Lemmy

Original comment thread.

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 v0.19.4 release is a big one, with > 200 pull requests merged since v0.19.3. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelogs at the bottom of this post.

Local Only Communities

Communities have a new visibility setting, which can be either Public (current behaviour) or LocalOnly. The latter means that the community won't federate, and can only be viewed by users who are logged in to the local instance. This can be useful for meta communities discussing moderation policies of the local instance, where outside users shouldn't be able to participate. It is also a first step towards implementing private communities. Local only communities still need more testing and should be considered experimental for now.

Image Proxying

There is a new config option called image_mode which provides a way to proxy external image links through the local instance. This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.

Instead if image_mode is set to ProxyAllImages, image urls are rewritten to be proxied through /api/v3/image_proxy. This can also improve performance and avoid overloading other websites. The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.

Many thanks to @asonix for adding this functionality to pict-rs v0.5.

Post hiding

You can now hide a post as a dropdown option, and there is a new toggle to filter hidden posts in lemmy-ui. Apps can use the new show_hidden field on GetPosts to enable this.

Moderation enhancements

With the URL blocklist admins can prevent users from linking to specific sites.

Admins and mods can now view the report history and moderation history for a given post or comment.

The functionality to resolve reports automatically when a post is removed was previously broken and is now fixed. Additionally, reports for already removed items are now ignored.

The site.content_warning setting lets admins show a message to users before rendering any content. If it is active, nsfw posts can be viewed without login.

Mods and admins can now comment in locked posts.

Mods and admins can also use external tools such as LemmyAutomod for more advanced tools.

Media

There is a new functionality for users to list all images they have previously uploaded, and delete them if desired. It also allows admins to view and delete images hosted on the local instance.

When uploading a new avatar or banner, the old one is automatically deleted.

Instance admins should also checkout lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner which can delete thumbnails for old posts, and free significant amounts of storage.

Federation

Lemmy can now federate with Wordpress, Discourse and NodeBB. So far there was only minor testing and these projects are still under heavy development. If you encounter any issues federating with these platforms, open an issue either in the Lemmy repo or in the respective project's issue tracker. You can test it by fetching the following posts:

• Wordpress
• Discourse
• NodeBB

In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts. The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.

Reliability and security of federation have been improved, and numerous bugs squashed. Signed fetch was broken and is fixed now.

Vote display user setting

There is now a user setting to change the way vote counts are displayed, called vote display mode.

You can specify which of the following vote data you'd like to see (or hide): Upvotes, Downvotes, Score, Upvote Percentage, or none of the above. The default (based on user feedback) is showing the upvotes + downvotes.

App developers will need to update their apps to support this setting.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds now include post thumbnail and embedded images.

Security Audit

A security audit was recently performed on Lemmy. Big thanks to Radically Open Security for the generous funding, and to Sabrina Deibe and Joe Neeman for carrying out the audit. The focus was on federation logic, and discovered various problems in this area. Most of the problems are being mitigated as part of this release. Fortunately no critical security vulnerabilities were discovered.

This is already the third security audit of Lemmy, all organized by ROS. We're greatly indebted to them for their support.

Other Changes

• Added Community local_subscribers count
• Support for custom post thumbnail
• For new user accounts the interface language and discussion languages are set automatically based on accept-language HTTP header
• Added instance-level default sort type
• Indicate to user when they are banned from community
• Added alt_text for image posts
• Dont require leading ! or @ to fetch a user or community
• Extra fields for PostReport and CommentReport views

Full Changelog

• API changes - lemmy-js-client 0.19.3 -> 0.19.4
• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

Upgrade instructions

Warning: This version requires both a Postgres and Pictrs version upgrade, which requires manual intervention.

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.

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Special thanks goes to Radically Open Security, @sleepless and @matc-pub for their work on lemmy-ui and lemmy-ui-leptos, @dullbananas for their help cleaning up the back-end, DB, and reviewing PRs, @phiresky for federation work, @MV-GH for their work on Jerboa and API suggestions, @asonix for developing pictrs, @ticoombs and @codyro for helping maintain lemmy-ansible, @kroese, @povoq, @flamingo-cant-draw, @aeharding, @Nothing4U, @db0, @MrKaplan, for helping with issues and troubleshooting, and too many more to count.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

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. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

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

I'm sure this will get clarified in the release notes for 19.4, and I'm probably annoyingly jumping the gun ... I'm just curious.

Otherwise, I find it cool to see this feature come out!

I host my own Lemmy instance and have a user account on it that I use everywhere (I don't host local communities, I just use it as a home for my Lemmy user account). I needed to re-home my Lemmy server, and though it's a docker installation, copying the /var/lib/docker/volumes/lemmy_* directories to the new installation didn't work. So I created a new Lemmy server.

How can I move my old account to the new server, so I can keep all my subscriptions and post/comment history?

always wondered this, but kept forgetting to post it

eg users would be on @[email protected] and a community would be on @[email protected] or something like that

then it would still follow the AP spec but still allow for identical identifiers (like a user account being @[email protected] and a community also being [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]))

Did I miss something? The site is pretty much broken, I can't post, and I can't view my profile, etc. I guess the site was shutdown but can't find any info

This is just to followup from my prior post on latencies increasing with increasing uptime (see here).

There was a recent update to lemmy.ml (to 0.19.4-rc.2) ... and everything is so much snappier. AFAICT, there isn't any obvious reason for this in the update itself(?) ... so it'd be a good bet that there's some memory leak or something that slows down some of the actions over time.

Also ... interesting update ... I didn't pick up that there'd be some web-UI additions and they seem nice!

Just a general observation I've made in my time on lemmy.ml, which I figure is attributable to lemmy the software, that may or may not be useful.

I'm talking about writing comments to posts (or replies to other comments, not sure if I've seen a difference).

And, just anecdotally, it seems that the longer the instance has been up without a restart or update (AFAICT of course), the longer the time between me clicking the Reply button and the time that the request is completed.

Usually, the first sign in my experience that the instance has been restarted is that this latency speeds right up to being almost instantaneous.

Anyone else notice the same or on other instances? It might be a clue to performance issues??

EDIT: applies to posts too (including this one incidentally)

I saw that the community i moderate is available on blahaj.zone, and it has pulled some old comments, but new ones did not federate. There is also an old stickied post still stickied.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/[email protected]

I assume somone from that instance had the c subscribed at some point, but then unsubscribed, so new comments and actions did not federate. If now somebody on that instance would subscribe again - will the obsolete sticky post just stay there forever? Because i am not sending the mod activity again to unsticky it?

Sometimes you post on Lemmy and it gets a level of traction that you were unprepared for. Right now, that just ends up filling your inbox. It would be nice if we could mute posts and then no responses would be sent to the inbox and everyone else can continue their discussions.

It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.

Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.

Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):

• I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
• A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
• This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
• Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
• Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.

---

Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).

As far as Lemmy design decisions go:

• Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
  • How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
  • You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
• Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
  • To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.

I'm really confused here. I was kind of freaking out for 10 minutes because all the posts on my Lemmy account on the lemm.ee instance from the last 7 months completely vanished out of thin air on my profile.

Than I loaded my profile page (this account) on my new account which I just created on lemmy.ml, and the posts all appear to still be there. So I'm confused, why is it that others can see my posts, but I cannot? If you're reading this, can you check my profile and see if the posts appear for me please? The last post should be 5 days ago.

There's only two things I can think of that might have bugged Lemmy out:

1. I was playing around in the settings earlier, and clicked the "Bot Account" checkbox; but I can't see how this would glitch anything, because I didn't click "Save".
2. The profile I'm posting this on is on lemm.ee. My newly created profile is on lemmy.ml and has the exact same username (DreitonLullaby) as this one; but I'm not sure how this would cause issues, because they are on two completely separate instances.

That's all I can think of. Is this a known bug? How can I fix this?

Now anyone can be made mod/admin without their consent . A yes or no option would be much appreciated so someone can't abuse it and make innocent people mod/admin of troubling instances or communities .

If you write a plugin, let me know how it goes!

Link to PR

In this case, it's one specific channel: https://diode.zone/c/andybalaam_lectures/videos?s=1. That is, [email protected]. It's run by @[email protected] / @[email protected]

AFAICT, federation hasn't been working from this channel to lemmy for ~3 months, for all the instances I checked (perhaps a particular lemmy version broke things?).

EG:

• the view on lemmy.ml
• on lemm.ee
• on programming.dev
• and on endlesstalk.org

By comparison:

• mastodon.social is up-to-date: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]
• And on hachyderm.io, following the user (rather than the channel) is also up-to-date: https://hachyderm.io/deck/@[email protected]

I'm not following anything else on peertube so I don't know how common this is (and I couldn't find anything on the GitHub issues), but different behaviour on mastodon and lemmy would superficially indicate that it's a lemmy problem, which would be a shame given that lemmy is much better for consuming peertube.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/15109471

This is a feature that as far as i know lemmy does not have, so it might be worth it to checkout and support piefed, it will probably be useful if there are certain topics that are really relevant to you and you want to develop in depth knowledge of.

Could this be implemented in Lemmy as well?

I have wanted this feature for some time now, and it seems like there is decent user interest:

• https://lemmy.world/post/4010300
• https://sh.itjust.works/post/8431810

Hi. So when I'm watching a tv show or movie, and it hits me in the feels, I will think something like "Oh, this movie is wholesome, or this tv show is wholesome" Even if it has swearing in it, as long as the message is a good one. I've been on Lemmy now a couple days, and I rate lemmy super-duper wholesome. Maybe it was the question/thread I asked, but the responses I got were very nice. Lots of people love to cuddle dogs as self-care and by golly, that's just as wholesome as it gets.

If it is not possible, I strongly suggest making it possible. Top in my experience has been more useful than hot and it's annoying to have to click on it for every post

User count has plateaued at about 420K

Active user count rose significantly between 2/24 37K to 3/24 51K

Hopefully users who signed up last year are coming back to use their accounts.

Maybe because they're tired of ads on reddit?

Should we put together a collection and and buy an ad campaign on Reddit?

I can see it now:

"Ads suck. We're ad-free forever. Join Lemmy."

and

"He'll never get us. Join Lemmy." or "Don't let him get you. Join Lemmy"

Hello,

I think it would be possible to improve the user experience of the language selection box.

Now:

Suggestion:

Everyone knows what they want to improve in their software. However, I am opening this post to raise awareness on this issue. It’s just a humble request.

As you know, large video subreddits contribute greatly to Reddit reaching a large user base. For example, when you open the homepage, you can see many subreddits such as r/interestingasfuck, r/funny, r/yesyesyesyesno, r/unexpected etc.

Lemmy is Reddit's alternative for text posts, but unfortunately not for videos at the moment. To fill this gap, I have opened the [email protected] community and shared a few posts. But these videos are inconsistent between applications and UI’s.

For example;

• Voyager can open videos inline without any problems.
• Mlem showing it as URL and opens the browser instead of playing.
• Lemmy default UI is worst. It doesn’t even show the link. You have to click it’s title to see the video but it’s visually not a link. (looks like this one only occurs on mobile)
• Alexandrite shows as a link.

Yes, video hosting is expensive. However, before solutions such as torrents and IPFS, we must ensure that direct videos work smoothly. This is my $0.02 opinion.

[email protected]

Technically it's not new, but practically speaking it's had 2 posts ever, with the last being 8 months ago.

You may also know it as "creative coding" or the like, but it's not limited to coding.

Has anyone else encountered ad bots in their signup applications?

Is there any plan or timeline to support in-line >!spoiler!< text?

I know a few apps have implemented this already, but it would be nice to have it on the entire platform.

The current spoiler is markdown is

clunky, difficult to remember, and not as flexible as in-line spoiler text.