Lemmy

In my profile it says my cake day is today (June 13), but it was displaying a cake icon on my comments all day yesterday (June 12).

The icon was a black and white outline so I thought maybe it was showing it the day before on purpose so other people would see ahead of time, and that it would turn colorful on the actual day. But then midnight hit and it disappeared, so it must be a bug instead.

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)

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!

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/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world

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?

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?

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

Link to PR

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.

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"

!generative@lemmy.ml

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.

If a comment or post gets reported, I can think of a number of different groups who might see that report:

• The moderators of the community in which it was posted.
• The admins of the instance hosting the community (call it instance X).
• The admins of the reporter's instance (call it Y).
• The admins of the poster's instance (call it Z).

Do all of these see the report? Only some subset? Some other group I'm not thinking of?

And if it is all/multiple of these, how does the actioning work? If the report's admin removes a post, does that mean nobody from instance Y can see it, but everyone else still can, or does it remove it more widely? Same for Z's admins and Z users. If X admins remove it, I presume that means nobody at all will see it, is this correct? And would a mod approving it means that admins of various instances will then not see the report, or does it stay in their queue separately?

Is there a setting page on the lemmy instance where I can download all my data?

This tab works like Subscribed only in reverse; it only shows stuff from comms you're not subscribed to. Perfect for finding new content to subscribe to without needing to sift through All.

Kind of like how you can do [in-line links](to link people to a website), allow the user to use the same syntax to create contextual information that appears when the [user mouses over](Similar to alt-text on an image). This way users who know the context won't have to slog through a tedious wall of text while those who don't can optionally bring themselves up to speed. For clarity sake in-line context will be a different color to a link, and those on mobile (or desktop) can click it to expand out the contained text as if it was part of the original comment.

EDIT: it might be a good idea to potentially use different syntax so that you can link websites within in-line context.

I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss how we feel about this topic and brainstorm ways to discourage unwanted use of the content we post.

I’ve seen some users add a license to the end of each of their comments. One idea might be this: Add a feature to Lemmy where each user can choose a content license that applies to everything they post. For example, one user might choose to no rights for their content (like CC0) because they don’t care how their data is used. Another user might not want companies profiting off their posts, so they’d choose a more restrictive license.

I’m eager to here everyone’s thoughts on the whole topic, so to kick things off:

1. Do you care how your public data and posted content is used? Why or why not?
2. What do you think of choosing a content license for your Lemmy account? Does this contradict the FOSS model?
3. Should Lemmy have features to protect user data/content in this way, or should that be left up to the user to figure out on their own?

Data is becoming an increasingly valuable commodity in the digital world. Hopefully these big-picture conversations can help us see what we value as a community and be more prepared for the future.

From https://fediverse.observer/stats

Which seems to not at all come close to representing what you might actually see on Lemmy, not that Lemmy is tiny either.

Has there been any attempt to measure the total active Lemmy userbase? This would depend on the definition of Active but any working definition would be more useful than counting account creation. Something like "posted at least once this quarter".

Hey I just joined Feddit it would be nice to meet someone and that’s all I got to say you can come to talk to me if you want

@BEND@kbin.social

byee

And also how do you make a account on Lemmy.ml I try and application never get approved

We seem to be getting attacked. Different accounts from different instances are posting to random places on various instances in short succession.

Post stuff about TikTok

Do you think it works okay, at least so far as local/federated communities go? What are some adjustments you might like to see to it?

Personally, I still find the dropdown/search combination somewhat unintuitive and at times it can feel clunky, although it has definitely improved. I sort of think a regular search bar to filter through communities/posters might be better, with a separate dropdown beneath or next to the bar, so one knows one can directly search by community/username, but I can see why it was done the way it was to a degree.