Seems like the servers are very slow to respond to most requests, investigating the cause, stay tuned.

EDIT: Systems are back to normal now.

Thanks to a particularly annoying botnet, everyone's favorite anime cat girl firewall is now helping protect piefed.ca & lemmy.ca from bots and scrapers.

This is requests per second and these are all thousands of scrapers on residential IPs hammering us:

They'd increase their usage until the site started struggling, then move on. I banned their user agents, but have no interest in a cat & mouse game. Anubis should hopefully keep things running much smoother for everyone.

Let me know if you have any trouble!

Some recent threads have pulled lemmy.ca into the drama around lemmy.world and Luminous5481. We banned them a few days before LW did, and claims have been made that we're aligned with LW in the pro-zionist behavior LW has been accused of.

~8 days ago Luminous had "murder all Zionists" in their name, during which time they banned recursive_recursion@piefed.ca from the community agitprop memes. The reason given was "zionism, genocide apologia" with a 74 year expiry time. Recursive saw this, was confused and insulted by the insinuation / threat, and retaliatory banned Luminous. This happened 2 days before the LW issue began, and from our point of view was unrelated.

Recursive posted in our internal chat immediately after they placed the ban, letting us all know. We all agreed that being flippant about who Luminous labels a zionist while also repeatedly calling for the murder of zionists, wasn't appropriate for lemmy.ca. It violates our of our "Be Civil" rule, and is toxic behaviour that doesn't belong here.

None of us knew at the time why Recursive had been banned, although yesterday while digging I found this thread. Luminous placed the ban because Recursive had banned Deceptichum@quokk.au with a "suspiciously similar ban message" to one MrKaplan used. Recursive used "Troll and perpetual history of bad faith behavior" vs MrKaplan removing a comment as "troll". That's a pretty shitty reason to label someone a zionist genocide apologist, while you're calling for the murder of all zionists.

None of us support Israel, we're all horrified by what they're doing. That doesn't mean throwing around death threats on Lemmy should be tolerated.

Context if you're unfamiliar with this issue:

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441787
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67441443

Hi Lemmy!

I spent a long time making these botanical micro-art trading cards for myself. They are for each province and territory of Canada. Kind of a hobby. I did everything by hand, locally and offline, so every individual card has some variations to them.

I'm really curious if others would ever want something like this as Canadian made micro-art collectables, happy to figure out if it's just me who likes them or?

Thanks

Going through the sidebar all the rules are perfectly reasonable. Just curious if some communities implement additional rules in addition to the Lemmy.ca rules, and how would I go about knowing about them?

It would be great if we join it again.

I learned about a bunch of local musicians in the previous editions.

It seems that for the last few days, PieFed.ca has not been syncing with other instances. In particular, I’ve confirmed that my posts have not synced with lemmy.ca. It does look like piefed.ca has been syncing from other instances, though.

I've just completed moving lemmy.ca and piefed.ca away from using Cloudflare's proxy service, this means traffic now comes directly from our server instead of being routed through any US based companies. Pixelfed.ca is still on deflect.ca for the moment.

Let me know please if you run into any problems or errors!

Note that in order to avoid making too many major changes at once, our DNS is still hosted by cloudflare. I'll be moving that away from them later this week

Update April 3rd: We've off their DNS now too, and pixelfed.ca is now off deflect as well. All done rearranging!

Hey folks, given the shit show with Discord, another community I'm part of on Discord is wondering whether to move to Matrix. Was wondering if there's an unadvertised Matrix server that someone at Fedecan is already hosting?

Feel free to help out any lost redditors who might need some help and guide them.

With the recent willingness of the US Government to pressure its tech agencies into revealing user data without a proper judicial warrant, we've decided it's overdue for us migrate away from Cloudflare.

We'll be transitioning our sites over to https://deflect.ca/ over the next week or so, starting with pixelfed first before doing lemmy and piefed.

I hope to be able to do this without any noticeable downtime, but it is a major config change that will require some backend changes as well. I'll make an announcement before/after and you can always check https://status.fedecan.ca/

Update Feb 16: pixelfed has been migrated to deflect

Update Feb 20: I'm working with deflect on improving performance before migrating lemmy / piefed over. Currently pixelfed load times aren't great due to traffic often hitting edge nodes way out in Europe

Update Mar 17: Unfortunately performance with Deflect isn't where I want it to be since their nodes are out East and our server is in Vancouver. As a result we're just going to be dropping the CDN altogether and hosting directly off our server. I'm planning to do the switchover this weekend (March 20-22), but in the meantime you can use https://test.lemmy.ca/ or https://test.piefed.ca/ if you'd like to bypass Cloudflare.

I made this post today, https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1quso40/comment/o3evucz/ It got 150k+ views, piefed.social etc. has seen a big spike in users.

If possible I want to copy-paste that recipe in r/BuyCanadian tomorrow to get more Canadians onboard here. But I need a nice image of a graph for the post to work.

Anyone know where I can get a graph like that? Admins?

Nothing pressing in terms of questions or concerns, but I was just wondering how things are at Fedecan and with the instance(s)? It feels like it's been a hot minute since the last update (big or small), so I thought I'd show my interest in knowing how things are going.

We were still on 0.19.13 so I've bumped us up to 0.19.15

• Changes for 0.9.15: https://lemmy.ca/post/57400474
• Changes for 0.9.14: https://lemmy.ca/post/56551342

Since early December, someone has created 65+ accounts with variations of the same name, and they have used those accounts for vote manipulation.

We reached out to the admin of the instance 4 weeks ago, recommending that they enable registration applications, upgrade the captcha difficulty, and/or require an email address to prevent this. We have not received a reply.

When we checked the logs this week, we saw that a new chain of accounts was created. This is creating extra work for our admin team to find and ban these accounts.

Defederation will block the instance, their communities, and their users from everyone on lemmy.ca and piefed.ca. Similarly, it will block content from lemmy.ca and piefed.ca from going to their instance.

Currently, less than 10 users from lemmy.ca are subscribed to a community there, the majority of which are subscribed to 1 community max.

You can view their communities here: https://lemmy.org/communities

Please share your feedback about this action in this thread.

We will be closing the census this week, on January 15th, 2026.

Link: https://survey.fedecan.ca//s/cmjcnqzgd0002th01dh6naqm6

A lot has changed since our last census in 2023! We would like to take another opportunity to learn about our growing community.

Everyone is welcome to fill out this survey! While this census is being run by the admins of lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, piefed.ca, and pixelfed.ca, you do not need to have an account on these instances, and you do not need to be located in Canada. If you do have an account on one of our instances, you can indicate that on the census to be included in those separate graphs/visualizations.

No question is mandatory. You may skip any question by either selecting “no answer (skip this question)”, or by leaving the question blank.

Some questions will be hidden depending on your selections. For example, the Pixelfed specific questions will be hidden if you don't select that as one of the platforms you use.

Sections:

• Section 1: Location
• Section 2: Demographics
• Section 3a: Instance Usage (Forum/Threadiverse)
• Section 3b: Instance Usage (Pixelfed)
• Section 4: Feedback / Closing questions

When results are ready, we will share them on our website and with posts on the main/meta communities in our instances.

The questions were created with help from @Dave@lemmy.nz, based on the questions from their census this year. The banner image was made with icons from flaticon.com.

Due to some issues with the survey platform, you won't be able to click on external URLs while completing the census. You can access those links here:

• Speed test: https://fast.com/
• Ethnicity options: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/ref/dict/app/index-eng.cfm?ID=a2_5
• Education options: https://canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/settle-canada/education/school-types/post-secondary.html

Link: https://survey.fedecan.ca//s/cmjcnqzgd0002th01dh6naqm6

The census will close on January 15th, 2026.

A lot has changed since our last census in 2023! We would like to take another opportunity to learn about our growing community.

Everyone is welcome to fill out this survey. You do not need to be located in Canada, and you do not need to have an account on one of our platforms. If you do have an account on lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works, piefed.ca, and/or pixelfed.ca, you can indicate that on the census in order to be included in those separate graphs/visualizations.

No question is mandatory. You may skip any question by either selecting “no answer (skip this question)”, or by leaving the question blank. Some questions will be hidden depending on your selections. For example, the Pixelfed specific questions will be hidden if you don't select that as one of the platforms you use.

Sections:

• Section 1: Location
• Section 2: Demographics
• Section 3a: Instance Usage (Forum/Threadiverse)
• Section 3b: Instance Usage (Pixelfed)
• Section 4: Feedback / Closing questions

When results are ready, we will share them on our website and with posts on:

• !main@lemmy.ca
• !main@sh.itjust.works
• !main@piefed.ca
• A pinned post on pixelfed.ca

The questions were created with help from @Dave@lemmy.nz, based on the questions from their census this year :)

EDIT: We've made the links unclickable (see comments). The census is long, so I didn't want people to lose their progress near the end. The links are here:

• Speed test: https://fast.com/
• Ethnicity options: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2021/ref/dict/app/index-eng.cfm?ID=a2_5
• Education options: https://canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/settle-canada/education/school-types/post-secondary.html

I see links to 'that site' owned by 'that billionaire' all the time, be it in posts or comments...

Is it possible to auto-suggest using xcancel.com instead, if direct links are in posts or comments, or even auto-fix them?

Barely enough time in the day to develop new features? Quit using your "full time job" to post genocide denial and Stalin apologism.

I can't remember the last time Lemmy added a new feature that actually benefits admins or users. The Piefed devs are constantly coming out with new features, maybe it's because they don't waste the whole day banning people for left wing political views like saying genocide is bad.

Does anyone know of any useful extensions for Lemmy? The site is pretty usable without any extensions, but that's what I thought about Reddit before I learned about Reddit Enhancement Suite many years ago.

Hey y'all, keep an eye out for trolls. I have the impression there are a few accounts on here with users whose only purpose is to instigate others and get angry reactions out of people.

Are there any way to report these users? I haven't found a report button for users specifically.

If I follow these links from Summit correctly I'm banned from news@lemmy.world & politicalmemes@lemmy.world

I don't know why, I'm usually a pretty cool uncontroversial dude.

Any way to find out how I got banned? Or at least verify it's legit?