Heads up: you might see a quick “are you a bot?” page on lemmy.radio now

You may notice a short page that says “Making sure you’re not a bot!” (with a little jackal) when you first visit lemmy.radio. It only lasts about a second, then you’re in. Here’s why it’s there.

The problem: lemmy.radio has been getting swamped by AI scraper bots: automated programs pretending to be real people, loading old posts thousands of times a second to harvest data. It was overloading the site and causing the errors and slowness a lot of you have seen lately.

The fix: I added a free, open-source tool called Anubis that acts like a bouncer at the door. When you arrive, it gives your browser a tiny puzzle to solve… think of it like rolling dice until you hit the right number. Your computer does it automatically in about a second, and then it remembers you for about a week so you won’t see it again for a while.

It’s easy for a real visitor but a nightmare for the bots: they’d have to solve that puzzle millions of times over, which is too slow and expensive to bother with. So real people get in, and the bots get turned away.

What you need to know:

• You might see the page on your first visit (or about once a week). Totally normal, just let it finish.
• Keep JavaScript on for it to work.
• Apps and other Lemmy servers aren’t affected, this only checks web browsers.

Sorry for the recent hiccups. Things should be much smoother now. Maybe even faster!

As always, please let me know if this causes any issues…

73,

w0odl

We turned 3 today and I have renewed the lemmy.radio domain for another year!

3 years ago, during the great reddit api/mobile move that a lot of people made, I thought it would be nice to have an instance just for hams. And now here we are! I’ve learned so much from the posts here and really enjoy being a part of this instance and maintaining it.

I greatly appreciate all of the people who share their radio knowledge here. I hope you continue to enjoy our special little instance.

73,

w0odl

And of course, if you’d like to celebrate our instances birthday and help keep this place alive: we have a Liberapay setup to help with donations.

https://liberapay.com/lemmyradio/

(continued from https://lemmy.radio/post/12771575)

Hey all!

From a previous thread/discussion, I have set up a contribution location for anyone wishing to help with costs for this instance.

This is not mandatory or required!

People have reached out to me to say that they enjoy using our lemmy instance and wanted to help, and I’m very thankful for that!

We will be using Liberapay for this and our profile for contributions is:

https://liberapay.com/lemmyradio/

This link and badge can also be found in the sidebar.

Below is a breakdown for how you will be helping with your contributions!

Monthly

• Hosting/VPS - $72
• Email - $17.45
• Object storage (media) - ~ $12*

Yearly

• .radio domain - € 25**

Please let me know how Liberapay is and as always, let me know if you have any questions! I will keep this highlighted on our instance for a week.

* media storage will fluctuate as we use the instance more, but I try to clean up old data/media frequently.

** .radio domains is about to be transferred to a new registrar, sav.com. They have not commented on if pricing will remain the same.

I’ve had it fixed in my head that covering hosting costs is just my job as admin, and I’ve been fine with that. But I’ve been rethinking it lately.

If someone wants to contribute to keeping this place running, who am I to say no? Feels a little rude to cut people out of something they actually want to be part of. lemmy.radio is a community, not my personal project I’m sharing.

I’m looking at Open Collective as a way to do this transparently. You’d be able to see exactly what the instance costs and where any contributions go, but I’d love to hear about other options.

Nothing’s set up yet. Wanted to float it here first and hear what you think. Open to other suggestions too.

FYI I’ve done this so far: https://opencollective.com/lemmyradio

73,

Ben w0odl

(I’m keeping this post open and highlighted for a week, ending 4/18. thank you for your input!)

Edit 4/14:

I received this response back from OpenCollective:

Hi, thanks for your application. We’re going to have to review applications like this in light of the legislation passed in the UK (The Online Safety Act) March 2025.

In light of this, I think I will also look into https://liberapay.com/

lemmy.radio will be down for up to an hour starting at 00:00 UTC 03/26/2026

This is needed for server maintenance. I’ll post here again when we are up and discuss the updates!

~ w0odl

post-downtime notes:

Thanks for putting up with the (un)scheduled downtime!

A status update: for the past 2 years, we have operated using a fairly large size VPS using Akamai/Linode. To be specific, we were using:

• 16GB ram
• 8 CPUs
• 320GB drive

This was mostly due to the the large amounts of images, videos, media that we accumulate over the years we’ve been up and running (we’re going to be turning 3 years old very soon btw!)

A few months ago, to help with the large costs of running this site, I moved all of our media to object storage, which TREMENDOUSLY cut down our drive space usage. And…

Today is the day, I actually scaled us back to a “smaller” VPS to help cut down on prices further. We are currently using:

• 8GB ram
• 4 CPUs
• 160GB drive

So let’s talk turkey about savings (if you care)

This drops our server fees from about ~$175/month to around ~$90/month

This is the price of the VPS, object storage, .radio domain, and email services we use.

Thank you for putting up with the hour or so we were down. I’m hoping that this will keep us running WELL into the future.

Cheers and 73,

w0odl

Hey all!

This is actually a double upgrade from 0.9.13 -> 0.9.14 -> 0.9.15. This mostly includes moderation feature add. Give them a look at: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-12-24_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.15_and_Testing_for_1.0

Let me know if any issues arise from the upgrade. Seems like lemmy 1.0 is around the corner!

73,

w0odl

Hey all!

Just wanted to share that we were down for about 2.5 hours today due to space issues on our server. I moved a few things around and everything seems to be up and running.

To help with this issue, I’ve moved our image server to S3 which may alleviate some of our issues, but I think the largest chuck of space is being taken up by propagated comments from other servers and I’m not sure what to do about that. We’re currently using about 300gigs out of a 320gig VPS.

It seems the S3 image uploads are working, but as always, if something seems off, let me know!

73,

w0odl

update 04:49UTC Oct/09/25: Currently migrating all of our image data to S3 so we don’t have any more broken photos

update 06:26UTC Oct/09/25: Image migration to S3 complete. Let me know if any issues arise or something seems off!