I’ve been monitoring the situation and unfortunately there’s not much that can be done from our end. I’ve already tried throwing as much hardware as I can afford at the problem. My understanding is that it should be resolved once they upgrade to 0.19.6 with the new Parallel Federation feature. We’ll be performing the upgrade soon, but I haven’t seen an ETA for them to upgrade yet.

I understand this impacts a large amount of our federated content and apologize for the disruption. Hopefully it can be resolved soon with the new releases.

It looks like you may have gotten hit by this issue.

Since you’re already logged in on a client, you could try setting an email address (if not already set) and doing a forgot password. That should allow you to reset your password to one within the limit.

Feel free to reach out if that doesn’t work or you continue to have issues!

Community creation is currently disabled. If you have an idea for a new community, feel free to DM me and I can help you get set up.

This issue should be fixed now. Let me know if you continue to see any issues.

For the technical details:

Pictrs is used for managing images in Lemmy. It uses a Sqlite database on the local filesystem which limits its scalability. After a recent upgrade, it does now support migrating this data into Postgresql. I’m hoping to schedule some time soon to perform the update. This will allow multiple instances of Pictrs to be run in parallel providing better uptime and recovery.

What happens here is that the service gets into a bad state and it tries to bring up a replacement. But due to the local DB, the replacement is unable to get a lock on the filesystem and crashes. Once we switch it to use Postgres, this should no longer be an issue.