Everything should be good to go. Report any issues!

Everything should be good to go. Report any issues!

Overnight you may experiences errors or downtime as there’s three different things receiving an upgrade. I’ll shoot to start after midnight EST.

Feel free to join the telegram or matrix server in case there’s any major issues that need to be communicated.

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_modewhich provides a way to proxy external image linksthrough 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_hiddenfield 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 historyand 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, after consenting.

Mods and admins can now comment in locked posts.

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

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, Discourseand 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 languageand 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

0.19.5 has also just dropped

This is a smaller bugfix release, with the following changes:

Lemmy

• Don’t change encoding style in clean_url_params.
• Fix for federation last_successful_id.
• Fixing featured_local trigger.
• Fix postres TLS connection.

Lemmy-UI

• Fix for fetch page title.
• Fix create post focus resets.
• Make media uploads viewable only on your own profile.
• Fixing an auto-download bug.
• Regenerating lemmy-ui themes.

You might witness momentarily downtime overnight. I’ll be migrating to a slightly more powerful server as I’ve noticed some performance issues, especially on Sundays.

Edit: Completed without much of a hitch. Let me know if you experience any issues.

I've decided to take the instance in a bit of a different route and make it a hub for all things comedy. Initially I was going to go all in on porn, but lemmynsfw and pornlemmy pretty much had that covered. The freaky stuff will still stay as well. So whether you're using this because of the quirky instance name or just as your nsfw alt, you're still welcome.

I've opened up a telegram channel and a matrix group for off site chats in case there's issues here or for just general chatter amongst the users on here.

Off Site Comms:

• Matrix
• Telegram

With that said you'll start seeing more content in the local feed based around some of my favorite comedians. If you have ideas or would like to help moderate some things, send me a message here or on any of the off site options.

If you'd like to donate to server costs, liberapay is the best option right now. I can accept most of anything though if you'd rather donate else where:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10890295

Lemmy Release v0.19.3 - A Few Bugfixes

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

• Fixed lemmy-ui error page bug by @Sleepless in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2302
• Fix bug with Mastodon undo follow activities by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4364
• Count chars, not bytes for max title length (fixes #4366) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4367
• Mark instance as alive after successful activity send (fixes #4039) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4377
• Dont allow caching captcha response by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4381
• Revert "Dont ignore errors during login (fixes #4319) (#4321)" by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4380
• Removing group from woodpecker, as its deprecated. by @dessalines in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4387
• Add secondary sort by published date for post view (fixes #4383) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4384

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.

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.

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.

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

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10364367

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

• Outgoing federation bug fixes.
• Lemmy can now receive reports sent from Mastodon and Kbin.
• Added the ability for admins to view votes, to prevent downvote trolling. Demo. #4088
• Various bug fixes and minor enhancements.

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm wanting to setup a group off site for communication about the site and just for general chatter amongst our users. Follow the link and submit which app you'd prefer to use. If you choose other, please reply with a comment here on what you'd prefer.

Matrix is decentralized and fits in with the theme of lemmy. Telegram is super lightweight with a lot general features/bots that I'm more familiar with. Discord I use as well but I feel to be the more bloated of them all. The survey is set to go until the end of January.

Major Changes

0.19.0 has a critical bug where sending outgoing activities can stop working. The bug is fixed in this version. It also fixes the “hide read posts” user setting, fixes a problem with invalid comment paths, and another fix for private message reports.

Report any issues.

I’ve deployed 0.19 and everything seems to be in working order. Report any issues you may come across.

Below is a break down of some of the new additions. If you used 2FA on your account, you will need to re-set it up.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9347983

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 is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. 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 changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer <jwt>. The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

• Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

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

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

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.

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.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.###

There’s been various post/comment floods from user accounts on lemmy.blahaj.zone. Thanks to those that have reported them. I think most have been taken care of but please report anymore you may come across.

General update, I've deployed 0.18.4 of lemmy. Everything seems to be fine. Report any problems if you come across any.

Changes for fellow nerds:

Lemmy
Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don’t have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)

Lemmy-UI
Mark post as read when clicking “Expand here” on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
Update translation submodule (#2023)
Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)

In other news I've discovered Photon and it's a pretty sweet front end for lemmy. Just use your login details and plugin your instance. Photon Community for updates on it's development and to report bugs/make requests.

There's a decent amount of you using the instance now so just thought I'd throw out some information. You're free to create a community here. Ideally NSFW themed, but even mild stuff is welcome. The more posters and less lurkers the better this whole fediverse can be.

Media Posting

Currently there's a 10MB limit for a post size on this instance. If you think this is too small, please let me know and I'll rethink that size. I highly recommend hosting your images elsewhere and if you do have to host them here, run them through Squoosh to drastically lower the size and keep the quality while doing it. Catbox is a great image host that allows NSFW content and also allows up to 200MB! On top of all that it allows direct linking without an ad riddled page. If you know of any other good image hosts, please let me know.

Donations

• Buy Me A Peach
• Patreon
• Bitcoin 39mDG2TrP8gtavUHz9rCxp1L6yrv65twv9
• Ethereum 0x31660F72DDaF949F5253bb85c3c3F360F1929141
• Litecoin MAkngUAPsWgYshdCvNmG6XtmmWF631EjFv

Use this thread for anything on your mind regarding this instance or for any suggestions that you may have.

Open registration for now! Rules in the sidebar of course. They'll develop differently as this instance grows I'm sure. I'd like to keep this mostly NSFW related but you're free to create whatever kind of community you'd like. Any question about anything... shoot me a message. Invite who ya can to grow some local content.