

> Who would have thought four twenty-somethings from Minneapolis could produce something so timeless, so vital, and so vivid? Back in 1984, when The Replacements dished out their magnum opus, Let It Be, nobody did. While all eyes were on Prince at the time, Paul Westerberg, Tommy Stinson, Chris Mars, and Bob Stinson were creating pure, unadulterated rock and roll. With his heart on his sleeve, Westerberg poured his love, his loss, and his inhibitions into each and every lyric, note, chord, and yelp. > > On “Androgynous,” the first hit of the piano strikes your nerves, tugging at your eyes, and by the time Westerberg sings, “Future outcasts, they don’t last,” you’re right there beside him — in the dusty bar, within the late hours of a week night, and with nobody to hold onto but the music. That’s everything The Replacements were meant to be; here they do that in every note, over 11 tracks, and for 33 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s not an album, it’s a life preserver. — Michael Roffman (2010)

Listen here.

!

> With new jack swing falling out of favor by the mid-’90s and Lisa “Left-Eye” Lopez dealing with personal struggles that kept her away from the group for extended periods, TLC found ways to mature their sound on their sophomore album. Reuniting with Babyface, Jermain Dupri, and Dallas Austin while adding contributions from Sean “Puffy” Combs, Organized Noize, and Chucky Thompson, they bumped up the hip-hop and soul vibes to utter R&B perfection on CrazySexyCool. > > At the same time, they helped spur a sex positivity movement that still evolves today by tackling romance from numerous angles: the tryst of “Creep,” the sweetness of “Diggin’ on You,” the XXX of “Red Light Special.” In between, they delivered one of the most enduring cautionary tales of all time in “Waterfalls.” CrazySexyCool was the R&B album of the decade. Today, it stands as a testament to confident womanhood, a statement sealed in the record books as the best-selling album by an American girl group ever and the first to reach Diamond status. — B. Kaye

Listen here.

!

> There is an alternate universe that exists where Wilco never releases Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album that would not only secure the band’s place in rock history, but would fundamentally alter the landscape of the music industry at the turn of the new millennium. Yes, this record is awash in mythology and backstory, best encapsulated in Sam Jones’ I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, which just so happens to be one of the best music documentaries of all-time. > > But YHF endures as a classic over 20 years later less because of that lore and more because it’s a collection of songs that’s so damn strong. Jeff Tweedy channels all his anxiety and self-consciousness into songs like “Ashes of American Flags” and “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” complementing those heavier tracks with the warm nostalgia of “Heavy Metal Drummer” and heart-on-your-sleeve romance of “Reservations,” which features a lyric that’s devastatingly direct: “I’ve got reservations about so many things, but not about you.” > > The genius of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the decision to add layers of feedback and field recordings and noise and distortion on top of Tweedy’s folk and country and indie rock songs, leaning into the experimental to such an extent that the record dispatched the “alt-country” label that had dogged the band since its founding. From start to finish, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot mesmerizes and beguiles, and somehow manages to sound like both falling in love and the end of the world. It’s untouchable. — S.D.

Listen here.

Meta just released Threads, a Twitter clone that is promised to be compatible with ActivityPub in the future. You sign up with your Instagram account and have the option of bringing in the people you follow there, even if they haven't a Threads account yet.

I'm planning to upgrade to 0.18 today and move the storage to S3, so I'll bring the instance down between 5-6pm PDT.

Update: this took longer than I expected. I started at 6pm because of work. I shut down the instance and took a snapshot, then brought it back up and upgraded to 0.18. The upgrade worked fine. I brought the services down and configured the instance to use S3 for object storage. That required migrating existing objects to an S3 bucket, which took quite some time. Then, after bringing the services back up again I got a "Server error" message. Unfortunately I had to stop at 8pm since I had something scheduled. At 9:15pm I was able to bring the services up successfully, and we're back!

Update 2: turns out we hit this bug, and the instance was down around 11pm. I changed the hostname of the instance and now it seems to be working fine.

!Cover of the album "Toxicity" by System of a Down, showing the Hollywood sign replaced by the name of the band

> After making a name for themselves with their self-titled debut, System of a Down reached new heights with their sophomore album, 2001’s Toxicity. Melodic, chaotic, and downright hypnotic, the album expanded the boundaries of heavy music. The frenetic “Chop Suey!” became one of the most bizarre hits of all-time on rock radio (even with Clear Channel temporarily removing it from airwaves after the September 11 attacks), while songs like the crushing title track and the haunting “Aerials” also served to propel the album to multi-platinum status. > > Sounding like no other band before them, Serj Tankian’s operatic vocals soar over Daron Malakian’s complex musical compositions, with Shavo Odadjian and John Dolmayan forming a relentless rhythm section. All told, Toxicity stands as one of the finest works of heavy music in the 21st century, if not all time. — S.K.

Listen here.

"50/90" is a challenge that started decades ago on Yahoo! Groups, with the goal of writing 50 songs in 90 days. It starts on July 4th, and goes til October 1st. These days the challenge is hosted on the FAWM website.

I know you're probably thinking "there's no way I can write 50 songs in 90 days!". And yeah, it's not easy, and usually less than 10% of participants make it to 50. I've been doing the challenge since 2016, and in a few years I wrote only 3 songs.

The important thing is that if you write one more song than you'd normally write, you're already a winner! 50/90 is an incredible supportive community, with prompts and challenges for inspiration. It's a great way to get feedback on your songs, and to practice finishing songs!

The website is live, and the challenge starts in a week... who's up for it? 🙂

How is everyone listening to music these days?

I use YouTube Music almost exclusively, since I like having YouTube Premium and Music comes for free. But it's not the best experience.

For indie artists I buy their music on Bandcamp and listen there, but I was thinking if I should download all the files from Bandcamp and upload to YouTube Music, so I can listen to everything in a single place.