Hello world,
we've had various smaller updates lately that didn't all warrant their own update posts and we don't want to post too many announcements around the same time, so we collected them for a single larger post.
New alternative Lemmy frontend: Tesseract
We have recently added a new alternative Lemmy frontend to our collection: Tesseract.
Tesseract was forked from Photon a while back and includes a variety of additional customization options and moderation utilities.
It is available at https://t.lemmy.world/.
Lemmy-UI update to 0.19.11-ish
We have deployed a custom build of Lemmy-UI, the default Lemmy web interface, which includes most of the features included in the official 0.19.11 release.
While we haven't updated our backend to a newer version yet, as we still have to find a solution for dealing with the newly integrated functionality to send emails on rejected registration applications, all the frontend features that don't require a backend update have been included. The only part that is currently missing is Lemmy's new donation dialog, as this requires a backend upgrade as well.
You can find the list of changes in the frontend section in the announcement for the 0.19.11 release.
Defederation from lemmy.one and r.nf
A Lemmy.World user informed us about an instance we are federated with that was hosting very illegal content a while back. This was a result of an attack more than a year ago, and said content federated to many other instances, which made local copies of the material. Unfortunately, when this material was taken down at the source, that action did not federate to all linked instances, meaning that there are still some instances showing this material.
Once we were made aware of this, we realized that this was likely not the only occurrence, so we started looking for other instances where this content may also still exist. We have identified more than 50 affected instances and already reached out to many of them to inform them about this content to have it taken down.
Among these instances, r.nf and lemmy.one were some of the first instances that were informed, but even after 2 months since the initial report there has been zero reaction from either instance. Both of these instances don't appear to be moderated, as evident also by posts asking whether the instance is still maintaned on lemmy.one and 2 month old spam in r.nf's main community.
The community that gets hit the hardest by this is !privacyguides@lemmy.one, which is the only larger community across these instances. We recommend looking for alternative communities on other instances.
Due to the lack of action and response we have since also reported this directly to their hosting providers through Cloudflare, which includes an automatic report to NCMEC.
Even when this material will get taken down now, we don't currently believe that the instance operators are willing or able to moderate these instances properly, so we will keep them defederated unless they can convince us that they are going to moderate their instances more actively and ensure that they provide usable abuse contacts that don't require going through their hosting provider.
We also defederate from other instances from time to time due to lack of moderation and unreachable admins among other reasons. If you're interested in the reasons for our defederations, we aim to always document them on Fediseer. Be warned though, as this list contains a mentions or references to various disturbing or illegal material.
Most of those instances are either very small, don't interact with Lemmy much anyway, or are explicitly stating support of content that is incompatible with our policies.
We also usually try to reach out to affected instances prior to defederation if we believe that they may not intentionally be supporting the problematic content.
We have temporarily re-federated to lemmy.one to allow this post and https://lemmy.world/post/28173100 to federate to them. We're waiting for federation to catch up with the activities since we defederated a day ago originally before we defederate again.
Reliability of media uploads
We have recently been receiving some reports of media uploads not working from time to time. We have already addressed one of the underlying issues and are working on addressing another one currently. Please continue to let us know about issues like that to ensure that they're on our radar.
We're currently also working on improving our overall application monitoring to collect more useful information that helps us track down specific issues, improve visibility for errors, as well as hopefully allowing us to identify potential performance issues.
Parallel federation
Back in Lemmy 0.19.6, Lemmy introduced the option to send federated activities in parallel. Without this, Lemmy would only ever have one activity in the process of being transmitted to another instance. While most instances don't have a large number of activities going out, we're at the point where instances far away from us are not able to keep up with our traffic anymore due to physics limitations when waiting for data from the other side of the world.
Some instances mitigated this by setting up an external federation queue near our instance that would batch activities together to work around these limitations while this was not implemented in Lemmy and deployed on our end. Unfortunately this also meant having to maintain an additional server, which means time investment, a few bucks every month to pay, as well as another potential component that could break.
We have enabled 2 parallel sends around a week ago and aussie.zone, who were pretty much constantly lagging behind multiple days have finally caught up with us again. We will continue to monitor this and if needed increase the number of parallel sends further in the future, but so far it looks like we should be fine with 2 for a good while.
edit: added section about parallel federation