lwadmin

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
 

Hello,

as this is a fairly active community we just wanted to let you know that this community is no longer federating with Lemmy.World due to defederation from lemmy.one for lack of moderation.

Our announcement can be found here: https://lemmy.world/post/28173093

We recommend migrating to a community on an instance that is maintained better.

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 

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

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submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 

Hello world,

as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.

It is very likely that these images are part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.

Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they're only trying to frame them.

Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting "Nicole" and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.

We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.

While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.

Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.

If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we'll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)


Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal <3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@LemmyWorld@mastodon.world) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

 

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN & Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.

See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711

While we value our users' right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

 

Dear Lemmy.world Community,

Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I'm reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I'm sure you can probably guess what we've had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I'll add the thing we're talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don't know.

Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.

The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn't apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.

This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it's relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.

We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.

Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.

Thank you for your understanding.


Sincerely,

The Lemmy.world Administration

Legal / ToS

spoilerCSAM


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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 

Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I'm sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

Version Release Date
0.19.0 2023-12-15
0.19.1 2023-12-20
0.19.2 2024-01-10
0.19.3 2024-01-24

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

 

Check the new blog post about the past 3 months for our .worlds

 

Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!

You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.

Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗

Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.

 

Hello World!

Lemmy.World is looking for new engineers to help with our growing community. Volunteers will assist our existing infrastructure team with monitoring, maintenance and automation development tasks. They will report to our head of infrastructure.

We are looking for junior admins for this role. You will learn a modern cloud infra stack, including Terraform, DataDog, CloudFlare and ma

Keep in mind that while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.

Applicants must be okay with providing their CV, LinkedIn profile; along with sitting for a video interview.

We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

To learn more and begin your application process, click here. This is not a paid position.

 

Hello World,

Due to our pace of growth, our platform ended up with thousands of communities created by you, our dear users. While we are still appreciative of every community effort, we decided we need to be able to better assist and publicize them. To assist with this effort, we now have two community team positions available:

  • The Community Engagement Team: This team will work with community moderators and find ways to increase their engagement, provide them with easy access to logo and banner options, and communicate with you better to assure transparency as needed. Team capacity: 6 new members expected
  • The Community Management Team: This team will be responsible of making sure communities have active moderators, assuring compliance in Lemmy.World communities, and keeping track of community moderation logs in order to assure they are moderated in good health. Team capacity: 6 new members expected

Both of these teams will be working closely with the admin team, and are expected to become ways for our users to have enhanced control of their instance. Let's build something great together!

How to apply

All applications must include the following information:

  • Your Lemmy.World registered username, and your reason to apply
  • The position you are interested in
  • Your time zone, and average availability level

All applications may be sent to @clueless_stoner@lemmy.world or @antik@lemmy.world, or e-mailed to info@lemmy.world

 

Hello World!

The Lemmy.World Terms of Service was recently updated, and we have also published 3 new documents set to be in use, starting from today. These documents are:


they're too long, didn't read


Okay.

Here are some simplified explanations to save you from the trouble. This update of our documentation was made to further reassure transparency towards our users, to comply with applicable laws to the best of our abilities, and to make it more convenient for all of us to use Lemmy.World safely.


The Changes Made to the Terms of Service

Highlights:

  • Section 8 was updated to refer to our new documents.
  • Section 5 was updated to further accommodate some of our communities, which were requesting exemptions from the previous version.
  • The minimum age was raised from 16 to 18.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/


The Privacy Policy in Short

We don't collect any real data from you. The only actual data we do collect are your username, password, the e-mail address you provide, and your Internet Protocol(IP) address.

We will never share your data with anyone for any reason, unless you do illegal stuff.

https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/


What's the Fair Use Policy?

The Fair Use Policy defines the main user and bot rules, and it is made so that rules of conduct and participation are easier for our users to read and access.

https://legal.lemmy.world/fair-use/


The Cookie Policy

Lemmy.World uses cookies like any other website. If you'd like to learn more or disable cookies, then visit the relevant link to our Cookie Policy.

https://legal.lemmy.world/cookie-policy/


end of relevant content


Upon these bits of info, we are also dying to tell you about why are we even bothering with any of this at all, and much more about our efforts and struggles that we hadn't had the time to tell you yet. But let that be a topic for our next post, haha :) stay safe, and with love!

Lemmy.World

❤️

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