What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This version fixes the problem of comment context not loading properly. It also fixes a couple other bugs.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

This upgrade takes ~5 minutes for the database migrations to complete.

You may need to run sudo chown 1000:1000 lemmy.hjson if you have any permissions errors.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That's why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn't send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can't access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy's web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance's icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy's web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text "404 error message here".

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml's home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy's database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy's main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

The new major version of Lemmy is now ready, and we need your help with testing. Most importantly it uses HTTP for API requests now, which is much more efficient than websocket. Additionally Two-factor-auth is supported. There are also countless other improvements and bug fixes.

You can register on any of the following servers to start testing, no approval required. You can post to your hearts content to find out if anything is broken. The test instances only federate with each other to avoid affecting production instances with spam.

• Enterprise
• Voyager
• DS

If you encounter any bugs that aren't present in 0.17, open an issue and mention in the title that it happened with a release candicate version. Over the next days we will publish new RC versions to fix bugs that will invariably pop up.

Instance admins can try the new version by using Docker images dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.0-rc.2 and dessalines/lemmy:0.18.0-rc.1. Make sure that working backups are in place. For production instances its better to wait at least some days for the major issues to be fixed.

Its been a hectic week everyone, so I apologize that I haven't been as responsive as usual. We realized that we could either spend all our day answering questions, or coding to make lemmy better, so we're prioritizing the latter.

Reddit caught us right in the middle of one of our larger performance improvements, so I apologize for the instability of instances like this one. But I'm confident that lemmy will improve, especially due to all the new contributors helping out with performance, security fixes, and stability.

Please use our the issue trackers for the various lemmy projects to report issues, otherwise they will likely get lost.

Call for testers

• You can help us test patch releases like this one at https://enterprise.lemmy.ml
• We're readying the 0.18.0 release soon, you can help us test at https://voyager.lemmy.ml , and https://ds9.lemmy.ml
  • App devs should use voyager.lemmy.ml to test and prepare for 0.18.0, which should come in the next few weeks. The API changes and new types can be seen here.
  • 0.18.0 should give servers a big performance boost by removing websockets and switching entirely to HTTP. It also will add a lot of features like 2fa / TOTP.

Mostly bugfixes.

Changelog

Its been a long time coming 🥳 .

Excerpt from the link:

Major Changes

Language Tags

Content can now be tagged to indicate the language it is written in. These tags can be used to filter content, so that you only see posts in languages which you actually understand. Instances and communities can also specify which languages are allowed, and prevent posting in other languages.

In the future this will also allow for integrated translation tools.

Comment trees

Lemmy has changed the way it stores comments, in order to be able to properly limit the comments shown to a maximum depth.

Included are proper comment links (/comment/id), where you can see its children, a count of its hidden children, and a context button to view its parents, or the post.

Featured posts

Admins and mods can now "feature" (this used to be called "sticky" ala reddit) posts to the top of either a community, or the top of the front page. This makes possible announcement and bulletin-type posts.

Special thanks to @makotech for adding this feature.

Federation

Lemmy users can now be followed. Just visit a user profile from another platform like Mastodon, and click the follow button, then you will receive new posts and comments in the timeline.

Votes are now federated as private. This prevents other platforms from showing who voted on a given post, and it also means that Lemmy now counts votes from Mastodon.

This release also improves compatibility with Pleroma. If you previously had trouble interacting between Pleroma and Lemmy, give it another try.

We've extracted the main federation logic into its own library, activitypub-federation-rust. It is open source and can be used by other projects to implement Activitypub federation, without having to reinvent the wheel. The library helps with handling HTTP signatures, sending and receiving activities, fetching remote objects and more.

Other changes

• Admins can now purge content and pictures from the database.
• Mods can distinguish a comment, "stickying" it to the top of a post. Useful for mod messages and announcements.
• Number of new / unread comments are now shown for each post.
• Lemmy now automatically embeds videos from Peertube, Youtube and other sites which provide an embed link via Opengraph attribute.
• You can give your site "taglines", short markdown messages, which are shown at the top of your front page. Thanks to @makotech for adding this.
• You can now report private messages.
• Most settings have been moved from the config file into the database. This means they can be updated much easier, and apply immediately without a restart.
• When setting up a new Lemmy instance, it doesn't create a default community anymore. Instead this needs to be done manually.
• Admins can choose to receive emails for new registration applications.
• An upgrade of diesel to v2.0, our rust -> postgres layer.

We're getting ready to release a new version of Lemmy, which will require a database upgrade, so we'll have a few hours of downtime.

All the old pictures are restored from a backup, and should be working now. We've bought more hard drive space too, so we should be okay for a while.

A few bug fixes:

• Fix missing auth on new post refresh. (#764)
• Change CSP rule for connect-src (websocket) to wildcard (fixes #730) (#737)
• Increase default search rate limit. (#2424)
• Rejected federated pm from blocked users (fixes #2398) (#2408)
• Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
• Revert "Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)"
• Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
• Dont allow login if account is banned or deleted (fixes #2372) (#2374)
• Fix panics in search_by_apub_id() (fixes #2371) (#2373)

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

Theming

Customizing Lemmy is now much easier than before. Instance admins can select a default instance theme under /admin which applies to all users who are not logged in, and those who haven't explicitly picked a theme.

It is also possible now to add custom themes to an instance, without having to recompile lemmy-ui. When running with Docker, make sure that these lines are present in docker-compose.yml (Ansible will add them automatically if you updated the repo). Then put your .css file into ./volumes/lemmy-ui/extra_themes. The new theme can then be selected by users, or set as instance default.

For native installation (without Docker), themes are loaded by lemmy-ui from ./extra_themes folder. A different path can be specified with LEMMY_UI_EXTRA_THEMES_FOLDER environment variable.

For instructions how to create a new theme, have a look at the documentation.

Federation

@nutomic made many changes to federation to increase compatibility with other software. Lemmy can now receive deletions from [Pleroma], comments from [Friendica] and communities from lotide. Other actions were already compatible before. Mastodon can now display communities even when a user with identical name exists (but the user can't be viewed in that case). There were no breaking changes necessary, so federation is fully compatible with 0.15. If you notice something in another project that doesn't federate but should, please open an issue.

Multiple users have pointed out that posts, comments and votes don't federate reliably. We first attempted to fix this in Lemmy 0.15.4 a few days ago, but that didn't help much. Later @nutomic noticed that Lemmy was only sending out activities with 4 worker threads, which is not enough for a big instance like lemmy.ml. At the same time, many of those workers were taken up by sending to broken instances, trying to connect for a minute or more. This version adds a timeout and increases the number of workers.

Federated bans

Until now, only community bans were federated, and the "Remove content" option didn't work over federation. The new version fixes this behaviour, so that both site bans and community bans federate, including "Remove content" option and expiry. Note that this change only affects new bans, those which were issued before upgrading to 0.16 will not be federated.

Hide communities

@dayinjing implemented a funcionality for instance admins to hide controversial communities. A hidden community is only visible to those users who subscribe to it. This represents a milder alternative to removing a community. This functionality is not implemented in lemmy-ui yet, but admins can hide a community like this via command line:

curl -X PUT https://example.com/api/v3/community/hide \   
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d \
    '{"community_id":3,"hidden":true,"reason":"*reason for mod log*","auth":"*admin jwt token*"}'

Jerboa: a new android app

To help adoption, and since most people use social media through their smartphones nowadays, @dessalines has been working on a native android app for Lemmy called Jerboa, which is now on F-Droid and Google Play.

It is still at an alpha level, but is very usable. We'd love to have experienced android developers contribute to it.

This now makes three smartphone apps for Lemmy: Lemmur and Jerboa for Android, and Remmel for iOS.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

There are three lemmy.hjson config changes. See defaults.hjson for comments and default values.

• changed boolean email.use_tls to email.tls_type
• added setup.default_theme
• added federation.worker_count

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost two years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation. If you would like to support our efforts, please consider donating.

If you'd like to support development, and make sure that we will always be available to work full time on Lemmy, consider donating to support its development. We've spent hundreds of hours on Lemmy, and would like to be able to add more developers to our little open-source co-op as time goes on.

Changes

API

• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.15.0 -> 0.16.0 .

Config

• The config changes are here.

Some websites block lemmy.ml links, for example Facebook as you can see in the screenshot below.

I dont know if this is because of the .ml domain (which is free and might be used by spammers), or because they are scared of Lemmy. Anyway, this doesnt mean that it is impossible to share content from lemmy.ml on Facebook or other sites, thanks to federation there is a relatively easy workaround:

1. Find another Lemmy instance, ideally one that is relevant to your audience
2. Copy the lemmy.ml link, and paste it into the search field of your chosen instance
3. You should get a search result for the post, comment, community or user, click on it
4. Copy the link and share!

There are a few caveats though: In the case of a post, comments and votes will be missing. You can fetch comments in the same way through the search. The other instance will also not receive any new posts/comments/votes made in the community, unless a user from the remote instance is following the lemmy.ml community.

The easiest way to avoid these problems is for you to make an account on the other instance and follow the community from it. Then every post/comment/vote will be delivered to the other instance, and the community should look identical on both instances.

Recently there have been some discussions about the political stances of the Lemmy developers and site admins. To clear up some misconceptions: Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others. While @dessalines and I are communists, we take decisions collectively, and don't demand that anyone adopt our views or convert to our ideologies. We wouldn't devote so much time to building a federated site otherwise.

What's important to us is that you follow the site rules and Code of Conduct. Meaning primarily, no-bigotry, and being respectful towards others. As long as that is the case, we can get along perfectly fine.

In general we are open for constructive feedback, so please contact any member of the admin team if you have an idea how to improve Lemmy.

Slur Filter

We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy. Not so much on lemmy.ml itself, but whenever Lemmy is recommended elsewhere, a few usual suspects keep bringing it up. To these people we say the following: we are using the slur filter as a tool to keep a friendly atmosphere, and prevent racists, sexists and other bigots from using Lemmy. Its existence alone has lead many of them to not make an account, or run an instance: a clear net positive.

You can see for yourself the words which are blocked (content warning, link here). Note that it doesn't include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people. If you want to use any of these words, then please stay on one of the many platforms that permit them. Lemmy is not for you, and we don't want you here.

We are fully aware that the slur filter is not perfect. It is made for American English, and can give false positives in other languages or dialects. We are totally willing to fix such problems on a case by case basis, simply open an issue in our repo with a description of the problem.

After almost a year of hard work implementing ActivityPub support on Lemmy, it is finally done! Anything that works here on dev.lemmy.ml, also works over federation between different instances (with one notable exception, community mods have to be on the same instance as the community for now).

Before we consider federation ready for production, some more testing is needed. And that's where you come in: go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like:

• post, comment and vote
• delete and restore posts/comments
• send private messages
• create communities, remove/restore posts and ban/unban users
• setup your own lemmy instance, and federate with enterprise.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml

If you notice any bugs, please report them on Github, as comments on this post, or in our Dev Chat on Matrix. Please keep in mind that our code of conduct also applies to the test instances.

The more you test, the sooner we will feel confident to enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml. Happy testing!

Lemmy v0.8.0 Release (2020-10-16)

:partying face:

Changes

We've been working at warp speed since our v0.7.0 release in June, adding over 870 commits since then. :sweat:

Here are some of the bigger changes:

LemmyNet projects

• Created LemmyNet, where all lemmy-related projects live.
• Split out the frontend into a separete repository, lemmy-ui
• Created a lemmy-js-client, for any js / typescript developers.
• Split out i18n lemmy-translations, that any app or site developers can import and use. Lemmy currently supports ~30 languages!

Lemmy Server

Federation

• The first federation public beta release, woohoo :fireworks:
• All Lemmy functionality now works over ActivityPub (except turning remote users into mods/admins)
• Instance allowlist and blocklist
• Documentation for admins and devs on how federation works
• Upgraded to newest versions of @asonix activitypub libraries
• Full local federation setup for manual testing
• Automated testing for nearly every federation action
• Many additional security checks
• Lots and lots of refactoring
• Asynchronous sending of outgoing activities

User Interface

• Separated the UI from the server code, in lemmy-ui.
• The UI can now read with javascript disabled!
• It's now a fully isomorphic application using inferno-isomorphic. This means that page loads are now much faster, as the server does the work.
• The UI now also supports open-graph and twitter cards! Linking to lemmy posts (from whatever platform you use) looks pretty now:
• Improved the search page ( more features incoming ).
• The default view is now Local, instead of All, since all would show all federated posts.
• User settings are now shared across browsers ( a page refresh will pick up changes ).
• A much leaner mobile view.

Backend

• Re-organized the rust codebase into separate workspaces for backend and frontend.
• Removed materialized views, making the database a lot faster.
• New post sorts Active (previously called hot), and Hot. Active shows posts with recent comments, hot shows highly ranked posts.
• New sort for Local ( meaning from local communities).
• Customizeable site, user, and community icons and banners.
• Added user preferred names / display names, bios, and cakedays.
• Visual / Audio captchas through the lemmy API.
• Lots of API field verifications.
• Upgraded to pictrs-v2 ( thanks to @asonix )
• Wayyy too many bugfixes to count.

Contributors

We'd also like to thank both the NLnet foundation for their support in allowing us to work full-time on Lemmy ( as well as their support for other important open-source projects ), those who sponsor us, and those who help translate Lemmy. Every little bit does help. We remain committed to never allowing advertisements, monetizing, or venture-capital in Lemmy; software should be communal, and should benefit humanity, not a small group of company owners.

Upgrading

• with manual Docker installation
• with Ansible installation

Testing Federation

Federation is finally ready in Lemmy, pending possible bugs or other issues. So for now we suggest to enable federation only on test servers, or try it on our own test servers ( enterprise, ds9, voyager ).

If everything goes well, after a few weeks we will enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml, at first with a limited number of trusted instances. We will also likely change the domain to https://lemmy.ml . Keep in mind that changing domains after turning on federation will break things.

To enable on your instance, edit your lemmy.hjson federation section to enabled: true, and restart.

Connecting to another server

The server https://ds9.lemmy.ml has open federation, so after either adding it to the allowed_instances list in your config.hjson, or if you have open federation, you don't need to add it explicitly.

To federate / connect with a server, type in [!community_name@server.tld](/c/community_name@server.tld), in your server's search box like so.

To connect with the main community on ds9, the search is [!main@ds9.lemmy.ml](/c/main@ds9.lemmy.ml).

You can then click the community, and you will see a local version of the community, which you can subscribe to. New posts and comments from [!main@ds9.lemmy.ml](/c/main@ds9.lemmy.ml) will now show up on your front page, or /c/All

Just a public service announcement.

The list of cross-posts shows both when you're creating a post, and on the posts themselves.

↓↓↓