Pricefield.org Meta

we're running on a much beefier server this time than we had on aws so hopefully this will be the end of that story. i'm still setting up some automations -- in particular, we don't have a health check and restart script here yet so we might have some intermittent outages, but also, as far as i've seen those issues were due to overload and we shouldn't have to worry about that here.

i hope federation is working. that's the last big thing to check here

how the actual fuck is this site still operating lmao

i was just preparing some pages to inform you of the site moving to hetzner finally. everything was down, i thought the drive filled up again so i started the backup process and everything, and... it's just running? wtf?

it's not even the first time in the past week of the same happening.

sorry about the intermittent downtime. i have no clue what's happening now, and i did also reconfigure dns already, expecting the aws instance to not come back up, so there's a very good chance we are in fact going dark sometime in the next 24 hours. i'll do my best to keep it as short as possible but there's a very good chance you'll see a static message here at some point

I really need to download the whole server and bring it all over to Hetzner, we got plenty of space there and hopefully enough performance that the auto-restart script won't be sending me 3-4 emails a day or so.

I'll keep it up for storm week because it's storm week, but if it goes down for a day-ish after that without much of an announcement, that's what's happening.

For now, I have limited time, so I just gave it another 50 GB on AWS. It should be enough for a while.

Hey was wondering if you would be able to purge an image I posted from the cache. I deleted the post but its still cached as an image object and displayed on other instances

https://pricefield.org/pictrs/image/bb92d53c-0cd2-4d5b-91c7-9c0a18183de1.webp

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2345596

I have been having a ton of issues editing or replying to post. I am completely unable to do it and was wondering if they are the issue or if we are.

They also left transphobic comments on one of my post

It seems like we have been getting swarmed by downvotes as of late on nearly every single post. The source seems to be people browsing by new, as the downvotes always happen very early into a post's lifecycle, and the people are total "randoms" (as in, previously unknown users). I checked up on a few of them just to see if they're alts or bots (we did have a troll incident that we silently dealt with) but the traffic seems genuine.

Hopefully this can be reverted in the future, since downvotes tend to be a useful tool by the community, but for now we're trying the Blahaj Zone way of handling things.

For the technically minded, we went from a t3a.small EC2 instance to an m6a.large. Both are dual-core instances, but the t3a.small type is on AMD's Zen 1 architecture, while m6a.large is Zen 3 based, which is light years ahead (this is the equivalent of swapping out a Ryzen 1600 to a 5600X). On top of that, on the T instances you're expected to only use 20% of the CPU and there's a pretty heavy surcharge if you continuously use more, while on the M instances you just get the whole thing, so hosting costs are actually projected to be lower even with the jump in CPU capacity, plus we enjoy a nice jump from 2 GB of memory to 8 GB.

And yeah, while the conventional wisdom is that burstable instances are a great fit for web services, we actually have a remarkably flat CPU load. I'm thinking it's probably federation that drives most of it it rather than direct usage of the site. I'm also fairly sure a c6a.large instance would be more cost-effective (it's basically the same thing with half the memory for 12% cheaper) but that's something to maybe figure out later.

Hi there! Great to see you here! If you're wondering what this place is and how to start, you have come to the right place.

Lemmy? I thought this was Pricefield.org?

Oh, yes! Lemmy is a social network, and Pricefield.org is part of it. Let me explain: (no pun intended... okay, maybe a little)

• Lemmy is built of themed communities. For example, we have /c/pricefield, a community around Max and Chloe, we have /c/lifeissilly, a meme community for Life is Strange, and a few others. Each community has its own focus, own themes, and own rules. (If you're familiar with Reddit, this is analogous to subreddits.)

• Every time you post, you post to a community. We don't have personal walls here like Twitter/Mastodon or Tumblr, if you'd like to post something, just go to the appropriate community and click "Create a post" in the sidebar. (On mobile, you might need to click on the Sidebar [+] button on the top of the page.) That's how we interact with each other.

So far, it all just sounds like existing forum-like sites, and this doesn't yet answer the question of what's the difference between Lemmy and Pricefield.org. So here's the weird part:

• Lemmy is not a single website, it's a bunch of interconnected websites. For example, there's lemmy.world, beehaw.org, lemmy.blahaj.zone and a lot of others. All of these sites talk to each other, and by using one of these sites, you can use all of them. (With exceptions. For example, we specifically block alt-right instances.) A single Lemmy website, like Pricefield.org, is called an "instance".
• Communities are part of instances, each instance may have multiple communities. That's how communities and instances interact. For example, the aforementioned Life is Silly community's proper name is !lifeissilly@pricefield.org -- the first part denotes it's called lifeissilly, the second shows it's on pricefield.org. Similarly, !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone is called 196 and resides on lemmy.blahaj.zone.
• Much like communities, each instance may have a different focus or theme. For example, you're on pricefield.org, which is a Life is Strange focused instance, it's a specific place. On the other end of the spectrum, we have lemmy.world, which is sort of a general catch-all instance, ran by the Open Collective and open to anything you want to do with it. For a middle ground, there's lemmy.blahaj.zone, which is a queer-focused instance, but also a general one, just with its admins making sure it remains a safe space for queer people.

So, in short (tl;dr:) Pricefield.org is part of Lemmy. It's a place where you can interact with all of Lemmy, and it's a place that hosts Life is Strange-related communities.

(If you want to go a bit deeper, even Lemmy isn't the whole thing, we're part of the wider Fediverse and you can expect to interact with people from Kbin and sometimes Mastodon as well here, but that's its own can of worms.)

So... how do I join?

Just sign up! You can do it on any instance you like, it doesn't really matter. You can access any place you want from nearly every instance. (Barring "defederation", which is when instances block each other, but don't pick an alt-right or a tankie instance and you're likely going to be just fine.)

If in the future, you decide you chose wrong and wanna switch instances, you can! We don't collect followers here on Lemmy, or amass karma, so there are no drawbacks to making a new account. You can always just register at a different place and keep interacting with the same communities. Apart from setting up your subscriptions again, you will see no disruption, so like a wise woman once said, let your inner punk-rock girl come out! You can afford to take chances!

\*Or inner punk-rock guy. Or something in-between or beyond. All are welcome here!

> CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP <

(You will need to verify your email, unfortunately that's a necessary step because of the spambots. If you don't receive your email within five minutes, contact me on Discord (@b3nsn0w) or Matrix (@b3nsn0w@matrix\.org) and we'll figure it out.)

Okay. I signed up. Now what?

Now you can surf the information superhighway and explore the wide world of Lemmy in the comfort of your own home! (And probably download a car.)

On your homepage, you will see a pair of selectors like this:

!

These will be your best friend when interacting with Lemmy.

Subscribed / Local / All

This one switches between the communities you receive content from.

• Local is kind of simple. If you remember how each community belongs to an instance, "local" on Lemmy means anything that is on the same instance you're on. That will be Pricefield.org in our case. So by selecting Local, you see content from all of our Life is Strange related communities.
• All means you get content from everywhere, all across Lemmy. Technically, this is only the communities Pricefield.org is aware of, which is why you might see different posts in the "All" of different instances, but you can easily make Pricefield.org itself aware of whatever you want. (We'll discuss how to do this later.)
• Subscribed shows you content from only the communities you subscribe to. If you click into a post, or visit a community, you will see a "Subscribe" button in the sidebar, clicking into that will add it to your list of communities to see posts from. This way, you can fully customize your Lemmy experience.

Active?

This one is the sorting method. There are a couple ways you can sort content on Lemmy:

• Active will bring you the posts where everyone is talking at the moment. It's a great way to jump into some discussions, but you might see the same posts for days sometimes, whenever something really catches the Lemmy community's interest.
• Hot focuses on posts that have a favorable upvote-to-recency ratio (as in, they have lots of upvotes and they aren't old). This is your best bet for finding cool stuff that's fresh every time.
• New is an unfiltered chronological feed. It generally moves way too fast on Lemmy to be usable for larger spreads, but if you're only subscribed to a small set of communities (or use the local setting, as of right now) it's a good way to see if anything happened since you last visited.
• Top of \<period> gets you the most upvoted posts from a given period of time. This is generally a slow-moving but high-quality feed, if you're into that, and you can dial in exactly how slow by selecting the appropriate time period.

(Similarly, you can also filter for comments, not just posts, with the selector to the left, if you're interested in that, but personally I haven't found much usefulness in that yet.)

That's nice and all, but how do I find communities?

I'm glad you asked! We have a specific page for it, which you can find in the top navigation (or the three bars / hamburger menu, if you're on mobile). Just like posts, it also has a Subscribed / Local / All setting on the top left, as well as a handy search bar on the top right, allowing you to browse for communities you might like:

!

However, there is a caveat for this: Pricefield.org is not aware of every single community on Lemmy. We run a "seeder", a specific type of bot that finds some cool communities for us so that you're not starting from scratch, but that's not foolproof. If you can't find what you like, you can look on the Lemmy Explorer on lemmyverse.net, which is your best search tool for all of Lemmy. Here's how you use it:

1. Open https://lemmyverse.net/communities (or just lemmyverse.net and click into "Communities" on the top of the page)

   !

2. Set up your home instance. In the top right corner of the page, you can see a little home icon, click that and type "pricefield" into the search box. Pricefield.org should come up like this:

   !

   Click into it. The house icon should turn green, with a little decor.

3. Now you can search for the communities you want, using this search box:

   !

4. Once you typed in your search, click into the name of the community, here:

   !

   This will pull up the community on your instance, if you have set it up with the house icon. When you do this the first time, it may load for a long time and give you an error -- just ignore that and refresh, it's loading the community in the background. You should see something like this once it has synced:

   !

   > ⚠️⚠️⚠️ IMPORTANT ⚠️⚠️⚠️ > > You need to be logged in for this to work! If you're not logged in on Pricefield.org, it will not sync the community and just give you a generic "not found" page every time. Unless the community is already here, but then the on-site search should have found it already.

5. Once the community has synced, you should probably subscribe in the top right. The instance only receives new content if at least one person subscribes, so if you're actually interested it's worth adding it to your list.

If you want to do this in a bit more of a manual way, or if you found a community directly on a different instance, you can refer to the old welcome guide which describes a few other ways you can sync communities. Just keep in mind to do this while you're logged in.

Okay, how do I post?

The easiest way to do so is to go to the community you'd like to post in, and click into "Create a post" in the sidebar. You will be given a form with the following options:

• URL: This is the link of the article, image, video, whatever you are posting about. This is also entirely optional, if you would like to make a text/discussion post you can just leave it empty. If you're uploading an image, leave it empty too.

• Image: This is where you can upload an image to Lemmy if you'd like to post it. Click into the input, select the file, and wait for the preview to pop up. This will also override your url with something that looks like this:

  https://pricefield.org/pictrs/image/edde3a42-52a0-4358-b484-bc756dada67d.jpeg

  Don't mind it, that's just your uploaded image's link. If you upload a different image it will change.

• Title: This is the title of your post, it's the part that will show in the list. (Weirdly enough, you can absolutely use markdown here.)

• Description: If you'd like to do a text post, or simply include a text part after the image or link, you can do it here. This is optional but it's also available on every post, you don't have to choose between image or text. You can use markdown here, if you click the little "?" icon in the corner it will open a guide about the various ways you can style your text. (That's how I did all the fancy stuff in this post too, including additional images -- super useful for galleries!)

There is also a language selection (you can keep this on default, but if an image-only comment is not sending you might need to select the appropriate language for the community), and you can always select the community in the end. Finally, there's this NSFW toggle:

!

Make sure to select this if you're posting any sexually explicit material, gore, or anything you wouldn't be comfortable showing to your boss. (Let's just assume your boss is Chloe Price, like you don't need to use this for something mild such as a kiss.)

Commenting works the same way as the description of the post, you even get the same editor. Also, you can edit both your comments and your posts, and post editing includes editing the title or the image. So if you messed up anything (and we do mean anything!) you can fix it, no big deal.

There's also a special kind of posting you can do: crossposting, which is where you take a post from one community (not even necessarily yours) and drop it into another community. When you do this, most of the posting form is pre-filled for you, you'll just have to select the community you want to post to on the bottom of the form. You can do this with this little squares icon on a post:

!

So, about this instance...

Pricefield.org is on the smaller end of instances you can find, focusing specifically on Life is Strange, the 2015 game by Don't Nod Entertainment, and the ship between Max and Chloe from that game. Currently, we have five communities:

• /c/pricefield, for Pricefield fluff
• /c/lifeisstrange, for discussion of Life is Strange, Before the Storm, and any eventual direct sequels (hopefully)
• /c/lis_franchise, for discussion of the entire franchise built around Life is Strange
• /c/lifeissilly, a meme community
• /c/meta, for anything concerning the instance

You can use the sidebar to navigate between most of these, or go to "Communities" in the top navigation and "Local" to see them all.

If you would like to create other communities related to LiS, you can, but we'd like to ask you to keep the instance focused on the game. While you can't directly create communities on other instances with accounts you make here (you'll need either a local account on the other instance or an admin over there to help you out), you can absolutely moderate those communities with your Pricefield.org account. Or you can participate here with non-local accounts. We would like to keep this instance as the LiS / Pricefield corner of Lemmy.

We do our best to keep registration open on this instance, and all fans of Life is Strange are welcome here.

I have some technical issues

Yup, that happens sometimes. Feel free to post about it here, or if you can’t, contact me on Discord (my username is @b3nsn0w there too), or on Matrix if you prefer that (I’m @b3nsn0w@matrix.org there). Lemmy is in its early days and still in active development, so it’s gonna be a bit of a rough but exciting ride, but we’re here to help you out with that. Ahoy, all aboard, Captain Bluebard is setting sail!

There has been an update to the way Lemmy handles the content security policy, in order to prevent similar attacks that happened to lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone. We have been running a custom CSP before, both to mitigate some attack vectors (although we wouldn't have caught this XSS) and to enable pulling fonts from Google Fonts, which is incompatible with the new security measures, so we're switching to a different solution there. The font will be back, it's just gonna take a sec.

Also, if you prefer this look, we're going to include a theme without the script font, as well as a few other variations.

Update: CSS files updated. We have four font options now:

• font 1: HelvetiHand, the menu font from Life is Strange. Would be a cool default but unfortunately it has some aliasing issues in some browsers.
• font 2: Neucha, the default font we use on the instance. Still similar to the game, but renders well.
• font 3: Dudu Calligraphy, the font from Max's diary. Unfortunately has the same issues as HelvetiHand.
• font 4: Helvetica, plain old and simple, if you'd like a non-script font. Since HelvetiHand was modeled after it it's weirdly fitting for a LiS community.

I understand that it is likely impossible to perform a direct 1 to 1 migration to another link software but I thought we must consider while we are a smaller instance regarding this.

[insert elevator music here]

update: we're halfway there

update 2: aaaand it's fixed

my name is SkyMTF but I mistyped and it's sktmtf instead

Great to see you here! If you're wondering what the hell this place is, you've come to the right place.

---

What is Lemmy to begin with?

Lemmy is an interconnected network of forums. If you have used Reddit in the past, you will be familiar how these work: there are communities (for example, /c/pricefield, same way you have /r/pricefield on reddit), there are posts, cascading comments, upvotes, downvotes, crossposts, everything. You can use each of these communities just like you did on reddit.

The important part about Lemmy is it's not just one site, it's a whole bunch of different sites working together. You can see here the list of sites we work with, and each of them has a similar list as well. This is why Lemmy won't end up like Reddit, because each instance has different admins, so even if some of them go berserk, the rest can just keep on going without them. There is no other Reddit where you don't have to deal with u/spez's rampages, but there will always be another Lemmy.

---

How do I start?

You should first pick an instance to make an account on. That will be your home instance, and you will access the rest of Lemmy through this instance. If you'd like to pick Pricefield.org, you can register here.

To start out, you could use our local communities: https://pricefield.org/communities

> Note: we have enabled email verification because of an onslaught of spambot registrations. You may find similar measures on other instances too, a lot of those that upgraded to 0.18.0 now require manual approval.

---

But how do I access the rest of Lemmy?

If you want to use a community from a different instance, you have two ways of accessing it:

• You can search for it by switching to "All" on the community list page: https://pricefield.org/communities?listingType=All
• You can copy the URL to the community into your own instance, if you have found it previously.

For example, let's say you found this place: https://lemmy.world/c/stargate. This is the stargate community on the lemmy.world instance, so to open it on your home instance, you just need to say:

[home instance]/c/[community]@[instance] https://pricefield.org/c/stargate@lemmy.world

and just like that, you can access it here: https://pricefield.org/c/stargate@lemmy.world

---

So, about this instance...

Pricefield.org is on the smaller end of instances you can find, focusing specifically on Life is Strange, the 2015 game by Don't Nod Entertainment, and the ship between Max and Chloe from that game. Currently, we have four communities:

• /c/pricefield, for Pricefield fluff
• /c/lifeisstrange, for discussion of Life is Strange, Before the Storm, and any eventual direct sequels (hopefully)
• /c/lis_franchise, for discussion of the entire franchise built around Life is Strange
• /c/meta, for anything concerning the instance

If you would like to create other communities related to LiS, you can, but we'd like to ask you to keep the instance focused on the game. While you can't seem to create communities on other instances with accounts you make here (not sure if that's a limitation in Lemmy itself or just its UI), you can absolutely moderate those communities with your Pricefield.org account, or you can participate here with non-local accounts. We would like to keep this instance as the LiS / Pricefield corner of Lemmy.

We do our best to keep registration open on this instance, and all fans of Life is Strange are welcome here.

---

I have some technical issues

Yup, that happens sometimes. Feel free to post about it here, or if you can't, contact me on Discord (my username is @b3nsn0w there too), or on Matrix if you prefer that (I'm @b3nsn0w@matrix.org there). Lemmy is in its early days and still in active development, so it's gonna be a bit of a rough but exciting ride, but we're here to help you out with that.

The instance is pretty new, and I'm completely new to Lemmy, so there are bound to be some things that go sideways. If something doesn't work, don't hesitate to talk about it here -- or if even that doesn't work, drop me a message on Discord (I'm @b3nsn0w there too)