TL;DR LemmyNZ turns 3 today. I made a video!

For the last two years I've posted a video celebrating LemmyNZ’s birthday. Today it's our birthday again, and I'm back with another terrible video!

As usual, here’s a bit of history of the last year here for those that are unable to watch the video or who just want to know more. If anyone has other memories to add, please do!

About a year ago we added a new frontend Blorp, one of many ways to use LemmyNZ from a browser (Blorp is also a mobile app).

We participated in Canvas, drawing a pretty substantial design, and with LemmyNZ users also contributing to other art across the canvas (and users from other instances also helping us).

We had our usual annual census, which was quite extensive. I will probably cut back the number of questions this year as it was a lot of work to pick through.

In October, we added a new community Maps without NZ.

Around November/December Lemmy.world had federation issues where they would suddenly stop sending us (and a range of other instances) content, which they traced to some faulty RAM on their server.

In February 2026 we migrated to storing images in object storage, and then migrated the server to a VPS when the team providing our hosting for free shut down their operations.

With this new cost, we started collecting contributions to pay for the server, and have collected over $150 already, which should cover 2-3 months of operation. We also had our first financial update ever, covering January-March 2026. I'll do another after June is over, aiming for quarterly updates.

To protect the server from a deluge of scraping bots that are a problem for anyone running sites these days, we implemented a tool called Anubis that weighs the soul of incoming requests. Following this we saw a significant reduction in bot traffic, and could hear the server sigh with relief.

We also added two new admins as a step to removing a single point of failure.

The video also covers some news articles around meth usage, alcohol usage, heath records hacks one and two, as well as climate change related events, research, and sporting impacts. And briefly mentions Wellington's sewage plant disaster.

Not mentioned - when I started a logo vote because I hate the little AI generated gremlin thing, and I seriously underestimated how much people care about these things. So we'll do a better job of getting some options, vote separately for the logo and banner, and hopefully do it a bit more justice.

Anyway, thanks everyone for being here!