announcements

We ran into some unexpected issues upgrading the instance to the latest Lemmy version, and troubleshooting was starting to take too long and extend past the previously given maintenance window. As such, we decided to restore from backup and attempt the upgrade again another day, next time with a larger maintenance window.

Everything should be back as it was before the downtime. The next maintenance will be announced soon.

Thanks for your patience!

We'll be taking the instance down for maintenance at 2PM UTC on Saturday 29 June. Use this to convert to your local time.

The instance will be upgraded to Lemmy 0.19.5, which requires upgrading several other services Lemmy relies on.

The maintenance window will be 3 hours

Not entirely sure what happened, but a routine backend upgrade from Lemmy 0.19.1 to 0.19.2 is causing issues with the past 3ish weeks of activity. The linked bug report has a bit more detail.

I'm going to try to work with the devs to figure out exactly what happened and do my best to recover that activity.

The storage backend for the instance has been upgraded, which means the instance should be faster by quite a bit. It also enables a few new data resiliency features, which is pretty cool. Hopefully we don't need them, but better safe than sorry!

Please report any issues on this post or a new post in [email protected].

Thanks for your patience as we work to improve your Lemmy experience.

We'll be taking the instance down for maintenance at 6PM UTC on Friday, 22 Dec. Use this to convert to your local time.

This maintenance is due to a much-needed storage upgrade, which will hopefully speed up the instance quite a bit. The maintenance window will be 3 hours to account for full system backup and restore, but I'm hoping we'll be done quicker than that.

We are now running Lemmy 0.19! There were a lot of cool changes in this release, definitely check out the release notes if you're interested in the specifics.

The important ones for users are:

1. Improved Post Ranking - Scaled sort! This is similar to Reddit's Hot sort, that is, ranking is based on the proportion of votes to active users, not just votes. This will greatly improve visibility for small communities, which is great!

2. Instance Blocking for Users - Users can now block entire instances themselves. If there's an instance you personally dislike but doesn't technically break our instance rules, you're now free to block it yourself.

3. Two Factor Rework - Enabling 2FA is now a two-step process, so it's harder to lock yourself out.

There may be breakage depending on what Lemmy client you use, so be sure your client supports the breaking changes in 0.19.

In the interest of transparency, we're announcing the implementation of defed list synchronization from Fediseer.

Fediseer is a community of fediverse instances that work together to crowdsource classification of both safe and harmful fediverse instances. This instance has just recently been "guaranteed", which means a member of the Fediseer community has sponsored us to join them. You can see details of our Fediseer presence here.

This enables a couple of things.

• This instance's admins can now guarantee, endorse, or censure other instances.
• We can implement block list synchronization with our endorsed instances.
• Block list synchronization can be filtered by tags.

Given this instance's stance towards censorship, we've been hesitant to implement block list synchronization, as we don't want to block an instance prematurely. However, given the recent influx of loli / pedo content creeping in, we feel it's in the best interest of this instance to at least synchronize blocking by loli and pedo tags.

So going forward, we will sync block lists with our endorsed instances' block lists filtered by loli and pedo tags. We'll also include spam tags, since there's been an influx of that, too.

As always, comments and questions welcome.

We'll be taking the server down for general maintenance at 5PM UTC on Monday, 23 Oct. Shouldn't last more than an hour.

Use this to convert to your local time.

Hey All,

First point of business, we're defederating from burggit.moe effectively immediately. I'm currently purging all burggit.moe communities, but if I miss one, please report it. The reason is closely tied to the second point of business.

Second point of business, I never thought we'd have to do this, but we've added a 6th rule: No loli / pedo shit. Pretty self-explanatory and straightforward. We don't care if it's "technically" legal, we're not hosting it. I don't even know if it's actually legal where the server is physically located, and I'm not putting that in my search history.

Again, we're staunchly against almost all types of censorship, but if that's the kind of material you're after, we have to ask you to look for it on another instance.

We are now hosting Photon at https://photon.frozeninferno.xyz! I've personally used a few different alternative front ends for Lemmy, but this is the first one I liked enough to host myself. Please feel free to leave any feedback here, and enjoy!

P.S. If you don't like Photon, the default Lemmy UI is still available at https://lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz as always. :)

P.P.S. If you want a wider interface (for desktop, for example), go into settings in the top right and disable Limit Layout Width.

I received a user report of (text) pedophilia on a post from rqd2.net. I considered banning the user, but after further investigation, much of that entire instance is dedicated to similar content. As such, I've decided to defederate from the instance.

As much as I dislike censorship and want users to be able to decide for themselves what they do or don't see, I don't feel comfortable hosting or providing access to content like that.

Edit: I'm also in the process of purging all rqd2.net communities from this instance. If I miss one, please report it.

Fixing the image database has started causing increased disk usage, so I'm scheduling some downtime to move the database to a larger storage device.

The downtime should be no longer than 30 minutes.

Here is the specific time converted for your local time zone (if you have browser location services enabled.

Sorry, everyone, but I had the image database misconfigured, and it wasn't properly retrieving thumbnails and some other image content. This issue has now been resolved, I believe, but if you notice any other oddities around images and pictures, feel free to respond here.

Lemmy services will be restarted every day at 4am CDT (9am UTC)

This has been implemented for a while now, but I never made an announcement. I noticed a few weeks ago that Lemmy seems to have federation issues when left running for longer than a few days, so I figured a quick daily restart would be the solution, and it's been working so far.

There will be a lot of new communities added to the "All" feed by this tool, some maybe NSFW.

I've been mulling it over for a while, but I've decided to sign the FediPact^1^, pledging defederation for any and all Meta-owned ActivityPub instances (Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon, Threads, etc.).

There may be some real value in exposing such a large audience to the fediverse, but I believe the risks outweigh any potential benefits. Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) is a strategy that companies use to stifle competition and innovation, and I don't want to support Meta in any hostile takeover they may be imagining for the ActivityPub protocol.

Also, the teardown of the leaked Android version of Threads shows that Meta is planning on federating political ads^2^. So yeah, you're welcome.

^1^The FediPact can be found here.

^2^https://tech.lgbt/@[email protected]/110647828827465600

Alt-right instance with intentions on infiltrating other big instances. Falls under Rule 2.

Hello, welcome to my Lemmy instance! Feel free to take a look around.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a federated link aggregation platform. You're familiar with the "link aggregation" part, I'm sure (think Reddit), but probably not so much with the "federated" part.

A federated platform is one in which individuals and/or communities create their own instance of the platform and share content between them. Think about it like two cities existing independently, but trading goods and services. lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz is an independent instance, as is lemmy.ml, but they can communicate with each other and share content.

Each Lemmy instance will host and make visible locally any content that has been either created locally or federated by a user. This means you'll see any communities (think subreddits) created locally, as well as any communities from other instances that a user of your instance has joined.

For example, I have joined [email protected], which means that community is visible here. And even though it's not hosted here, you can interact with it here just as if it was.

Now, just because I have joined that community, and it's visible here does not mean you have joined that community. If you create a user, the community I subbed to will not show up in your "subscribed" list unless you also join it. It will just show up in the "all" list and be easily accessible.

So if everything is federated, where should I make an account? What even is an account?

A Lemmy account represents your presence on that Lemmy instance and any federated content on other instances that you interact with. It's entirely possible to have multiple Lemmy accounts on multiple instances, and that's not an uncommon way for people to split their interests and interactions.

So you can make an account on a smaller instance like this and go find content via federation. Or you can make an account on a more popular instance to make content discovery a little easier. Either choice is perfectly valid.

Some instances have open registration, some (like this one) require admin approval, and some are currently closed to new users.

Your account is identified similar to smashing a Twitter handle and an email address together. For example, my account is identified as @[email protected]. Similarly, if I made an account with the "frozen" username at lemmy.ml, it would be identified as @[email protected].

Joining other instances' communities

In order to subscribe to other instances' communities, you follow a simple, though not exactly intuitive, process. First, visit the community you wish to join, for example https://lemmy.ml/c/memes. Select and copy the entire URL. Next, open the search functionality on this instance (using the magnifying glass in the top right), and paste the URL in the search box. Then click the top drop down and make sure it says "All" (you may need to select something else and then re-select "All"). Finally, click the community name (not any posts or comments, just the community name, for example, [email protected]), then click "Join" in the sidebar on the right.

Congratulations, you have now federated that community with this instance! The only caveat about federated content vs. local content is that federation only obtains new content that's been created since it was federated. In order to see historical content for a federated community, you must manually visit the community on its original instance.

Finding other instances and communities

The easiest way to find communities to join at the moment is to visit the biggest instances (lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, and beehaw.org), click Communities at the top, and browse that instance's local communities. There are also a lot of resources to find active and popular instances and communities:

• https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances - A list of instances in an easy-to-read table.
• https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ - An interactive map of all federated Lemmy instances.
• https://browse.feddit.de/ - A search engine specifically for finding Lemmy instances and communities.
• https://lemmyverse.net/ - Another search engine for finding Lemmy instances and communities.

Lemmyverse is very helpful in subbing to new communities. You can search for the instance on which you have an account, set that as your home instance, then go search for communities on all instances. When you open one, it will automatically open the community through your home instance, so you can immediately subscribe.

So, to sum up:

• Lemmy instance - an independent website hosting its own Lemmy platform (like an entire Reddit website)
• Community - subreddit
• Federation - sharing content between instances

And I think that wraps it up. Once again, welcome! Enjoy your time here, and feel free to contact me directly with any questions. And make sure to subscribe to this announcements community! I won't spam your feed, I promise. :)