TL;DR Lemmy.nz turns 2 today. I made a video!

There's a mirror here if it doesn't work: https://files.catbox.moe/xca9pn.mp4

Last year I posted a video celebrating Lemmy.nz's first birthday. Today I'm doing it again! No sound, and my video skills haven't got any better, but at this point it's practically a tradition for me to do a bad video and a history write up.

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!

Picking up from where the last one left off - we were having trouble with Lemmy.world and had added a second server in Finland that was responsible for collecting the activities from Lemmy.world and sending them in batches to Lemmy.nz so it could keep up. This was a temporary solution until (A) Lemmy got the functionality to send in parallel, and (B) Lemmy.world updated and turned this on. We finally got there just 6 weeks ago on 20 April 2025, and the batcher was turned on 6 May 2024, so we spend almost a full year running the batcher. Luckily it worked really well for us, we were very lucky to have a Lemmy user/contributor able to build such a tool and happy to provide the support to set it up and monitor it.

We participated in Canvas 2024, where everyone places a pixel on a big shared canvas to create art. Here is a post about our NZ contribution, though many of us also contributed to other art on the canvas (and we also had many from outside NZ helping us at times).

We did a census around this time last year, and the results were released about a month after our birthday last year. This year I have been working with Lemmy.ca (who were the inspiration for our census) to create a mostly shared structure so that both of us and any other instances who want to can have a shared set of questions for easier comparison across instances. I expect to have the survey up and running in the coming days so keep an eye out!

The video has a section on some of the news stories across the year, including Dunedin Airport introducing a time limit on hugs, Auckland City Mission distributing meth lollies, a call to police about a realistic looking sex doll, someone leaving flavoured milk at a petrol station, and a guy who did a performance in Wellington where he folded a fitted sheet.

I also included a section on how we do boats good in NZ, with the grounding of the ferry Aratere, the sinking of the navy boat Manawanui, and a commuter ferry sailing through a SailGP practice (I think the ferry was in the right on that one though).

We entered Lemmyvision with the Alien Weaponry song Mau Moko, and got 3rd! Last year we got 5th so that's a pretty good result.

Some things not mentioned in the video:

• There was a migration of hardware of our hosts, moving from owned hardware to leased dedicated hardware as the hardware was aging.

• We now have two lemmy-ui front end containers running load balanced, which should help with errors we were getting sometimes. We've had the two containers a little while now and I do feel like it's helping.

• We are currently piggy-backing on hosting, but the guys giving us hosting are now stepping away from hosting the other services on the shared host (like Mastodon.nz, Pixelfed.nz) and are passing these on to others as they find people willing to take them on. It's likely as this happens we will need to move off to our own hosting, handle donations ourselves, etc. More info will come as plans are sorted.

The last year was certainly a lot less dramatic than the first year. Hopefully the next year will be like that too!

Thanks to everyone for being here!