join-lemmy.org News

Lemmy Release v0.19.16

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.16

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. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to resolve this.

Changes

This release mitigates a potential security issue with the image endpoint. In short, an attacker can inject query parameters and make proxied requests to arbitrary URLs. See the security advisory for details.

Also there are fixes for the database connection pool. The pool size is now at least two, as a lower size can result in deadlocks. Additionally there are now connection timeouts added. If your server logs show pool timeout errors, you should increase database.pool_size in the Lemmy config.

Fix for image proxy filetypes by @dessalines in #6357
Enable DB connection timeout by @Nutomic in #6355
Use min database pool size of 2. by @dessalines in #6345

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five 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.

Lemmy Release v0.19.15 and Testing for 1.0

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.15 and Testing for 1.0

What is Lemmy?

Changes

We messed up the previous release and did not include the full list of changes. In fact there were a handful of other bug fixes, and notably a maximum page limit of 10 to prevent a DDoS attack. Some users were also hitting this limit, so with this version the limit is increased to 100. We apologize for these mistakes.

Here is the full changelog since 0.19.13:

Don't allow accessing page numbers greater than 10 by @dessalines #6017
Update deps based on cargo audit by @Nutomic in #6258
Increase page limit to 100 by @Nutomic in #6252
Ban federation for deleted users by @Nutomic in #6207
Federate mod actions on deleted users by @Nutomic in #6199
Allow admins to view deleted user profiles by @Nutomic in #6194
Adding creator and community indexes for post_aggregates. by @dessalines in #6025
Ignore apub person banners which cannot be parsed by @Nutomic in #6015u

Now for the good news, the development version of Lemmy 1.0 is available for testing on voyager.lemmy.ml with lots of new features. Registration is open, you're welcome to create an account. Feel free to post spam and try everything out. Here is only a short overview:

Multi-communities: Combine different communities together into a custom feed.
Post scheduling: Specify when your post should be published.
Keyword filter: Automatically hide posts about certain topics.
Private communities: Only followers can view the content, and need to be approved manually by mods. Other community visibilities are also available (unlisted, local only).
New notification system: Including notifications for mod actions, and subscribing to communities and posts to be notified about new comments.
OAuth: Login to Lemmy with existing account from another website. Use this link to signup with your Github account (the UI still needs to be improved).
Post Tags: Categorize posts within a community (UI part not implemented yet).
User vote totals: You can see the total number of upvotes and downvotes given to each user.
User notes: You can keep notes on other users.
Combined Feeds: View your saved, liked posts and comments together in a single list.
Comment Locking: Mods can now lock comments recursively.
GDPR style data exporting: You can now export your full posting history as a JSON file.
Plugins: Can be written in JS, Python, Rust, and any other language that targets Webassembly. The test server has a plugin for automatic language tagging of posts.
Cursor pagination: Don't lose your place in the feed when switching pages.
API v3 compat: Lemmy 1.0 can be used by existing apps with no changes (but most new features are only available via the new API v4).
More: Countless smaller features, bug fixes and improvements, too much to list here.

All the above mentioned features are already implemented and fully working, but may need some polishing. If you encounter any problems, please open an issue (backend, frontend). voyager.lemmy.ml is automatically updated to the latest development version every night, so that changes can immediately be tested.

Keep in mind that Lemmy 1.0 is still in alpha state. There may be breaking changes and critical bugs, so do not attempt to upgrade your own instances yet. We intend to publish the first beta version in January, along with API docs and upgrade instructions for test servers.

We hope that you are as excited about these new features as we are. With all this said, happy testing and Merry Christmas!

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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, donating and reporting 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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy Release v0.19.14

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.14

What is Lemmy?

Changes

Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.

The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy Release v0.19.13

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.13

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This version fixes a handful of bugs. Most importantly it prevents a background task from blocking the Lemmy server entirely. Edit marks on comments are now hidden if it was edited within 5 minutes of creation. Also the browser cache usage is significantly reduced. Additionally ARM builds are fixed by using the default memory allocator on that platform.

Backend

Fixing active counts slow queries. by @dessalines in #5907
Only use mimalloc on x86 and purge images in background task by @Nutomic in #5893
Add missing comment depth check by @Nutomic in #5842
Dont sanitize RSS content manually (fixes #5850) by @Nutomic in #5852
Reduce false positives in URL blocklist to reduce scunthorpe problem by @Nothing4You in #5807

Frontend

Don't show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes by @jfaustino #3197
Increase bio max length to 1000 chars by @nutomic #3249
Change link from element.io to matrix.org by @nutomic #3250
Remove all caches (fixes #3195) by @Nutomic in #3248
Fixed ordering for search results by @Nutomic in #3219
Add search field to community sidebar by @Nutomic in #3217
Add checkbox for title only search by @Nutomic in #3220

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy Release v0.19.12

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.12

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This release includes various minor improvements and bug fixes.

Backend

Fix Peertube federation by @flamingos-cant in #5652
Show NSFW content by default if content_warning exists by @xaegit in #5655
Register users in a transaction by @Nothing4You in #5608
Fix email notifications for denied applications by @Nutomic in #5641
Dont run scheduled tasks at startup by @Nutomic in #5732
Only use HTTP/1 for federation by @flamingos-cant in #5744
Update user count from local_user table instead of person table, and only count users with accepted application by @dullbananas in #5495
Decrement fail_count instead of reset to 0 by @Nutomic in #5737
Fix opentelemetry by @MrKaplan-lw in #5702
Fix post listing in nsfw communities by @Nutomic in #5698
Add missing post_read / hide / saved post_id indexes by @dessalines in #5689
Improve media deletion logic by @Nothing4You in #5677
Include published in VoteView order by for more consistent pagination by @MrKaplan-lw in #5676
Mark posts in NSFW communities as NSFW by @Nothing4You in #5646
Use version from git to indicate unreleased changes by @MrKaplan-lw in #5622

Frontend

Add Rblind theme by @travis-jeans in #3159
Remove browser cache by @SleeplessOne1917 in #3150
Show registration denial reason on login by @dessalines in #3175
Always escape HTML attributes in emoji autocomplete and custom emoji markdown renderer by @Nothing4You in #3169
Fix missing user badge for deleted users by @MrKaplan-lw in #3162
Add hungarian language by @dessalines in #3158
Fixing cache-control header. by @dessalines in #3148
Disable blur for NSFW images by default if content_warning exists by @xaegit in #3128
Add Vary: Cookie Header (fixes #3117) by @xaegit in #3119
Use alert-info for donation dialog by @dessalines in #3115
Optimize Dockerfile by @Nothing4You in #3090
Add support for using Lemmy UI with an external Lemmy instance by @SolninjaA in #3041
Only show View registration button to admins on profiles of local users by @Nothing4You in #3072

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy Release v0.19.11

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.11

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This release fixes a security vulnerability which allows an attacker to delete images uploaded by other users. You can read the details in the security advisory. Thanks to @Nothing4You for discovering and fixing it.

A new donation dialog is shown to users once per year, to help fund Lemmy development.

There are also various backports from the development branch. Importantly the "Private instance" setting can now be used with federation enabled. This way only logged-in users can browse posts and comments, which stops AI crawlers from overloading the server. Also moderators can now view votes in the post/comment options.

Backend

Remove unnecessary pictrs purge calls (#5566)
Donation dialog (#5559)
Send out email after registration denied, email confirmed (#5553)
Change private instance setting to allow federation (#5530)
Proxy post.url if it is an image (#5545)
When creating community copy allowed languages from creator profile (#5490)
Include image alt text in post search (#5449)
Add config option to enable json logging (#5471, #5557)
Embed images in RSS feeds (#5488)
Fix federation of sticky posts (#5593)
Deleted user shouldnt break federation outbox (#5443, #5573)
Fix some image embeds by escaping alt text (#5506)
Properly federate distinguish comment (#5586)
Increase default registration rate limit to 10 per hour (#5600)
Remove debug ratelimit being used in production (#5551)

Frontend

Implement donation dialog (#3034)
Hide images in private message reports (#3053)
Dont render images in private message (#3043)
Changed checkbox text "Only moderators can post to this community" from legend to label on the Create Community page (#3046)
Trigger toast error on community request failure (#3045)
Add local link next to fedilink on posts (#3033)
Add banned badges to post and comment listings (#3030)
Linkify user @ mentions (#3029)
Adding ability for mods to view votes. (#3027)
Upvote, downvote, view source, and favorite icons become larger when pressed to improve visibility on grayscale screens (#2960)
Improve colour contrast of the mini-overlay in the top right corner of link or image post thumbnails (#2961)
Improve screenreader accessibility by adding a main element to more pages (issue #2891) (#2944)
Using input group for allowed and block instance buttons. (#2905)
Moving totp and delete account settings into their own cards. (#2907)
Hide NSFW field for create post form, for NSFW communities. (#2887)
Modify the logic for appending the URL after uploading an image, placing the image URL after the cursor. (#2804)

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 are able to develop Lemmy as an open source platform free of tracking and ads thanks to the generosity of our users. Once a year we ask you to consider donating to support our work. Financial security allows us to continue maintaining and improving the platform. If you’d like to make a one-time or recurring donation simply use the links below. Thank you for using Lemmy.

Nutomic and Dessalines, Lemmy Developers

Lemmy Release v0.19.10 and Developer AMA

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.19.10 and Developer AMA

What is Lemmy?

Developer AMA

Next week we are going to hold an "Ask me Anything" where users can ask the Lemmy developers all sorts of questions. They will be answered by @dessalines and @nutomic who have been working on Lemmy since the beginning in 2019. Other maintainers may also chime in. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

The AMA thread will be opened next Tuesday, March 25 in !announcements@lemmy.ml. We will start responding one day later. Until then you can let other people know about the AMA, think of good questions and read our previous AMAs:

Changes

Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
Also remove private messages when banning user with "remove content" (goodbye Nicole) #5414
Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can't see most posts #5485
Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009
Optimize migrations which were included in 0.19.6 #5301

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy v0.19.9 Release

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.9 Release

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This version fixes a potential security problem, by preventing Lemmy from accessing localhost URLs. There is also a fix for a crash during markdown parsing. Lemmy now uses mimalloc instead of the system allocator (usually glibc), which should improve performance and prevent unlimited memory growth over time.

Lemmy

Lemmy-UI

Enforce required validation on signup answers (@anhcuky)
copy thumbnail URL during crossposting (@anhcuky)
Adding a bottom-margin to spoiler details tag.
Fixing login password limits.
Adding zh-CN as default for zh lang.
Updated translations

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Breaking Changes in Lemmy 1.0

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Breaking Changes in Lemmy 1.0

The major breaking changes for version 1.0 are already implemented. However it will still take a lot of work to implement the new features in lemmy-ui, and publish the final release. So this is a good time for developers of Lemmy clients to start adapting the new API, and suggest changes before it gets finalized.

If you use any apps, frontends or bots for Lemmy, please help us out by notifying the developers about this post.

With the new version there is all new documentation based on OpenAPI, thanks to @dessalines and @MV-GH. You can also test the new API on voyager.lemmy.ml, and with Lemmy version 1.0.0-alpha.0. Note that this server still uses lemmy-ui 0.19.8 with API v3, because lemmy-ui is not updated for the new backend version yet.

Unfortunately there is no good way to see all the API changes between 0.19 and 1.0, but you can try viewing the diff in lemmy-js-client, or see the pull requests listed below.

If you have any questions about these changes, feel free to post in !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml or in the Development Chat on Matrix. If you have suggestions for breaking API changes before the new version is finalized, open an issue.

Here are the major API changes in detail. As this is an alpha version there may be further breaking changes before the final release, but nothing major.

Rename account endpoints

Various endpoints have been renamed, especially those under /api/v3/user have been moved to /api/v4/account/auth. These changes are fully compatible as the endpoints can still be called under /api/v3.

/api/v3/user/register to /api/v4/account/auth/register
/api/v3/user/login to /api/v4/account/auth/login
/api/v3/user/logout to /api/v4/account/auth/logout
...
/api/v4/site doesn't have my_user anymore, this is now available at GET /api/v4/account

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5216

Combined endpoints

There are various places in the UI where different types of data are shown together, for example posts and comments in the user profile. Until 0.19 these were queried separately, to display the (last 20 posts) and (last 20 comments). For 1.0 Dessalines implemented combined queries, so that the new endpoint /api/v4/person/content returns the last 20 (posts and comments). See the issue and linked pull requests for more details.

The combined endpoints are:

Note that the endpoints for modlog, report list and search also return combined data in API v3 on Lemmy 0.19, because making them backwards compatible would require an unreasonable amount of work.

Image endpoints

Uploading or deleting avatars, icons and banners is done through separate endpoints now. With this change it is possible to disable image uploads, while still allowing changes to avatars etc.

The endpoints for image upload and proxying have been moved to GET /api/v4/image/{filename} and GET /api/v4/image/proxy respectively.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5260

Other Breaking Changes

This list is likely incomplete.

New Features (not breaking)

This list is definitely incomplete, and more features will be added before the final release.

New parameters for GET /api/v4/search
New parameters for GET /api/v4/post/list
Adding a get_random_community endpoint. - GET /api/v4/community/random
Adding a can_mod field to CommentView, PostView, and CommunityView. (not yet merged)
Private communities
SSO support
Request idempodency support
Add support for donation dialog
Return correct status code for rate limit error
Add media filter setting
Post scheduling
Slim comment views - GET /api/v4/comment/list/slim

Lemmy v0.19.8 Release

Thu, 12 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.8 Release

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This release includes a few minor fixes and improvements. Merry Christmas Everyone!

Lemmy

Fix post thumbnails by properly determining file type
Provide health endpoint for pictrs at /pictrs/healthz
Allow bypassing image proxy for specific domains (can be configured via config value pictrs.proxy_bypass_domains, and i.imgur.net is bypassed by default)
API returns content of removed comments for admins

Lemmy-UI

Updated translations

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy v0.19.7 Release

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.7 Release

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This is a small bugfix release with the following:

Fixing cors origin wildcard. by @dessalines in #5194
Fetch community mods synchronously by @Nutomic in #5169
Move aggregates to replaceable_schema, fix error (fixes #5186) by @Nutomic in #5190

Full Changelog

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

Lemmy v0.19.6 Release

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.6 Release

What is Lemmy?

Changes

This release took a long time to complete due to a major performance problem which brought lemmy.ml to a crawl every time we tried to deploy the new version. It took a lot of testing (in production) to narrow it down to a single commit, and finally fix the problem.

The release itself contains numerous bug fixes and minor improvements:

Lemmy

Enhancements

Parallel federation sending by @phiresky in #4623
Reduce CPU usage for generating link previews by @phiresky in #4957
Switch from OpenSSL to rustls by @kwaa in #4901
Increase max post url length to 2000 characters by @dessalines in #4960
Increase max length of user bio to 1000 charactes by @dessalines #5014
Reduce maximum comment depth to 50 by @nutomic #5009
Resize post thumbnails by @nutomic #5107/files
Add category to RSS feeds by @nutomic #5030
Allow users to view their own removed/deleted communities by @dessalines in #4912
Add backend check to enforce hierarchy of admins and mods by @dessalines in #4860
Do pictrs transformations for proxied image urls by @dessalines in #4895
Enable more build optimizations by @nutomic in #5168
Calculate "controversial" ranking with exponent instead of multiply (just like Reddit) by @dullbananas in #4872
Automatically remove tracking parameters from URLs by @dessalines #5018
Relax timeout for sending activities by @Nothing4You in #4864

Bug Fixes

Fix admin notification for new user registration (fixes #4916) by @Nutomic in #4925
Allow community settings changes by remote mods @flamingo-cant-draw in #4937
Fix problem with connecting to Postgres with TLS @FenrirUnbound in #4910
Fix bug when commenting in local-only community by @dessalines in #4854 and @abdel-m in #4920
Fix scheduled task to delete users with denied applications by @Nothing4You in #4907

API

Return image dimensions and content type in API responses by @dessalines in #4704
Adding a show_read override to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4846
Add show_nsfw override filter to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4889
Require authentication for site metadata fetch endpoint by @dessalines in #4968
Add the ability to fetch a registration application by person_id by @dessalines in #4913
Order community posts by published data, not id by @dullbananas in #4859
Throw error when non-mod posts to mod-only comm or when URL is blocked by @flamingo-cant-draw in #4966
Add option to search exclusively by post title by Carlos-Cabello #5015

Database

Approve applications in transaction by @Nothing4You in #4970
Use trigger to generate apub URL in insert instead of update, and fix query planner options not being set when TLS is disabled by @dullbananas in #4797

Lemmy-UI

Fix full-size post images. by @dessalines in #2797
Fix modlog ID filtering. by @dessalines in #2795
Allow Arabic and Cyrillic characters when signing up or creating community by @SleeplessOne1917
UX - Swap "Select Language" and "Cancel/Preview/Reply" button locations around in commentsReverse order of buttons in Reply TextArea
Fix jump to content by @SleeplessOne1917
Fixing peertube and ordinary video embeds. by @dessalines in #2676
Changing sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax. by @dessalines in #2677
Remove show new post notifs setting. by @dessalines in #2675
Fix memory leak around emojis on server render by @makotech222 in #2674
Enable spellcheck for markdown text area by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2669
Pre release dep bump by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2661
Add ability to fill magnet link title on post creation. by @dessalines in #2654
Registration application view by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2651
Add torrent help by @dessalines in #2650
More moderation history by @dessalines in #2649
Fix tribute related bug by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2647
Remove min and max length from password input when using login form by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2643
Remove trending communities card from home. by @dessalines in #2639
Set data-bs-theme based on the presence of "dark" in theme name by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2638
Fixing modlog filtering to allow admins and mods to filter by mod. by @dessalines in #2629
Fix issue from logo bugfix by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2620
Make more post params cross-postable by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2621
Fix wonky comment action icon button alignment by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2622
Prevent broken logo from crashing site by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2619
Add rate limit info message. by @dessalines in #2563
Fix getQueryString by @matc-pub in #2558

New Contributors

@abdel-m made their first contribution in #4920
@johnspurlock made their first contribution in #4917
@FenrirUnbound made their first contribution in #4910
@kwaa made their first contribution in #4901
@Daniel15 made their first contribution in #4892

Full Changelog

Upgrade instructions

This upgrade could take as long as ~30 minutes for larger servers, due to needing to recalculate controversy ranks for all historical posts.

There are no breaking changes with this release.

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 shout out to @SleeplessOne1917, @phiresky, @dullbananas, @mv-gh, @Nothing4u, @asonix, @sunaurus, @flamingo-cant-draw, and @Freakazoid182 for their many code contributions and helpful insights.

Support development

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

New NLnet funding for Lemmy

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

New NLnet funding for Lemmy

The NLnet foundation has previously provided three funding rounds for Lemmy, which allowed Dessalines and Nutomic to work fulltime on the project. With this funding we were able to implement fundamental features such as federation, and to get Lemmy ready for production and to prepare for the huge migration of Reddit users.

Now we have good news, a new round of funding was approved for a total of € 50.000. For the first time there will be two additional developers receiving funding: Phiresky, who has made numerous contributions to federation and database code. And Sunaurus, admin of lemm.ee who contributed many bug fixes. They will help to implement new features faster and spread the workload.

By the way, if you want to see a particular feature implemented, we always welcome contributions via pull requests. Additionally we are available for paid work on specific features. You can send a mail to contact at join-lemmy.org, or message @nutomic:matrix.org to discuss the details.

Without further ado, here are the approved milestones and payment amounts:

Private communities (RFC link, 6000€)
Improvements for outgoing federation (3000€)
SQL paging and filtering for multiple types (6750€)
Plugin System and example Plugin (3000€)
Post scheduling (1500€)
Improve Linking Federated Posts (2250€)
Automatic Language Tagging (1500€)
Poll support (3500€)
Moderation Improvements (4500€)
- Include instance blocks in mod log (750€)
- Implement warnings, notify user when warned (2250€)
- Attach unresolved report counts to comment and post payloads (1500€)
Rework API Endpoints for API v4 (€ 6000)
- Separate endpoints for image upload (3000€)
- Move taglines and emojis into separate paged endpoint (1500)
- Reduce amount of redundant data returned (1500€)
Multi-communities (6000€)
Ease discovery of federated communities (3000€)
Post tags (RFC link, 4500€)

Lemmy v0.19.5 Release

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.5 Release

What is Lemmy?

Changes

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

Lemmy

Lemmy-UI

Full Changelog

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.

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

Lemmy v0.19.4 Release

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.4 Release

What is Lemmy?

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, 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, 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:

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

Upgrade instructions

We recommend upgrading to PostgreSQL 16 due to a known memory leak in PSQL 15. To use the new image proxy feature, pict-rs version 0.5+ is required.

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.

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

Lemmy v0.19.3 Release

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.3 Release

What is Lemmy?

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.

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

Lemmy v0.19.2 Release

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.2 Release

What is Lemmy?

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.

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

Lemmy v0.19.1 Release

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.1 Release

What is Lemmy?

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.

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.

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.

Lemmy v0.19.0 Release

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.19.0 Release

Written by @nutomic and @dessalines, 2023-12-15

What is Lemmy?

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.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

Changes

API

Our HTTP API docs are at https://join-lemmy.org/api/
- These are auto-generated directly from our rust type definitions, using ts-rs.
- A comparison from the last release

Config

You can see the current config options here.

New option cache_external_link_previews [1] [2]
New option cors_origin to permit cross-origin requests [1]
Default database connections increased from 5 to 95 [1]

Lemmy Server

Sort by post id in post view (#4270)
Debug random test failure (#4275)
Create comment in transaction. Fixes #3741 (#4265)
Making login case-insensitive. Fixes #4272 (#4273)
Revert "Minor CI improvements (#4266)" (#4271)
Optimizing sql format check. (#4268)
Minor CI improvements (#4266)
Adding a retry on a few fetches. (#4267)
Upgrading lemmy-js-client to 0.19.0 (#4260)
Quick fix for Peertube federation (fixes #4261) (#4264)
federate-less-noisy (#4263)
Correctly combine sorts in post view cursor-based pagination (#4247)
Reenable API tests that were accidentally skipped (#4259)
Second attempt to make command line options more consistent (#4249)
Upgrade pictrs to 0.5.0-rc.2, remove cargo unstable flags (#4258)
Add test for fixed deleted post filter (#4256)
Remove moderator_view field from PostQuery (#4255)
Fixing metadata endpoint. (#4257)
Update mod.rs (#4240)
See if different SQL query fixes performance regression (#4246)
Speed up GET /api/v3/site endpoint (#4245)
Dont use test.png image for api tests (#4254)
Upgrade dependencies (#4248)
Set explicit limit for getPosts/getComments in tests (#4250)
Add CI check for ignored files (#4252)
Show federated posts on user profile. Fixes #4228 (#4229)
Dont allow blocking local instance (fixes #4241) (#4242)
Make command line options consistent (#4243)
Add voters to active users (#4235)
Extend sitemap span (#4231)
Print version to log (#4226)
Revert debug auth (#4232)
Dont set duplicate context for activities (#4233)
Enable missing code for prometheus actix-web stats (#4230)
Some changes to help debug auth problems on lemmy.ml (#4220)
Fix cors_origin wildcard (fixes #4214) (#4221)
Only allow distinguishing own comments (fixes #4216) (#4222)
Removing cookie secure check. (#4213)
Remove httpOnly requirement. (#4212)
Registrations and Reports should sort by New when viewing unresolved / unread. (#4207)
Upgrade deps, fix issue with wrong diesel-async in Cargo.lock (#4211)
Fixing rust-analyzer suggestions on rss feeds. (#4210)
Fix:#4197: validate post title must be shorter than 200 letters (#4198)
Update diesel-async (#4203)
Fix entrypoint in Dockerfile (#4202)
fix: Cross-compilation to ARM64 (#4142)
Remove pictrs config section old_db (#4199)
Upgrade pictrs to 0.5.0-beta.2 (#4194)
Upgrading deps. (#4196)
Setting rank column defaults to a small number. Fixes #4178 (#4191)
Users can view their own posts after removal (fixes #4186) (#4192)
Add API tests for purge user and purge post (#4183)
Fix remote community posts appearing in local listing (fixes #4180) (#4181)
Prevent purged user getting refetched from home instance (fixes #3815) (#4189)
Removing yarn-error.log (#4185)
Adding creator_is_admin to PersonView, CommentView, and PostView. (#4165)
Fixing issue with mods not being able to view reports. Fixes #4172 (#4174)
Prevent random test failure (#4184)
Fix deleted posts so they can only be seen by creator (#4182)
Use rust 1.74.0 in CI and move clippy lints to Cargo.toml (#4170)
Fix banning of remote user (fixes #4169) (#4171)
Adding Selectable and diesel postgres backend check. (#4175)
Upgrade activitypub to 0.5.0-beta.5 (#4179)
Include instance blocks in settings export (#4173)
Fix following local communities stuck on pending (fixes #4160) (#4161)
Add upload_timeout to PictrsConfig (#4159)
Add api tests for image endpoints (#4150)
Use result instead of unwrap in apub tests (#4168)
Fix report count endpoint error (#4167)
Merge /site_inbox into /inbox, remove unique constraint for inboxes (#4138)
Fixing an issue with timezone migration. (#4153)
Removing show_new_post_notifs. (#4158)
Fix cors wildcard (ref #4095) (#4156)
Adding skip_serializing_none to federation state. (#4152)
Removing one other cache_remote_images. (#4151)
Rename cache_remote_images setting to cache_external_link_previews (ref #4035) (#4148)
Remove id column and use different primary key on some tables (#4093)
Make import and export settings endpoints reachable (#4143)
Dont send comment reply to user who has community blocked. Fixes #3684 (#4096)
Dont create auth cookie in backend (#4136)
Fixing the desktop image on the README. (#4135)
Only check auth secure on release mode. (#4127)
Only keep sent and received activities for 7 days (fixes #4113, fixes #4110) (#4131)
Add UI setting for collapsing bot comments. Fixes #3838 (#4098)
add federation queue state to get_federated_instances api (#4104)
Support signed fetch for federation (fixes #868) (#4125)
Also order reports by oldest first (ref #4123) (#4129)
Adding creator_is_moderator to CommentReplyView and PersonMentionView. (#4126)
Show oldest registration applications first (ref #4122) (#4123)
Change logout endpoint to return SuccessResponse (#4121)
Remove unused deps (#4111)
Fix hot_rank algorithm pushing downvoted content off the feed. (#4085)
Move usage of env::var to lemmy_utils, simplify db init (ref #4095) (#4108)
Add link to githubs new issue button for security advisories. Fixes #3734 (#4107)
Adding cors_origin to settings. Fixes #3665 (#4095)
Dont allow bots to vote. Fixes #3940 (#4100)
Resolve federated objects from other instances via redirect (fixes #3129) (#4073)
Include prometheus in default build, remove build feature (fixes #3558) (#4071)
Hide private messages from blocked users. (#4102)
Upgrading deps. (#4103)
Fix issue with sending private messages to yourself. Fixes #3912 (#4099)
Disable ansi coloring in logs. Fixes #3975 (#4101)
Hide public rss items for private instance. Fixes #3785 (#4097)
Fix bug when leaving admin team, setting accepted application as true… (#4090)
Dont serialize karma. #3393 (#4089)
Allow Arabic and Cyrillic usernames/community names (fixes #1764) (#4083)
Use starts_with for forbidden unicode (Fix #3888) (#4079)
Allow torrent magnet links as post urls. Fixes #3916 (#4092)
Fixing matrix id regex. Fixes #3431 (#4091)
Add creator_is_moderator to Comment and PostViews. Fixes #3347 (#4087)
Fixing problem with SaveUserSettings, when either the Person or Local… (#4077)
Adding /version route. Fixes #2914 (#4059)
Make sure my_vote is consistently missing if not voted. Fixes #3197 (#4075)
Return status 401 on logout with invalid auth (fixes #4081) (#4082)
Avoid using proxy for pictrs requests (fixes #3489) (#4072)
Hide deleted user accounts, add tests for PersonView (fixes #3811) (#4070)
Making mark post read fields optional. (#4055)
Adding ts-rs directives for login_token. (#4063)
Fix up convert more responses to SuccessResponse (#4066)
Convert more responses to SuccessResponse. Fixes #2860 (#4058)
Remove unused static (#4061)
Refactor rate limiter and improve rate limit bucket cleanup (#3937)
Handle invalid ban expires values (fixes #4045) (#4046)
List distinguished comments first (fixes #3843) (#4050)
Allow marking multiple posts as read in single api call (fixes #3963) (#4048)
Add validate_auth api endpoint (fixes #3702) (#4049)
Enable animated avatars setting (#4040)
Read community follower count from home instance (fixes #1440) (#4013)
Cleanup public api (#4047)
Remove empty API responses (#3993)
Ignore activities in remote communities without local followers (#4006)
Trying to fix export ci, try 1. (#4038)
Cleanup checks for community actions (fixes #2858, fixes #2868) (#4028)
Convert titles for posts from Mastodon to plaintext (fixes #3828) (#4033)
Moving to debian-based docker image. Fixes #3972 (#4004)
Fix legacy pagination for Subscribed feed (#4030)
Only sanitize strings when generating RSS feeds and emails (fixes #4003) (#4024)
Implement user data import/export (#3976)
Wipe bio when user is banned with remove content (fixes #4012) (#4032)
add keyboard navigation setting (#3569)
Add db table for login tokens which allows for invalidation (#3818)
Make input length checks consistent with HTML maxlength attribute (#4009)
Add comment to explain startup server (ref #4005) (#4022)
Specify password length limits in error (fixes #3284) (#4007)
Dont create :latest docker tag (fixes #3996) (#4016)
Return HTTP status 503 to all requests during startup (fixes #3780) (#4005)
Handle empty reason for registration application denial (fixes #3485) (#4008)
Mention max length for site name in config (fixes #3006) (#4010)
Change RELEASES.md to link to join-lemmy.org news (#3997)
Increase timeout for image upload to 30s (fixes #3920) (#3998)
Notify admin about registration application after email verification (fixes #3024) (#3995)
Increase default database connections (fixes #3394) (#3994)
Fix federation of admin actions (fixes #3980) (#3988)
Rework the way 2FA is enabled/disabled (fixes #3309) (#3959)
Forgot to add ts export to pagination cursor. (#3971)
Make local federated instances use comnpose file for build (#3968)
User can block instances (fixes #2397) (#3869)
Fixing GetPostsResponse serialization. (#3967)
Fix Posts List Performance + cursor-based pagination (#3872)
Fixing high CPU usage on federation worker recheck. Fixes #3958
Async scheduler (#3949)
Persistent, performant, reliable federation queue (#3605)
Add ts(skip) attributes to fix js client code generation (#3952)
Adding a scaled sort, to boost smaller communities. (#3907)
Include domain in errors (#3944)
Bump ts_rs version (#3947)
Replace ammonia lib with manual html escaping (fixes #3774) (#3938)
Add logging for pictrs uploads (#3927)
Change AddAdmin to use person_id instead of local_user_id (#3941)
Auto resolve reports trigger (#3871)
Get rid of remaining Perform/SendActivity traits (fixes #3670) (#3926)
Make use of variables less redundant and inconsistent in distinguish.rs (#3932)
Remove left joins and use only one call to select method in post_view.rs (#3865)
Adding a new config flag to disable pictrs caching for thumbnails (#3897)
Use Queryable instead of JoinView (#3917)
Add ARM64 Docker image support (#3810)
Adding a post_view mode. Fixes #3730 (#3731)
Implement remote follow (#3738)
update moderator view (#3820)
replace expect with ErrorUnauthorized (#3915)
Allow passing auth via header or cookie (#3725)
Make remove content optional during account deletion (fixes #1617) (#3817)
Sitemap - use UTC time (#3914)
Fix time zone handling (#3496)
Move admin flag from person to local_user (fixes #3060) (#3403)
Lowercase domain on db query filters (#3849) (#3873)
Sitemap (#3808)
fix: add client connect timeout to scheduled task (#3883)
Add person name to PersonIsBannedFromSite error (#3786) (#3855)
Replace Option(bool) with bool for PostQuery and CommentQuery (#3819) (#3857)
Update .woodpecker.yml use steps instead (#3858)
Fixing woodpecker env var. (#3854)
Adding 0.18.4 Release notes. (#3853)
Automatically resolve report when post/comment is removed (#3850)
Speedup CI (#3852)
Reorder woodpecker config to avoid ci failures (#3851)
Replace TypedBuilder with Default in update forms (#3814)
Reduce amount of columns selected (#3755)
Allow filtering posts and comments by whether they were liked/disliked - fixes #3401 (#3523)
Allow filtering PMs by sender (#3770)
Fix sanitize_html whitespaces (#3829)
Revert "Attempt to fix CI building wrong commits (#3830)"
Attempt to fix CI building wrong commits (#3830)
Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)
Remove unused db view options (#3787)
Remove form_id params (#3812)
Update QUESTION.yml, remove UI (#3807)
Fixing broken SQL migration formatting. (#3800)
Dont use sha hash for password reset token (fixes #3491) (#3795)
Rewrite remaining federation actions, get rid of PerformCrud trait (#3794)
Adding SQL format checking via pg_format / pgFormatter (#3740)
Do not hide read posts when it is a user profile view (#3791)
Only run slow CI checks for actual code changes (attempt 2) (#3759)
Remove follow community traits (#3737)
Default imprementations for read and delete in Crud trait (#3707)
Rewrite some federation actions to remove Perform/SendActivity (ref #3670) (#3758)
Enhanced testing of comments. Validate reply notifications, mentions (#3686)
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)
Revert "Only run slow CI checks for actual code changes (#3750)"
Update CODEOWNERS (#3748)
Delete migrations_testing folder (#3751)
Move entry from .rgignore to .gitignore (#3752)
Rewrite some API handlers to remove Perform trait (#3735)
Adding 0.18.3 Release notes. (#3753)
Only run slow CI checks for actual code changes (#3750)
Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
Use same table join code for both read and list functions (#3663)
remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
Change readme installation link (#3736)
Federation tests replication round1 - demonstrate absent replication of comment deletes (#3657)
Omit local instance from federated instances list (#3712)
add trigram index to search (#3719)
Sanitize html (#3708)
Add moderator view parameter to list posts (#3176)
Add controversial ranking (#3205)
Make resolve_object not require auth #3685 (#3716)
Skip fragile API tests (#3723)
UI Settings - Blur NSFW & Auto Expand (#3377)
Enable gzip for reqwest (#3696)
Dont authenticate user after successful password reset #3714 (#3715)
detailed error message for blocked domains (#3698) (#3701)
Bump version of dependency "webmention" (#3711)
prevent ordering by comment path without post filter (#3717)
Update Dockerfile to run process as non-privileged user. (#3709)
Change logic for determining comment default language (fixes #3451) (#3672)
disable rustfmt feature on rosetta-build (#3679)
Fix federation test errors with new lemmy-js-client (#3678)
Adding diesel migration check. Fixes #3676 (#3677)
Make sure comments are sorted by hot_rank, then score. (#3667)
Fix process shutdown (#3673)
Ignore errors when fetching community mods (fixes #3460) (#3674)
Upgrade activitypub library to 0.4.6 (fixes #3222) (#3675)
Denormalize community_id into post_aggregates for a 1000x speed-up when loading posts (#3653)
Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort. (#3618)
Handle displaying of deleted and removed posts/comments (fixes #2624) (#3286)
Use local_site.default_post_listing_type as the initial default listing type for new users (#3666)
Dont publish releases to crates.io (fixes #3272) (#3664)
Remove SendActivity and Perform traits, rely on channel (#3596)
Don't panic when scheduled tasks can't connect to database (#3634)
Add http cache for webfingers (#3317)
prepare-drone-federation-test.sh has some more echo output and note about the LEMMY_DATABASE_URL format (#3651)
Post remove delete federation outbound fix0 (#3613)
Add Japanese README (#3620)
Cache & Optimize Woodpecker CI (#3450)
Remove TypedBuilder from db_views and db_views_actor (#3637)
Optimize hot rank updates (#3617)
Split activity table into sent and received parts (fixes #3103) (#3583)
work around race condition on community fetch (#3414)
Make lemmy_api_common wasm-compatible (#3587)
Add dev profile to strip symbols and disable debug info (ref #3610) (#3611)
Check for dead federated instances (fixes #2221) (#3427)
Fix wrong SMTP port when TLS is being used (fixes #3574) (#3607)
Add workaround for #3102 until cross-compile work complete (#3472)
Updated Lemmy Matrix Support link (#3599)
Update RELEASES.md (#3593)
Add infinite scroll user option (#3572)
Use specific Rust nightly version for CI cargo fmt (fixes #3467) (#3577)
Make functions work with both connection and pool (#3420)
Shrink capacity in RateLimitStorage::remove_older_than (#3536)
Fix #3366: Wrap plain-text error responses from the API in JSON (#3559)
Fix #3501 - Fix aggregation counts for elements removed and deleted (#3543)
Only update site_aggregates for local site (#3516)
Error enum fixed (#3487)
Adding phiresky to codeowners. (#3576)
Upgrade all dependencies (#3526)
Use async email sender (#3554)
Update RELEASES.md (#3556)
Adding v0.18.1 and v0.18.0 release notes. (#3530)
Updating login.rs with generic incorrect_login response. (#3549)
Improve api response times by doing send_activity asynchronously (#3493)

Lemmy UI

Upgrading lemmy-js-client. (#2285)
Make sure banned toast has correct user. (#2281)
Fixing link targets reloading page. Fixes #2275 (#2276)
Moderation/content action overhaul (#2258)
Fixing communityToChoice. Fixes #2231 . Fixes #2232 . (#2271)
Only generate manifest if it isn't already in memory (#2272)
Adding a few promise.all concurrent fetches to FetchInitialData. #2234 (#2270)
Changing auth cookie name back to jwt. (#2269)
Added aspect ratio to the video (#2268)
Move lemmyClient generation into fetchInitialData functions. Fixes #2243 (#2260)
fix wrapped http client (#2267)
Fixing cross-fetch issues. (#2254)
Fixing comments auto-collapsing. Fixes #2252 (#2253)
Forgot to add yarn.lock.
Disable post voting buttons when logged out. Fixes #2248 (#2249)
Attempting to fix SSR. #2243 (#2247)
Fixing instance blocking. Fixes #2245 (#2246)
Fixing QR code CSP, try 2. Fixes #2241 (#2242)
Fix shutdown behaviour (#2239)
Multi-platform Dockerfile (#2235)
Update deps (#2237)
Upgrading deps. (#2233)
Fixing follow from subscribe page. Fixes #2215 (#2229)
Adding creator_is_admin and creator_is_mod, removing pointless functions (#2228)
Update bs theme when site theme is changed (#2226)
Settings Import/export (#2223)
Auto focus search input when navigating to search page (#2224)
Remove previous button for PaginatorCursor (#2221)
Fix back button from posts going back twice instead of once (#2220)
Fixing errors. Fixes #2216 (#2219)
Fixing QR code CSP. (#2218)
Upgrade for lemmy js client 0.19.0-alpha.16 (#2210)
Search page select fix (#2201)
Fixed markdown parsing error particularly with the spoiler tag. (#2200)
use improved notification system for all notification types (#2190)
Make 2FA input play nicer with phone keyboards (#2199)
Add code highlighting (#2195)
Updating for new v19 changes. (#2191)
Dont hide reply box on other actions. Fixes #1968 (#2189)
Add curl for basic healthcheck (#2186)
Tweak 2fa (#2179)
Add RTL/BIDI to post text (#1963)
Simplify favicon (#2176)
Adding cursor pagination. Fixes #2155 (#2173)
fix: Fix emoji picker custom emoji bug (#2175)
Fixing broken docker build due to missing rxjs. (#2174)
Dont push to :latest docker tag (#2171)
fix: Prevent login screen from redirecting to signup (#2170)
feat: Accomodate 2FA changes in UI
Adding scaled sort to UI. Fixes #2156 (#2169)
fix: Fix notifications (#2132)
Smart url parsing (#2141)
fix: Fix bug where old settings would linger on page until browser refresh (#2153)
fix: Fix bug where user could not block person from profile page (#2151)
Husky fix for production build. (#2150)
feat: Block instance (#2144)
Remote follow (#1875)
Remove auth from API request body params (#2140)
refetch inbox when marking a message as read (#2131)
allow limited markdown in spoiler summary (#2126)
Changed blocked instances to not be linked from instance page (#2121)
fix purge submit button in post-listing (#2128)
Increase cache-control max-age to 60s (#2124)
Don't hide the 'show source' button for anonymous users (#2127)
Disable "Next" button in Paginator when the next page is empty (#2114)
Add moderator view button (#1993)
Fix communities search bug (#2108)
Display more information why has the login failed (#2109)
Fix husky for yarn 2 . (#2110)
Report fix (#2089)
always show community name with instance for easy copy-pasting to friends (#2073)
Update spoiler icon to diamond shape. (#2102)
Ensure markdown links have the noopener and nofollow rel tags as well. (#2100)
Move allowed and blocked instance tables to the column right of linked instance table (#2071)
Woodpecker updates. (#2046)
Federate emoji sizing (#2063)
Moved title field to the top of post-form (#2039, #2059) (#2061)
Temp fix to modlog failing to render future dates (#2058)
Move banned users to a separate admin tab. (#2057)
Fixing webpack build. (#2042)
Frontend Settings - "Blur NSFW" and "Auto Expand" (#1640)
Add open links in new tab (#2032)
Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
Lemmy 2515 controversial posts and comments (#1727)
Update translation submodule (#2023)
Mark post as read when clicking "Expand here" on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)
Fixing comment report showing dot. (#1989)
Make sure comment score color matches your vote. (#1988)
Allow limited set of markdown in title rendering (#1977)
Allow selecting from all languages in person settings (fixes #1971) (#1985)
Separate final comment row + add classes (#1982)
Allow sorting on /communities (#1934)
Fix base.output (see #1911) (#1943)
Add show/hide button to password fields (#1861)
Fix start_url and scope (#1931)
Remove lodash.merge dependency (#1911)
Set person_id to myId in handleLeaveModTeam (#1929)
Remove invalid default option from language list (#1919)
Fix CSP in dev mode (#1918)
Add Toast Messages for Bad Logins (#1874)
Comment border tweak (#1820)
Add nonce-based CSP header (#1907)
Use the 'node' user instead of root when running. (#1894)
Add community name to featured post action in Modlog (#1891)
Use canonical URLs (#1883)
Add theme option for compact that respects browser default (#1870)
Update post listing to prefer local image when available (#1858)
Disallow /modlog since it is not relevant for bots (#1850)
Fix XSS vuln (#1897)
User inferno prompt instead of handrolled one (#1867)
Darkly tweak (#1811)
Reopen PR 1420 Feature add three six and nine months options frontend (#1689)
Update lemmy-js-client and lemmy-translations (#1848)

Join-Lemmy Redesign and Funding Drive

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Join-Lemmy Redesign and Funding Drive

Written by @nutomic and @dessalines, 2023-10-31

Intro

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k monthly active users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, 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.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

Lemmy v0.18.5 Release (2023-09-29)

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18.5 Release (2023-09-29)

Written by @nutomic and @dessalines, 2023-09-29

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

This release fixes a problem with federation of moderation actions performed by admin accounts. Specifically there is an check when receiving remote federation actions, which is incorrectly rejecting them in some cases. The problem is fixed by this release.

There are no other changes.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but theyâ€™ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

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

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

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

Changes

Lemmy

Fix federation of admin actions (#3988)

Lemmy v0.18.4 Release (2023-08-08)

Tue, 08 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18.4 Release (2023-08-08)

Written by @nutomic, 2023-08-08

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

This version fixes the problem of comment context not loading properly. It also fixes a couple other bugs.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

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

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

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

Changes

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)

Lemmy v0.18.3 Release (2023-07-28)

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18.3 Release (2023-07-28)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2023-07-28

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

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

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

You may need to run sudo chown 1000:1000 lemmy.hjson if you have any permissions errors.

This upgrade takes ~5 minutes for the database migrations to complete.

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

Changes

Lemmy

Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
Revert "Add controversial ranking (#3205)"
Omit local instance from federated instances list (#3712)
add trigram index to search (#3719)
Federation tests replication round1 - demonstrate absent replication of comment deletes (#3657)
Make resolve_object not require auth #3685 (#3716)
Sanitize html (#3708)
Add controversial ranking (#3205)
Skip fragile API tests (#3723)
Enable gzip for reqwest (#3696)
Dont authenticate user after successful password reset #3714 (#3715)
Bump version of dependency "webmention" (#3711)
prevent ordering by comment path without post filter (#3717)
Update Dockerfile to run process as non-privileged user. (#3709)
Dont show removed comments to unauthenticated users (release branch) (#3689)
Add dev profile to strip symbols and disable debug info (ref #3610) (#3611)
Dont publish releases to crates.io (fixes #3272) (#3664)
Change logic for determining comment default language (fixes #3451) (#3672)
Post remove delete federation outbound fix0 (#3613)
disable rustfmt feature on rosetta-build (#3679)
Make sure comments are sorted by hot_rank, then score. (#3667)
Ignore errors when fetching community mods (fixes #3460) (#3674)
Upgrade activitypub library to 0.4.6 (fixes #3222) (#3675)
Denormalize community_id into post_aggregates for a 1000x speed-up when loading posts (#3653)
Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort. (#3618)
Use local_site.default_post_listing_type as the initial default listing type for new users (#3666)
Don't panic when scheduled tasks can't connect to database (#3634)
Add http cache for webfingers (#3317)
Optimize hot rank updates (#3617)
Split activity table into sent and received parts (fixes #3103) (#3583)
work around race condition on community fetch (#3414)
Make lemmy_api_common wasm-compatible (#3587)
Check for dead federated instances (fixes #2221) (#3427)
Fix wrong SMTP port when TLS is being used (fixes #3574) (#3607)
Add infinite scroll user option (#3572)
Shrink capacity in RateLimitStorage::remove_older_than (#3536)
Fix #3501 - Fix aggregation counts for elements removed and deleted (#3543)

Lemmy-UI

Fixing comment report showing dot. (#1989)
Make sure comment score color matches your vote. (#1988)
Allow limited set of markdown in title rendering (#1977)
Allow selecting from all languages in person settings (fixes #1971) (#1985)
Separate final comment row + add classes (#1982)
Fix CSP in dev mode (#1918)
Fix base.output (see #1911) (#1943)
Add show/hide button to password fields (#1861)
Fix start_url and scope (#1931)
Remove lodash.merge dependency (#1911)
Set person_id to myId in handleLeaveModTeam (#1929)
Remove invalid default option from language list (#1919)
Comment border tweak (#1820)
Add Toast Messages for Bad Logins (#1874)

Lemmy v0.18.2 Release

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18.2 Release

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

This is an emergency release to fix the cross-site scripting vulnerability that was exploited yesterday. The attack used a bug in custom emoji code in order to exfiltrate admin login tokens. This release fixes the bug. Additionally it disallows inline Javascript using Content Security Policy. This should ensure that XSS vulnerabilities are impossible from now on.

Special thanks to @makotech222 and @sunaruas for these fixes.

Important note for instance admins: if your instance had any custom emojis configured, it is possible that the attacker has gained access to admin accounts. In order to invalidate all logins you need to execute the following command in PostgreSQL, and restart Lemmy afterwards.

UPDATE secret SET jwt_secret = gen_random_uuid();

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Changes

Lemmy

Improve api response times by doing send_activity asynchronously (#3493)
Updating login.rs with generic incorrect_login response. (#3549)
Use async email sender (#3554)
Upgrade all dependencies (#3526)
Only update site_aggregates for local site (#3516)

Lemmy-UI

Reopen PR 1420 Feature add three six and nine months options frontend (#1689)
Add nonce-based CSP header (#1907)
Use the 'node' user instead of root when running. (#1894)
Add community name to featured post action in Modlog (#1891)
Use canonical URLs (#1883)
Add theme option for compact that respects browser default (#1870)
Update post listing to prefer local image when available (#1858)
Disallow /modlog since it is not relevant for bots (#1850)
Fix XSS vuln (#1897)
User inferno prompt instead of handrolled one (#1867)
Darkly tweak (#1811)
Update lemmy-js-client and lemmy-translations (#1848)

Lemmy v0.18.1 Release

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18.1 Release

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2023-07-07

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

This release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Changes

API

Added a few more post sorts, a show_nsfw to ListCommunities, and open_links_in_new_tab to SaveUserSettings.
Full list of changes here

Lemmy Server

Revert "Make sure hot rank sorts for post and community filter by positive hot ranks. (#3497)" (#3521)
Make hot rank not crash on future (#3517)
Upgrade crossbeam-channel (#3512)
Update prettier to 3.0.0 (#3509)
improve admin and mod check to not do seq scans and return unnecessary data (#3483)
Only allow http(s) scheme for urls (ref #3505) (#3508)
Change security contact mail (#3506)
Allow cross-origin requests (#3421)
Make sure hot rank sorts for post and community filter by positive hot ranks. (#3497)
Fixes wrong community moderator ordering. (#3495)
Use fixed prettier version for CI (#3507)
upgrade markdown-it to fix panic (#3490)
improve performance of community followers inbox query (#3482)
Cache federation blocklist (#3486)
Add Prometheus endpoint (#3456)
Adding a person.admin index, and featured_local/community indexes. (#3479)
Add feature for enabling json logging (#3462)
fix(posts/comments/search): return error on invalid community name (#3418)
Improved validation of display names (Fixes #3436) (#3437)
Remove not needed anymore http-signature-normalization-actix dependency (#3458)
300 comment limit. (#3306)
Do not decrement comment score twice when removing then deleting. (#3196)
Remove excessive content_type header configuration (#3470)
Adding rest of community sorts. Fixes #3374 (#3376)
Dont compare db string errors (fixes #1393) (#3424)
Add Open links in new tab setting (#3318)
Fix awesome-lemmy owner (#3469)
Add awesome-lemmy to LemmyNet? (#3413)
Use serde(skip) instead of skip_serializing, add placeholder values (#3362)
Mark follow as pending when subscribing to remote community (fixes #3384) (#3406)
Fix formatting for latest nightly (#ref 3467)
Remove PerformApub trait (#3423)
Fix quoting of max-file in docker-compose.yml (#3442)
don't strip, log trace if requested (#3425)
Update federated posts to not cache sensitive images if not allow by local site (#3253)
Fix concatenation of audio captcha wav files (#3350)
Automatically manage database when running scripts/test.sh (#3389)
Fixing release script. (#3398)
Added gitattributes to normalize all files to lf (#3386)
Update activitypub-federation crate to 0.4.5 (#3379)
Fix cargo warnings (#3397)
Fix missing sorting types (#3370)
docs(api): Add api-common info on generating TypeScript bindings (#3330)
Remove redundant calls to Iterator::collect (#3365)
Run cargo update as part of release script (#3369)
Fixes #2900 - Checks slur regex to see if it is too permissive (#3146)
add new flag to api (#3363)
feat: re-added captcha checks (#3289)
Limit password resets (#3344)
Fixing the release script. (#3295)
Batch hot rank updates (#3175)
Feature add three six and nine months options backend (#3226)
Fetch community outbox and moderators in parallel (#3360)
Remove networks from docker-compose.yml (#3356)
Item URL should point to post URL (#3345)
Site Metadata: resolve relative URLs for embedded images/videos (#3338)
Use compression middleware (#3343)
Remove another unused dev dependency
Adjust the config check to be a separate faster to compile binary (#3313)
Remove unused actix_rt dependency
Add Liftoff to README.md (#3357)
Respond with Content-Type: application/activity+json (#3353)
Fix lemmy UI environment variable (#3299)
Leave no apk cache in Docker image (#3327)
Allow wildcard imports in schema.rs (#3293)
Update DB local_user.theme type to text (#3266)
feat: allow all admins to purge content (#3271)
Add separate Post check for is_valid_body_field (#3263)
Remove DELETED_REPLACEMENT_URL
Add support for sslmode=require for diesel-async DB connections (#3189)
Remove actix_rt & use standard tokio spawn (#3158)
Revert "feat: re-added captcha checks (#3249)" (#3288)
Fixing removed posts showing. Fixes #2875 (#3279)
Reversed requirement question logic (#3283)
feat: re-added captcha checks (#3249)
Add support for sslmode=require for diesel-async DB connections (#3189)
Remove actix_rt & use standard tokio spawn (#3158)
after 30 days post deletion, replace comment.content and post.body with 'Permanently Deleted'

Lemmy UI

Dark theme tweaks (#1840)
fix: Adjust sidebar banner to wrap bellow the title (#1819)
add ruby annotation support (#1831)
fix: Fix mobile thumbnail being too small (#1814)
Use Join Lemmy hostname as link text in footer (#1737)
fix: Add focus ring color to post action buttons and markdown help link (#1816)
fix: Fix focus ring styles for radio button toggles #1772 (#1773)
fix toaster upon user settings change (#1802)
Fix home page not using site-level listing type #1612 (#1778)
feat: Subtler user badge style (#1796)
Fix data-bs-theme (#1810)
Attempt to fix inability to logout from some instances (subdomains) (#1809)
feat(theme): Vaporwave (#1682)
fix: Revert smaller text size (#1795)
Updated the regex for isAuthPath to reduce false positive hits (#1806)
fix: Add focus border to markdown toolbar buttons
fix: Add data-bs-theme attribute for user dark/light modes (#1782)
fix: Break text on post titles so long words don't overflow
fix: Fix comment collapse and vote buttons not having focus style (#1789)
Add missing modlog reasons (#1787)
Fix search page breaking on initial load when logged in (#1781)
feat: Add PR template (#1785)
Fix profile loading spinner
fix: Move getRoleLabelPill to the only component that uses it
fix: Remove unused hasBadges() function
fix: Fix badge alignment and break out into component
Move export to barrel file
fix: Fix avatar image overlay aspect ratio
fix: Fix circle image aspect ratio
fix: Add some spacing between upload field and image; fix circle image aspect ratio
Prevent JWT token from showing up on error page
fix: Fix vote buttons not showing spinners while registering vote #1761
fix: Fix joined button check color
fix: Fix up filter row gaps and margins a little
fix: Fix heading levels
fix: Simplify row classes a bit
fix: Fix some gaps in search filters
fix: Fix row gap on search options
fix: Add bottom margin to inbox controls
fix: Small cleanup to search/inbox controls
fix: Update comment to reflect new logic
fix: Post expand button was not showing if body-only post
fix: Fix vote buttons in list view variable width
fix: Fix thumb buttons having gray background #1754
Add metaKey to markdown-textarea, for macos
Fix jwt cookie path
Fix quotedText bugs in markdown editor
Fix DM replies
Add fallback date-fns locale import
Fix date-fns locale import failing for some locales
fix req.cookie nonexistent -.-
Enforce SameSite=Strict (#1713)
fix service worker path
fix cache auth method
Fix authorized route false flag
Fix dev caching issue
change max-age to 5 for non-authed responses
Fix PostListing mobile margin layout issue (#1706)
Cache static data for a day
Try increasing node memory.
Fix taglines on Home (#1701)
Use git hash to break cache (#1684)
fix issue with thumbnails (#1695)
Fixing site setup. Fixes #1694 (#1697)
Removing unecessary timezone adjusting
Allow audio captcha through CSP (#1690)
fix formatting
Fixing lints. (#1686)
Search only communities by default when coming from communities page
Add Security.txt (#1408)
Fixing timezone issue with date-fns. Fixes #1680 (#1681)
Add error toast for 413 content too large response on image uploads (#1675)
Add publicPath for static js (#1672)
Fix search page to stop couldnt_find_object error (#1669)
Add fixed width/height to PostListing thumbnail parent (#1660)
fix: Add user action buttons to post dropdown #1653 (#1655)
Adding nightly docker build. (#1678)
Return appropriate error codes (#1665)
Add i386 theme (#1662)
Set cache-control headers to reduce server load (fixes #412) (#1641)
formatting
make subscribe/unsub/pending button consistent
Revert #1463, markdown default lang select
remove hard-coded text foreground color classes (#1658)
Fix subscribe and block community buttons not showing up on first load
change me-2 to me-1, no need for me-2 width
make mod shrunken label text-primary
add @jsit advice
fix weird borders when markdown textarea is disabled
use span
always show badge on mobile
fix a few colors
Reduce fetchLimit (40 -> 20) (#1638)
Moving webpack-bundle-analyzer require inside mode check to fix docker.
Fix allowed and blocked instances not being fetched for admin settings (#1627)
fix: Restore mdNoImages import
fix: Fix alignment of preview mini-overlay buttons on thumbs
fix: Remove body preview
fix: Move toggle button to its own function
fix: Show metadata preview card on all post pages
Fix feedback on banning an unbanning
fix vote button alignment
remove icon (#1618)
Indicate valid and invalid fields in signup form (#1450)
capitalize button (#1616)
Move password reset form to separate route, view (#1390)
feat(UI): Reduce base font size (#1591)
Fix: missing semantic css classes and html elements (#1583)
partially revert change
chore(DX): Add prettier to eslint config for use with editors
fix: Remove unnecessary class
fix: Remove unnecessary classes
fix: Restore removed classes
fix: Remove wrapping li's
fix: Remove extraneous classes
fix: Move things back to where they were
chore: Separate post mod buttons into functions
remove hook entirely
fix bug collapsing previews when voting
fix: Remove unnecessary string interpolations
fix: Remove smallavatars prop
fix: Restore icon avatars; make smaller and roundrect
fix: Use Bootstrap file upload form control styles
Fix feedback on banning an unbanning
fix vote button alignment
remove icon (#1618)
Indicate valid and invalid fields in signup form (#1450)
capitalize button (#1616)
Move password reset form to separate route, view (#1390)
feat(UI): Reduce base font size (#1591)
Fix: missing semantic css classes and html elements (#1583)
chore(DX): Add prettier to eslint config for use with editors
Only give child comments colored borders
Associate NSFW label with its checkbox
fix: Remove unnecessary string interpolations
fix: Remove unnecessary class
fix: Remove unnecessary classes
fix: Restore removed classes
fix: Remove wrapping li's
fix: Remove extraneous classes
fix: Move things back to where they were
chore: Separate post mod buttons into functions
remove toUpperCase since the translation is uppercase
fix vote button alignment
partially revert change
Add space between cancel and ban button
add tooltip
Fix feedback on banning an unbanning
make post creator badge stand out more
remove icon (#1618)
Indicate valid and invalid fields in signup form (#1450)
capitalize button (#1616)
Move password reset form to separate route, view (#1390)
feat(UI): Reduce base font size (#1591)
Fix: missing semantic css classes and html elements (#1583)
remove hook entirely
run prettier
add darkly-pureblack theme
chore(DX): Add prettier to eslint config for use with editors
fix bug collapsing previews when voting
Associate NSFW label with its checkbox
fix: Remove unused comment
fix: Fix image/title wrapping on small
fix: Fix post listing vote/image/title widths
fix: Fix a too-small thumbnail column
fix: Set max height on post listing thumbnails
fix: Remove unnecessary string interpolations
fix: Tidy up divs
fix: Make navbar container full screen width #1536
feat: Use plus/minus expand button in title for showing body/preview
fix: Remove unnecessary class
fix: Remove unnecessary classes
fix: Restore removed classes
fix: Remove wrapping li's
fix: Remove extraneous classes
fix: Move things back to where they were
chore: Separate post mod buttons into functions
feat(UI): Fix some link hover colors
feat(UI): Hide avatars on listings
feat(UI): Always put post body behind togggle on post listings (home/community) #1595
Only give child comments colored borders
Update post-listing.tsx
CSP should allow data urls for media-src or the audio captcha won't work
fix(UI): Make max-width wider, and make sidebar narrower on wide screens #1536
Use spae instead of margin
Fix search request being called twice on search page
Add margin to new comment text
handle embedded iframe content better
fix lint error
fix error on prod
chore: Empty commit to re-trigger Woodpecker
chore(a11y): Remove a11y eslint overrides, as there are (almost) no more violations
fix(a11y): Change the look and behavior of some file upload fields
fix: Add type=button to buttons
fix: Fix some classes on private message collapse/expand button
chore(a11y): Remove now-passing jsx-a11y tests from exemptions
fix(a11y): Change divs and links to buttons
fix: Remove invalid class
chore: Empty commit to re-trigger Woodpecker
fix: Fix some Bootstrap 5 font classes
fix: Fix some Bootstrap 5 font classes
fix(a11y): Restore aria-activedescendant
chore: Empty commit to re-trigger Woodpecker
fix(a11y): Make foreground of 'remove image button' white
fix(a11y): Add alt text to emojis form
fix(a11y): Fix some a11y markup in Searchable Select component
fix(a11y): Change image remove button to true button element
fix: Ignore rule for clickaway div; 'Esc' works for this
fix(a11y): Fix non-list item being inside ul list in navbar
fix: Fix non-unique ID attribute on re-used element
fix: Fix another class
fix: Fix some Bootstrap 5 font classes
fix: Fix some emoji escape logic
fix: Button doesn't need tabindex
fix: Fix incorrect function reference
fix: Empty commit to re-trigger Woodpecker
fix: Emoji picker can be closed with escape key, other a11y fixes
fix: Fix some a11y issues on jump to content button
fix: Fix up some interface language logic and design
fix: Clarify a comment
Remove federation worker count
fix: Add triangle alert icon to language warning
added litely-compact
changed where custom compact code goes
added darkly-compact - issue 552
Refactor first load handling
Fix issue when navigating awat from settings
Give function better name
Make date distance format use correct verbiage
Extract date fns setup
Remove unused dep
Replace momentjs with date-fns
Cache post listings and restore listing state when using browser back navigation buttons.
Fix homepage scrollTo(0, 0) failing when document size changes.
Moved !isBrowser() check to FirstLoadServer.isFirstLoad
Fix server-side rendering after first load.
fix: Add aria-describedby for language warning
Update src/shared/components/common/markdown-textarea.tsx
Fix comments expanding when they're not supposed to (#1540)
Update src/shared/components/common/markdown-textarea.tsx
fix: Disable save button if no text is entered
fix: Fix some more private message form stuff
Remove federation worker count
feat: Clean up the Create Private Message page a bit
Fix emojis being unable to save
fix: Use simpler syntax for languageId array
fix: Add triangle alert icon to language warning
fix: Fix language selection bug
fix: Use Interface Language instead
Refactor first load handling
fix: Add aria-describedby for language warning
Fix issue when navigating awat from settings
Give function better name
Cache post listings and restore listing state when using browser back navigation buttons.
fix: Specify vote content type so buttons work for both comments and posts
Fix homepage scrollTo(0, 0) failing when document size changes.
Moved !isBrowser() check to FirstLoadServer.isFirstLoad
Fix server-side rendering after first load.
fix!: Try to get Vote Buttons component working in Comments
fix: Remove unused prop
Change function name
Make date distance format use correct verbiage
Extract date fns setup
Fix homepage scrollTo(0, 0) failing when document size changes.
fix: Rework some vote buttons architecture
Remove unused dep
Replace momentjs with date-fns
fix: Undo some other extraneous changes
fix: Undo some extraneous changes
fix: Remove tippy duplicate functions
fix: Revert to old mobile vote style
feat: Move vote buttons to separate component
feat: Default language dropdowns to user's primary language
added litely-compact
changed where custom compact code goes
added darkly-compact - issue 552

Lemmy v0.18 Release (2023-06-23)

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.18 Release (2023-06-23)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2023-06-23

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That's why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn't send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can't access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy's web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance's icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy's web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text "404 error message here".

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml's home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy's database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy's main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

Upgrade instructions

The installation instructions have been slightly updated. However there are no breaking changes, other than removing websocket.

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Changes

API

Our HTTP API docs are at https://join-lemmy.org/api/
- These are now auto-generated directly from our rust type definitions, using ts-rs.
- A comparison from the last release
There are two breaking changes since the last release:
- GetSite.taglines is now required, and is an empty array.
- SortType and ListingType are now numbered enums, rather than strings in some places, and numbers in others.

Config

No changes, but you can see the current config options here.

Lemmy Server

Speedup cargo check in CI (#3239)
Correct error messages if user registers with taken user/email (#3093)
Fixing cross_post duplicates. Fixes #3233 (#3234)
Add test to check reading and listing posts return my_vote (#3215)
Reduce memory usage of rate limiting (#3111)
Adding current domain from settings to CORs. (#3231)
remove debugging println (#3227)
Fixing comment_view unit tests. (#3224)
Fix parameter ordering for new_report_subject string (#3210)
Move cors default to source code (#3219)
Fixing tag deploys. (#3216)
Feature add hours as sorting options backend (#3161)
Don't check verified email when an admin logs in (#3209)
fix: add CORS origin environment variable (#3191)
make embedded pict-rs port configurable (#3201)
Move connection creation into scheduler. (#3120)
Calculate initial hot_rank and hot_rank_active for posts and comments from other instances (#3131)
Changed github issue template to align logically with the question asked (#3135)
Update README.md (#3137)
Remove e-mail verification success e-mails (#3124)
Fix Hidden communities showing in community list (#3094)
Update all dependencies (#3091)
Prevent making an instance private if federation is enabled. (#3074)
Handle scheduled task errors (#3090)
Fix unapproved users being able to log in after registration mode set to closed. (#3096)
Link tafkars in readme (#3087)
doc: Added pythorhead library in readme (#3114)
Only create ltree postgres extension in migration if doesn't already exist (#3092)
add issue template yml from lemmy-ui (#3086)
Fix Issue #3075 by using None for local fields instead of Some(false) (#3088)
stop requiring superuser to run migrations (#3002)
Fixes #1884 - Support Spoiler Tags (#3018)
Fix compilation
Align default DB password with documentation (#3068)
Update RSS url (#3053)
Docker yaml anchors and docker logs (#3027)
Fix ports used by docker (#3012)
Add limit and pagination to feeds (#2980)
Upgrade activitypub-federation to 0.4.1 (#3039)
Adding Lemmy-Swift-Client to README.md (#3026)
use usize::MAX for line wrap length, since lettre does it for us (#3034)
update doku (#3003)
Fix contributing link (#3015)
Better issue templates. (#2991)
allow specifying db uri in config file (#2956)
Adding hot_rank columns in place of function sorting. (#2952)
make shebangs posix compliant (#2974)
Fix private message e-mail notification subject and body (#2963)
Add comment depth check (#2940)
Add lemmyexternalproxy to lemmy so that it can talk to the internet (#2960)
Fix translation build error (fixes #2967) (#2968)
Activitypub breaking changes for Lemmy 0.18 (#2705)
Add db index for post.url column (#2929)
Fall back to String for Comment::path when not using the full feature (#2941)
update diesel to 2.1.0 and diesel-async to 0.3.0 (issue #2882) (#2895)
Fix dev setups. (#2944)
Set version name for crates.io release (#2928)
Fix handling of follows addressed to single value (#2920)
Remove chatserver (#2919)
Adding taglines to SiteResponse. Fixes #2925 (#2926)
Fix All reports not showing. Fixes #2902 (#2903)
README updates (#2913)
Filter empty username strings from Mastodon (fixes #2886) (#2887)
Update humane tech badge to point to new repo (#2898)
Update to fix nginx proxy config for Docker Installs (#2908)
Remove jaeger, opentelemetry from docker-compose (#2894)
Replace remmel with Mlem. (#2890)
Add CORS support for debug mode. (#2884)
Don't filter comments of posts from blocked community when viewing post detail (#2880)
Remove websocket code (#2878)
Dont return error in case optional auth is invalid (#2879)
Remove unnecessary clone (#2874)
Remove GetCommunityResponse.default_post_language (#2867)
Dont refetch post url metadata when post is received again
Dont retry outgoing HTTP requests (ref #2865)
Force enable undetermined language (#2851)
Fix typo that caused error (#2861)
Prettier check (#2855)
Downgrade postgres for CI to 15.2 (fixes #2857) (#2859)
Make volumes used in docker compose work when running on machines with SELinux enabled (#2853)
Set attribute deny_unknown_fields for Lemmy config (#2852)
Fixing empty req issue. (#2849)
Upgrade api_test deps (#2850)
Adding comments to all API related types. Fixes #2846 (#2848)
Adding typescript generation for API. Fixes #2824 (#2827)
Addressing slow profile queries. #2777 (#2830)
Reverting to older non-multi-arch dockerfile. Fixes #2832 (#2833)
Add to field in follow activities for better compatibility (#2829)
Use older git clone for woodpecker. (#2831)
Remove last Option<Vec.. from API. Fixes #2820 (#2822)
Adding cross_post fetching to GetPost. Fixes #2127 (#2821)
Use Dockerfile.multiarch as Dockerfile (#2818)
Adding diesel enums for SortType and ListingType (#2808)
Make path to local lemmy-ui use correct relative path (#2817)
Add lemmy-bot to README libraries list (#2816)
Separate federated_instances into its own endpoint. Fixes #1931 (#2813)
Use official rust image and clean up Dockerfiles (#2804)
Temporary fix for hiding deleted posts. #2624 (#2811)
Leave modded communities on account deletion. Fixes #2560 (#2810)
Adding check to description and body length fields. (#2805)
Fix & Optimize CI config (#2802)
Making the chat server an actor. (#2793)
Use pretty print for federation json responses (#2801)
Fix listing type default value (#2796)
Add woodpecker ci (#2789)
Remove unused dependencies (#2795)
Optimize federated language updates to avoid unnecessary db writes (#2786)
Added identifier to context (#2791)
Activitypub crate rewrite (#2782)
Add Custom Emojis Support (#2616)
Adding deadpool timeouts. (#2775)
Adding TOTP / 2FA to lemmy (#2741)
Get rid of Safe Views, use serde_skip (#2767)
Show deleted and removed posts for profile views. Fixes #2624 (#2729)
Dont upsert Instance row every apub fetch (#2771)
Fixing broken websockets. (#2770)
Ignore undetermined language when calculating post default language (#2769)
Switch from bb8 to deadpool. Fixes #2765 (#2768)
Adding a vector indexing check to prevent panics. Fixes #2753 (#2754)
Cleaning up person_view sorts (#2760)
Add default attribute for webfinger properties (fixes #2756) (#2759)
Include type information with webfinger responses (fixes #2037) (#2746)
Fixing issue with saving site language. Fixes #2748 (#2749)
Proper permission check for federated comment distinguish (#2697)
Implement separate mod activities for feature, lock post (#2716)
Fix case in activitypub context (ref #2734) (#2743)
Separate comment distinguish (#2740)
Adding instance software and version. Fixes #2222 (#2733)
Fixing slow joins to post_read, post_saved, and comment_saved . (#2738)
Remove lemmur since its deprecated. (#2742)
Combine prod and dev docker setups using build-arg (#2739)
Organize utils into separate files. Fixes #2295 (#2736)
Removing checking permissions when editing posts and comments. (#2727)
Fixing updated form fields. Fixes #2724 (#2725)
Only let top admin purge. Fixes #2731 (#2732)
Fix writing of removeData in apub context (fixes #2734) (#2735)
Adding a site option to email admins for new reports. (#2730)
Sort community search by active_monthly by default. (#2728)
Fix post titles being cut off (fixes #2718) (#2720)
Improved error message when attempting to fetch non-local object (fixes #2715) (#2717)
Convert HTML from titles into markdown (#2709)
In apub post receive, check posting restricted to mods (ref #2702) (#2704)
Fix docker federation setup (#2706)
Fix data fetching from Peertube (fixes #2689) (#2703)
Add a ntfy notif on a tag deploy success. (#2701)
Disable pictrs feature in CI to make it faster (#2698)
Fixing admin application email subject. Fixes #2688 (#2695)
Fixing person block views. Fixes #2693 (#2694)
Fixing GetPosts active sort index. Fixes #2683 (#2684)
More explicit upgrade instructions.
Fix yerbate.ml -> join-lemmy.org links
Publish without verify (#2681)
Fix paths in release script, update crate versions (#2680)

Lemmy UI

fix(tabs): Fix tab semantics and a11y (#1382)
fix: Remove Bootstrap JS in sidebars (#1434)
Store manifest in memory so it does not need to be generated for every page request (#1433)
Com create post (#1431)
fix: Small adjustments to create post form
fix: Fix Communities search/filter header #1417
Fix mobile navbar bug (#1428)
feat: Hide 'comments' in post listing comments button; icon and title text is clear
feat: Drop dependency for tsconfig-paths-webpack-plugin
fix main.css vars (#1424)
feat: Bootstrap 5 (#1378)
Add scripts to make managing translations easier (#1414)
Fix redirect after successful password reset
fix: Shrink and normalize some post action button colors and sizes
fix: Litely Red was importing the wrong vars
fix: Always show advanced post buttons dropdown
Fixing missing class for language select.
feat(post): Move post domain beneath post title (#1363)
Updated link to lemmy-repo as direct link to issues
feat(css): make vertical rhythm more consistent for post listings
fix(post): Fix missing labels on block/report buttons in new dropdown
fix: Add compiled theme stylesheets
fix: Fix too-intense hr color between posts
fix: Fix post creator text alignment
fix: Prettier ignore generated themes, as they aren't written by humans
feat: Badge-ify NSFW and removed by mod title info
fix: Fix display inline of post title
fix: Only post title should be inside h5, not the additional metadata icons
fix: Use btn-sm for advanced menu dropdown buttons
fix: Remove some extra classes on flag/report buttons
fix: Fix vertical alignment and border radius of advanced dropdown menu items
fix(a11y): Add aria-controls for advanced button dropdown
fix: Fix some button labels and tippy text
feat: Move advanced post menu into dropdown
Always allow users to control whether they see NSFW content
fix: Fix display inline of post title
fix: Use btn-sm for advanced menu dropdown buttons
fix: Remove some extra classes on flag/report buttons
fix: Fix vertical alignment and border radius of advanced dropdown menu items
fix(a11y): Add aria-controls for advanced button dropdown
fix: Fix some button labels and tippy text
feat: Move advanced post menu into dropdown
fix: Fix some small style issues
feat(a11y): Add eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y
fix: Fix Trending sidebar card too
fix(a11y): Fix some mobile styles for Sidebar Cards
fix(a11y): Apply same accordion/collapse markup to Subscribed Communities sidebar card
fix: Add .accordion wrapper around sidebar to obtain negative bottom margin
fix(a11y): Fix some a11y issues in Site Sidebar and use native Bootstrap Collapse and Card classes
fix(a11y): Add aria-label to fetaured pins
fix: Only post title should be inside h5, not the additional metadata icons
fix: Fix some references to ; they should refer to a specific gray in case changes
fix: Move var to grays area
fix: Fix broken theme overrides; group theme variable files by variable type
fix accidental changes
remove comments
fix merge conflicts
Add default profile picture for users who do not set one (#1339)
feat(navbar): Add labels for navbar items on mobile (#1323)
fix: Fix rounded top corners in markdown textarea
fix: Fix input-bg for darkly theme
chore: Fix a missing theme color
chore: Fix vars
chore: Remove some redundant Sass variable declarations and re-organize them
fix: Fix imports
Revert "fix: Sass files don't need to refer to full node_modules path"
fix: Sass files don't need to refer to full node_modules path
fix: Remove inline styles and use Bootstrap classes
fix: Fix missing prop
fix: Vertically align icons in post listing
fix: Add total users in site sidebar
fix: Re-add 'number of communities' to site sidebar
fix: Fix broken link
fix: Fix rounded textarea in Markdown box
feat: Fix some colors on dark mode
feat: Redesign the format bar / textarea into a single bordered area with divider
and of course, yarn.lock
handle login failures correctly
wrap login call in try/catch for error handling
Fix first loads not working
Remove extra div in post sidebar
feat: Move text formatting bar above textarea
Add a class to the more button on a comment node
Switch navbar classes to ids
break out browser and helper methods
feat: Adds Jump to main content functionality
chore: ensures validURL function does not throw exception
break out all role utils
Adding a few more 0.18.0 API changes. (#1324)
Use aside semantic HTML tag for sidebars
Use article semantic HTML tag for posts/comments
Use footer semantic HTML tag
Add lemmy-site class for easier detection
Add ID's and classes to sidebars
Add clases and ID's to post form/listing
Add classes to post and comment repy textareas
Rename markdown-textarea ID's
Add nav and footer ID's
fix block community functionality in sidebar (#1316)
fix: fix loading custom themes with a custom LEMMY_UI_EXTRA_THEMES_FOLDER
Admin Settings: Bugfixes (#1313)
hardcoded node version due to bug "Text file busy" error introduced in node 20.3 (#1320)
changed required checkbox (#1318)
set loading state attribute to false if createPost fails (#1311)
Make community IDs more easily selectable (#1306)
Re-arrange elements beneath markdown textarea #1057 (#1288)
Match more specific locales to supported ones (#1241)
formatting
refactor server, tidy up, use handlers/middleware/utils pattern
Fixed color scheme variables of litely-red
Improve the look of tables (#1299)
feat(post-listing): Add link to post for mobile preview
go back if last history action was push, fix bug preventing navigation to / working from login
add user-scalable=no to meta tag
Removed duplicated CSS rule
Make comment border colors semi-transparent
Add long polling to update unread counts in navbar. (#1271)
make button a tad smaller
remove pictrsDeleteToast usage from PostForm, add delete image button, fix infinite loading bug if upload error occured
Use http client (#1081)
Horizontally scrollable code blocks, instead of wrapping.
Update BUG_REPORT.yml
add checkboxes to feature requests
required under label
indent validations
label array
add checkboxes to issue template
Fixed NSFW image blur spilling outside the preview
Recompiled theme files using latest Bootstrap 4
Added npm scripts to rebuild theme files
Add title to pictrs-image
Make the community title in the sidebar link to the local community. (#1161)
Fix prompt component (#1223)
Fix mobile menu collapse bug (#1222)
Another try at sanitize. (#1208)
remove unused theme files (#1202)
issue templates in yml format (#1211)
Make preview button say "edit" when in preview mode (#1164)
Add shortcut for submitting post (#1163)
Fix typo in post-listing.tsx (#1181)
Only show 'saved' tab on own profile page
Added Ctrl-K keybind
Fix quotes (#1131)
Alternative way to sanitize isoData (#1129)
chore: switched to enabling language warning by prop rather than disabling
fix: Adds ability to hide language warning
styles(#1067): Run prettier
fix(#1067): Fix language not updating when editing post
Fix isoData can contain user generated content (#1114)
Add media-src * to Content-Security-Policy header
Refactor lets to consts
Fix aria-label for language select
Add aria attribute to track toggle status of up/down votes. (#1074)
Make comment depth easier to track visually
Make comments nested lists
Fix CONTRIBUTING link
Fix sorting help link
Do not refresh when community is selected in create post (#1042)
Navbar fix 2 (#1038)
Lint fix (#1035)
Changes to language tag
Hopefully stop lint command from erroring
Always replace host with internal host
Revert "User HTTP instead of HTTPS when fetching icon in docker internal network"
Revert "Add debug statement."
Add debug statement.
User HTTP instead of HTTPS when fetching icon in docker internal network
Add error message paragraph
Make error code always display
Navbar hide menu fix (#1033)
Show parent comment for comment link. Fixes #1030 (#1032)
Add heading tag to rate limit form
Remove console log
Include forgotten translation
Remove console logs
Add web share for browsers that have it enabled (#1029)
Show language on posts and comments (#1026)
Allow user to submit rate limit changes
Put rate limit options in its own tab
Refactor tabs into reuseable component
Replace link to issue tracker with proper support spaces
Fix isoData bug
Refactor how error data is passed from server to client
Make admin UI for allowing/blocking instances easier to work with (#1012)
Get rid or forced error
Changing all bigints to numbers
Upgrade lemmy-js-client to work with bigints. Fixes #1018 (#1022)
Redirect from pages that require auth on logout (#1016)
Fix things not working in production build
Fix error page not showing when site not fetched and adjust styles
Handle error when site not returned
Use node env instead of version for environment specific logic
Redirect to login and remove duplicated code
Fix server redirect error
Set up logic for handling errors
Extract helper function
Dont preselect new post language (#1008)
Update JS client to version with fixed JSON serialization (#1017)
Redirect fomr pages that require auth on logout
Remove "banned" badge from posts and comments (fixes 899) (#1011)
Add support for PWA (#1005)
Using auto-generated types from ts-rs. (#1003)
Fixing some outdated docs links. Fixes #1006 (#1007)
Upgrading deps. (#1004)
Prettier css (#995)
Add content warning to modlog and fix modlog routing bug (#994)
Get rid of "No Results" showing while search is still loading. (#997)
Add SleeplessOne1917 to Codeowners.
Handle when logged out (#986)
Make pages use query params instead of route params where appropriate (#977)
Multiple image upload (#971)
I18 quality of life change (#973)
Optimize Tagline Form page (#972)
Don't show icons / banners for banned users and removed communities. (#962)
fix: Fix undefined showing up in markdown (#970)
refactor: update UI to use new client uploadImage function (#967)
Add woodpecker ci (#964)
fix: Make search screen able to change type, listing type, and sort when there is no query (#966)
Adding 2FA support. Fixes #938 (#939)
Add Custom Emoji Support
Only show the determined warning for multiple. (#952)
Upgrading deps (#951)
Adding ban_from_community to be more clear. Fixes #872 (#943)
Let any mod feature and lock posts. Fixes #875 (#944)
Adding a warning for deselecting the undetermined language. (#945)
Fixing line formatting. (#947)
Do local community checks for buttons. Fixes #918 (#948)
Check to make sure post is correct. Fixes #934 (#949)
Remove buggy navbar search. Fixes #921 (#950)
Fix issue with empty markdown content not nulling DB. Fixes #924 (#925)
Adding reports send email to admins option (#932)
v0.17.1
Fix comment box closing. Fixes #904 (#914)
Fix showing crosspost dupes. Fixes #900 (#912)
Fix live updating postres edit. Fixes #908 (#911)
Removing extra themes. Fixes #905 (#910)
Fixing post setState error. Fixes #902 (#903)

Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout

Sat, 17 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update from Lemmy after the Reddit blackout

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2023-06-17

If you are reading this then you most likely know about the recent news from reddit. As a result of these events, Lemmy has grown immensely in the last two weeks. The number of monthly active users has increased over 25 times, from 1.000 to 27.000 at time of writing. Suddenly Lemmy has become one of the largest Fediverse projects, ahead of Peertube and Pleroma.

We are proud of this network growth, because it means that people want to take control of their social media into their own hands, as well as see the benefits of software made to serve human need, rather than the private profits of a few US tech giants.

However such growth can't happen without problems. Users were confused, servers became overloaded, and countless bugs were reported that no one noticed before. For us maintainers (dessalines and nutomic), it has resulted in an endless stream of questions and notifications, which is impossible to keep up with. Previously there were 5 - 10 Github notifications per day; now they have risen to over 100 daily.

Additionally, discussions on Matrix and Lemmy are also extremely active. Understandably, our focus has shifted to programming to make Lemmy better, rather than answering an ever-increasing backlog of questions.

At the moment we are urgently working to solve major issues, such as optimizing slow database queries, ripping out the inefficient websocket API, and fixing a major security vulnerability (big thanks to deadcade). In addition we suddenly have to manage dozens of pull requests. To give us time to work on these priorities, it would be very beneficial if users could refrain from interacting with issue trackers when possible. Before opening an issue, make sure that it hasn't been reported before. And when writing comments, make sure that they actually contribute to solving the issue at hand. Generally it is better to move discussions to Lemmy if possible. We are very thankful to everyone who contributes by writing code, hosting instances, moderating communities, and answering questions.

At the same time, we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won't have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.

On another topic, there are rumors circulating that we are fascists or supported genocide. These claims are completely false, and like most viral twitter threads, are coming from a single Mastodon user on a personal vendetta who didn't provide any sources. Such slander doesn't deserve any response and is best left ignored. If you want to know the truth then read the following pages (both from 2021):

As you can see we are not a faceless corporation that is accomodating to everyone. We are individuals with our own opinions. If you disagree with these, it is no problem! You can still freely use the Lemmy software on different instances. If you host your own instance, we have no control over it at all and are unable to censor what users say. For more details read the documentation on censorship resistance. In practice, the instance list already contains various instances whose content would be banned from lemmy.ml immediately.

Regarding development, we are happy to collaborate with anyone who is willing to put in the work, regardless of politics. The only condition is to follow the rules when posting in development spaces. Essentially, be respectful.

For the past three years dessalines and I have been funded to work on Lemmy full-time by generous support from the NLnet foundation. These donations are paid out when we implement certain new features. But now we are busy answering questions, reviewing pull requests and urgently fixing problems. That means we are unable to work on the milestones agreed with NLnet, and won't receive payments from them. We are increasingly reliant on user donations to pay our bills. These donations currently add up to 1500 Euros per month, which is not even enough to pay minimum wage for the two of us. Hopefully more users can consider donating, so that we can put our full attention to making Lemmy better for everyone, and possibly add more developers to our worker co-op in the future.

Again, we'd like to thank everyone for their support and assistance, and we remain hopeful that together, as a federation, the fediverse and all its projects collectively, can win the battle for the internet, and create a better, more enjoyable experience than the one forced upon us by these nefarious tech giants.

Lemmy v0.17.0 Release (2023-01-31)

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.17.0 Release (2023-01-31)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2023-01-31

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

Language Tags

Content can now be tagged to indicate the language it is written in. These tags can be used to filter content, so that you only see posts in languages which you actually understand. Instances and communities can also specify which languages are allowed, and prevent posting in other languages.

In the future this will also allow for integrated translation tools.

Comment trees

Lemmy has changed the way it stores comments, in order to be able to properly limit the comments shown to a maximum depth.

Included are proper comment links (/comment/id), where you can see its children, a count of its hidden children, and a context button to view its parents, or the post.

Featured posts

Admins and mods can now "feature" (this used to be called "sticky" ala reddit) posts to the top of either a community, or the top of the front page. This makes possible announcement and bulletin-type posts.

Special thanks to @makotech for adding this feature.

Federation

Lemmy users can now be followed. Just visit a user profile from another platform like Mastodon, and click the follow button, then you will receive new posts and comments in the timeline.

Votes are now federated as private. This prevents other platforms from showing who voted on a given post, and it also means that Lemmy now counts votes from Mastodon.

This release also improves compatibility with Pleroma. If you previously had trouble interacting between Pleroma and Lemmy, give it another try.

We've extracted the main federation logic into its own library, activitypub-federation-rust. It is open source and can be used by other projects to implement Activitypub federation, without having to reinvent the wheel. The library helps with handling HTTP signatures, sending and receiving activities, fetching remote objects and more.

Other changes

Admins can now purge content and pictures from the database.
Mods can distinguish a comment, "stickying" it to the top of a post. Useful for mod messages and announcements.
Number of new / unread comments are now shown for each post.
Lemmy now automatically embeds videos from Peertube, Youtube and other sites which provide an embed link via Opengraph attribute.
You can give your site "taglines", short markdown messages, which are shown at the top of your front page. Thanks to @makotech for adding this.
You can now report private messages.
Most settings have been moved from the config file into the database. This means they can be updated much easier, and apply immediately without a restart.
When setting up a new Lemmy instance, it doesn't create a default community anymore. Instead this needs to be done manually.
Admins can choose to receive emails for new registration applications.
An upgrade of diesel to v2.0, our rust -> postgres layer.
Too many bugfixes to count, they are listed below.

Upgrade instructions

This upgrade requires a newer version of postgres, which must be done manually. Do not try to use Ansible.

cd to your lemmy docker directory and run this helper script:

sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/main/scripts/postgres_12_to_15_upgrade.sh
sudo sh postgres_12_to_15_upgrade.sh

This script saves a copy of your old database as 12_15.dump.sql. Do not delete this file until you've followed all the instructions below, and the upgrade is complete.

Next, manually edit your lemmy.hjson to account for a few breaking changes:

pictrs_url is removed, and the pictrs config is now a block. If using docker, it should look like:
```
pictrs: {
    url: "http://pictrs:8080/"
    # api_key: "API_KEY"
}
```
The rate_limit, federation, captcha, and slur_filter blocks should be removed, as they are now in the database, and can be updated through the UI.
The site setup has removed a few fields.
See the link above for every setting.

Next, edit your docker-compose.yml file to use the newer version of lemmy and lemmy-ui.

The image lines should look like:

image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.0 for lemmy
image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.0 for lemmy-ui

The lemmy-ui environment variables have changed, and should now look like:

  environment:
    - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536
    - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST={{ domain }}
    - LEMMY_UI_HTTPS=true

You can always find the latest version here.
Ensure that postgres is postgres:15-alpine (the upgrade script above should have already set this correctly)

If you're having any problems, your docker-compose.yml should look similar to the one from the lemmy-ansible repo.

Finally, run sudo docker-compose up -d, and wait for lemmy to start up.

Note: On production databases with thousands of comments, this upgrade takes several hours. If your system has problems upgrading, or you'd like to speed up the upgrade, consider tuning your postgres database using the instructions here. If not, just wait for the database migrations to complete, as this large migration of the comment table only ever needs to be run once.

Note: If you have any issues upgrading, you can restore your old database using the backup and restore instructions here.

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

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Changes

API

lemmy-js-client 0.16.4 -> 0.17.0 API changes

Config

lemmy.hjson

Lemmy Server

Speeding up comment-ltree migration, fixing index creation. Fixes #2664
Add feature to embed pictrs in lemmy binary (fixes #2627) (#2633)
Update post_aggregates indexes to account for featured_local and featured_community columns. (#2661)
Post creation from Mastodon (fixes #2590) (#2651)
Upgrade to postgres 15. (#2659)
Add reddit -> lemmy importer to readme. (#2662)
Some script improvements (#2654)
Use enum for registration mode setting (#2604)
Removing sniptt/monads for lemmy-js-client. (#2644)
Fix historical post fetching. Fixes #2640 (#2643)
Adding the go client. (#2629)
Point to !lemmy_support for support questions (#2638)
Add documentation for using Lemmy API from Rust (#2639)
Improve application question check (#2628)
Fix user following (#2623)
Allow embedding Lemmy, fix setup error (#2618)
Fixing missing forms, incorrect user discussion_languages (#2580)
Add support for Featured Posts (#2585)
Remove federation backwards compatibility with 0.16.x (#2183)
Rework websocket (#2598)
Add SendActivity trait so that api crates compile in parallel with lemmy_apub
Move code to generate apub urls into lemmy_api_common
Builds lemmy_routes in parallel with lemmy_apub
Merge websocket crate into api_common
Check user accepted before sending jwt in password reset (fixes #2591) (#2597)
Relax honeypot check (fixes #2595) (#2596)
Use audience field to federate items in groups (fixes #2464) (#2584)
Federate group moderators using attributedTo field (#2588)
Set cargo home in ci to avoid redownloading deps between steps (#2587)
Add some more clippy lints (#2586)
Use release docker image for nightly build (#2583)
Implement federated user following (fixes #752) (#2577)
Upgrade activitypub_federation to 0.3.4 (#2581)
Upgrade activitypub_federation crate to 0.3.3 (ref #2511) (#2578)
Remove federation settings, rely on sensible defaults instead (#2574)
Fix clippy lints. (#2572)
Add support for Taglines (#2548)
Various pedantic clippy fixes (#2568)
Sort vecs before assert to avoid random test failures (#2569)
Display build status badge from drone.join-lemmy.org (#2564)
Specify dependencies and metadata for entire workspace (#2565)
Use enum_delegate crate (#2554)
Live reload settings (fixes #2508) (#2543)
Fix activity list test (#2562)
When announcing incoming activities, keep extra fields (#2550)
Mobilizon federation (#2544)
Update doku dependency for easier formatting of defaults.hjson (#2553)
Translated README.md to Chinese (#2549)
Add diesel_async, get rid of blocking function (#2510)
Use urlencoding for db url params (fixes #2532) (#2537)
Dont serve apub json for removed objects (ref #2522) (#2538)
Fix password length check (#2536)
Remove explicit panic from db connection code (fixes #2533) (#2535)
Send error message when rate limit is reached (#2527)
Mark own private messages as read in api (fixes #2484) (#2531)
Mark objects as not deleted when received via apub (fixes #2507) (#2528)
Group imports dess (#2526)
Fix invalid config in docker/prod (fixes #2520) (#2524)
Fix local site images. (#2519)
Fix 2455: Check auth for pictrs when instance is private. (#2477)
Fix limit_languages to operate on correct instance (fixes #2496) (#2518)
Image improvements (#2513)
Make verify apub url function async (#2514)
Moving settings to Database. (#2492)
Enable lto, strip symbols via cargo.toml (#2512)
Fix docker dev build (#2509)
Federate votes as private (#2501)
Dont try to send activities if federation is disabled (fixes #2499) (#2500)
Return empty vec when reading all languages (fixes #2495) (#2497)
Update clippy to use Rust 1.64 (#2498)
Only allow authenticated users to fetch remote objects (#2493)
More real-world prod config, separate lemmy config (#2487)
Fix check for federated mod actions (#2489)
Make docker-compose more clear and explicit (#2469)
implement language tags for site/community in db and api (#2434)
Change description in readme (#2481)
Use compat mode when signing outgoing activities (fixes #1984) (#2473)
Check to make sure comment isnt deleted / removed for unread count. (#2472)
Dont show deleted users or communities on profile page. (#2450)
Adding email admins for new applications. Fixes #2271 (#2390)
Showing # of unread comments for posts. Fixes #2134 (#2393)
Convert emails to lowercase (fixes #2462) (#2463)
Remove unnecessary show_deleted_and_removed comments for a profile. (#2458)
Remove pointless language joins. (#2451)
Fix rate limit error messages. Fixes #2428 (#2449)
Fix missing local user from post queries. (#2447)
Diesel 2.0.0 upgrade (#2452)
Allow filtering out of deleted and removed comments when getting person details (#2446)
Implement reports for private messages (#2433)
Check for slurs in account creation. (#2443)
The language id is crucial for front ends. (#2437)
Update docker version to 0.16.6. Fixes #2435 (#2438)
Adding job to drop phantom ccnew indexes. Fixes #2431 (#2432)
Don't search for community descriptions, search for user display_name. (#2430)
Increase default search rate limit. (#2424)
fix clippy
dont set default user languages in api code (already done in db)
dont test with all features
clippy fixes
api changes for comment language tagging
add test for comment view languages
fix tests
Add language tags for comments
Pass LocalUser to PostQuery etc, instead of separate params (#2413)
Tag posts and comments with language (fixes #440) (#2269)
Rejected federated pm from blocked users (fixes #2398) (#2408)
Adding distinguish comment. Fixes #2002 (#2391)
Fix pictrs routing (#2407)
Add postgres auto-explain for dev testing. (#2399)
Add Modlog Filters (#2313)
Accept Image objects in attachments (#2394)
Tweaking postgres upgrade script (#2389)
Use typed-builder crate for queries (#2379)
Use doku release version (ref #2343) (#2386)
First pass at adding comment trees. (#2362)
Update apub examples to remove to field (ref #2380) (#2382)
Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
Fix a few form options for diesel. Fixes #2287 (#2376)
Remove docker/pleroma/ folder (#2381)
Remove listing type community. Fixes #2361 (#2377)
Dont allow login if account is banned or deleted (fixes #2372) (#2374)
Send websocket message on accepted follow. Fixes #2369 (#2375)
Fix panics in search_by_apub_id() (fixes #2371) (#2373)
Fix follow being stuck as pending after accept (#2366)
Adding 0.16.6 release
Change config pictrs key name (#2360)
Config changes, remove unused image purge function (#2343)
Fix problem where actors can have empty public key (fixes #2347) (#2348)
remove parking_lot (#2350)
Revert "Use correct url for activitystreams protocol context (#2326)" (#2351)
Adding check for requests with no id or name, adding max limit. (#2265)
Dont allow blocking admin (#2340)
Fix wrong clippy warning in ci (#2339)
Be more explicit about returning deleted actors or not (#2335)
Specify minimum Rust version 1.57 (fixes #2333) (#2334)
Remove update and read site config. Fixes #2306 (#2329)
Don't create or initially follow a default community. Fixes #2317 (#2328)
Increase RSS fetch limit to 20. Fixes #2319 (#2327)
Expose pending 2 (#2282)
Use correct url for activitystreams protocol context (#2326)
Move setting http_fetch_retry_limit into federation block (#2314)
Fix length of post_report.original_post_name db field (fixes #2311) (#2315)
Adding admin purging of DB items and pictures. #904 #1331 (#1809)
Fix: Use correctly parseable JSON-LD context (#2299)
Fix lemmy version in prod docker-compose.yml (#2304)
Upgrade activitypub_federation to 0.2.0, add setting federation.debug (#2300)
Remove unused setup config vars (#2302)
Add pub use for db crates in api_common (#2305)
Add link to Matrix chat in readme (#2303)
Accept private like (#1968) (#2301)
Move different features drone check to below defaults.hjson check. (#2296)
Bump lettre to 0.10.0-rc.7 (#2297)
Remove unused cargo.toml files (#2293)
Forbid outgoing requests in activitypub tests (fixes #2289) (#2294)
Embed Peertube videos (#2261)
Run cargo check for each crate with different features (ref #2284) (#2292)
Remove 0.15 federation compat code (#2131)
Extract Activitypub logic into separate library (#2288)

Lemmy UI

Fixing requireapplication string. (#895)
Fixing PWA install. Fixes #822 (#893)
Removing monads. Fixes #884 (#886)
Sanitize article html. Fixes #882 (#883)
Add id to App component (#880)
Adding Community Language fixes. #783 (#868)
Add FeaturedPost Support (#873)
Fix csp header for svgs in firefox. Fixes #869 (#870)
Remove federation strict_allowlist and retry_count. (#867)
Add Taglines support (#854)
Fix wrong comment link. Fixes #714 (#865)
Dont render images in tippy. Fixes #776 (#864)
Move symbols to its own cacheable file. Fixes #809 (#862)
Hide post report images. Fixes #824 (#861)
Add inline markdown rendering for post titles. Fixes #827 (#860)
Show deleted on profile page. Fixes #834 (#859)
Make sure user is logged in for site creation. Fixes #838 (#858)
Fix missing report shield. Fixes #842 (#855)
Increase markdown field char limit to 50k. Fixes #849 (#850)
Adding new site setup fields. (#840)
Fix workaround for broken logout (#836)
Strip html from og descriptions. Fixes #830 (#831)
Cleanup docker builds (#829)
Fix admin default listing type. Fixes #797 (#818)
Search button and input style fixes (#825)
Support new video embed api format (fixes #709) (#817)
Change for container divs to container-lg (#813)
Remove newline, save space for toast message.
Avoid browser warning about leaving page, handle delete image fail and add user filenames to messages.
Avoid browser warning about leaving page, handle delete image fail.
Adding private message reporting. Fixes #782 (#806)
Adding the email_admins for new application config. (#742)
Adding new unread comments. (#749)
Fix broken profile page, and missing sidebars. (#795)
Adding a loading indicator for post community searching. Fixes #692 (#794)
Fix missing initial load of discussion languages. (#793)
Fix posts pushed from blocked users/comms. Fixes #697 (#792)
Adding post and comment language tagging. Fixes #771 (#781)
Hide create community (#787)
Increase fetch limit for user and community searches. Fixes #756 (#773)
Fix private instance setting. Fixes #769 (#786)
Hide extra comment and post functionality from search page. Fixes #752 (#788)
Show create post even if not subscribed. Fixes #768 (#789)
Cantarell for darkly/darkly-red. Fixes #779 (#784)
Adding mod / admin distinguish. (#744)
Disable CSP when in debug mode. (#743)
Reduce search minLength to 1. Fixes #750 (#751)
Add support for filtering mod logs
Documenting and changing a few env vars. Fixes #661 (#739)
Fixing post_view glitch. Fixes #740 (#741)
Change CSP rule for connect-src (websocket) to wildcard (fixes #730) (#737)
Comment Tree paging (#726)
Adding block from community sidebar. Fixes #690 (#716)
Fix suggested post title html. Fixes #691 (#717)
Fix missing deny button. Fixes #723 (#728)
Fix community filtering. (#729)
use zh-TW for language code, instead of zh_Hant. (#725)
Fix Notification browser fetch
Forgot to type a few Searches. Fixes #718 (#722)
Fixing linkify GC crash. (#715)
New communities fetch limit is 50. (#711)
Clicking "subscribe pending" button performs unsubscribe (fixes #705) (#706)
Fix site setup and login. Fixes #699 (#702)
Adding purging of comments, posts, communities, and users. (#459)
Removing save and read config hjson. Fixes #695 (#696)
Expose pending 2 (#662)
Adding option types 2 (#689)
Fix NPE during new site startup (#677)
Fixing CSP for iOS devices. Fixes #669 (#678)
Fix issue with new notification trying to do a fetch.

First release of LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board written in Rust

Wed, 02 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

First release of LemmyBB, a federated bulletin board written in Rust

Written by @nutomic, 2022-09-14

We are excited to announce the release of lemmyBB. This is an alternative frontend for Lemmy, based on the design of phpBB. It turns Lemmy from a link aggregator with upvotes and image previews into a traditional forum, or bulletin board.

Lemmy is a self-hosted discussion platform which supports Activitypub for federation with other servers. 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.

By combining these projects, we get the benefits of both: a stable and performant backend which supports Activitypub federation, has an extensive API with mod tools and much more. Together with a classical frontend that is focused on text-based discussion, with no distraction of voting or overt number of image posts.

The easiest way to try lemmyBB is by signing up on the flagship instance fedibb.ml and joining the discussion. You can also install your own instance by following these instructions. Resource usage is very low as everything is written in Rust (except the PostgreSQL database). Fedibb.ml uses about 70 MB of RAM and a negligible amount of CPU.

There are still many things to work on, and some missing features need to be added. A lot of polishing also needs to be done. Contributions are more than welcome, so if this sounds interesting, consider getting involved!

LemmyBB can also serve as an example of Lemmy's potential as a generic backend for social media platforms. Instead of starting a project from scratch to write an API, database logic, authentication, federation etc, you could create a frontend for Lemmy. This can be written in your language of choice, and only needs to render HTML, and use the Lemmy API. This doesn't have to be a forum, a blogging platform or image gallery would also be possible.

To be clear, lemmyBB is not meant to replace phpBB and it will never have all the same features. It was simply much easier to use this approach for someone like me who doesn't know much about frontend development. In that sense, I want to give a big thanks to the phpBB developers for publishing their work as open source, and making this project possible!

Lemmy v0.16.7 Release : Bug fixes (2022-09-14)

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.16.7 Release : Bug fixes (2022-09-14)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-09-14

A few bug fixes:

Fix missing auth on new post refresh. (#764)
Change CSP rule for connect-src (websocket) to wildcard (fixes #730) (#737)
Increase default search rate limit. (#2424)
Rejected federated pm from blocked users (fixes #2398) (#2408)
Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
Dont allow login if account is banned or deleted (fixes #2372) (#2374)
Fix panics in search_by_apub_id() (fixes #2371) (#2373)

Lemmy v0.16.6 Release : bug fixes (2022-07-19)

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.16.6 Release : bug fixes (2022-07-19)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-07-19

A few bug fixes:

Fix problem where actors can have empty public key (fixes #2347) (#2348)
Be more explicit about returning deleted actors or not (#2335)
Dont allow blocking admin (#2340)
Increase RSS fetch limit to 20. Fixes #2319 (#2327)
Fix length of post_report.original_post_name db field (fixes #2311) (#2315)
Add pub use for db crates in api_common (#2305)
Accept private like (#1968) (#2301)

Lemmy Release v0.16.4 - Peertube federation, Rust API and other improvements (2022-05-27)

Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.16.4 - Peertube federation, Rust API and other improvements (2022-05-27)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-05-27

What is Lemmy?

Major changes

This version adds a new community setting "restricted". If this is active, only moderators can post in the community (but anyone can comment). This can be useful for announcements or blogs.

In your site settings there is a new field for legal information. This can be used to present terms of service, privacy policy etc.

We've also added an admin setting for the default post listing type. This determines whether users without login, and newly registered users, will see the Local or All timeline by default.

HTML tags are now disabled in markdown, as the were causing some issues.

Federation

Lemmy now federates with Peertube! Be aware that this requires Peertube v4.2.0-rc.1 or later. You can now follow Peertube channels from Lemmy and comment on videos. If there is other functionality that you would like to see federated, please open an issue (the same goes for federation with other projects).

When browsing remote Lemmy communities, you will now see the site description and rules in the sidebar. Some federated actions did not generate mod log entries previously, this has been fixed. Also, federation with Friendica was approved, Lemmy now correctly receives comments with hashtags. Additionally, the previous version had a check which rejected federation in case the domain of user avatars or banners didn't match the user's domain. This check broke federation with some instances, and was removed.

Rust API

If you are thinking of developing a Rust application which interacts with Lemmy, this is now much easier. The lemmy-api-common crate has a new feature which disables all heavy dependencies (like diesel) by default. You can add the crate to your project, and interact with Lemmy API using the exact same structs that Lemmy itself uses. For an example, have a look at lemmyBB. Its in a very early stage, so contributions are welcome!

In other development news, our test instances (ds9.lemmy.ml, voyager.lemmy.ml, enterprise.lemmy.ml) are now updated automatically every night with the latest development version. This should make it easier for admins and users to test new features before they are released. At the same time, join-lemmy.org and its instance list are also updated automatically every night.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost two years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

If you'd like to support development, and make sure that we will always be available to work full time on Lemmy, consider donating to support its development. We've spent hundreds of hours on Lemmy, and would like to be able to add more developers to our little open-source co-op as time goes on.

Changes

API

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.16.0 -> 0.16.4 .

Lemmy

Add legal information (fixes #721) (#2273)
Add drone task for nightly build (#2264)
Fixing malformed rosetta translations. Fixes #2231
Make opentelemetry dependency optional
Remove check that avatars/banners are locally hosted (fixes #2254) (#2255)
Simplify building plain/html emails (#2251)
Federate with Peertube (#2244)
Derive default for api request structs, move type enums (#2245)
Add cargo feature for building lemmy_api_common with mininum deps (#2243)
Add restricted community field to CreateCommunity, UpdateCommunity (ref #2235) (#2242)
Implement restricted community (only mods can post) (fixes #187) (#2235)
Update community statistics after post or comment is deleted by user (#2193)
Accept comments with hashtags from Friendica (#2236)
Remove unused dependencies (#2239)
Fix link metadata unit test (#2237)
Dont return "admin" for GET user when no id/name is provided (fixes #1546) (#2233)
Federation: dont overwrite local object from Announce activity (#2232)
Require registration application by default (#2229)
Add default post listing type (fixes #2195) (#2209)
Show deny reason to users after a failed login. Fixes #2191 (#2206)
Fix allowlist / blocklist description location. Fixes #2214 (#2215)
Split apart api files (#2216)
Changing default listing type to Local from Subscribed.
Expose remote site info in GetCommunity API (fixes #2208) (#2210)
Fixing unstable post sorts. Fixes #2188 (#2204)
Adding lemmy_ui_debug for future debug testing. (#2211)
Fixing generate unique changeme (#2205)
Change Person, Instance types (#2200)
Write mod log for federated sticky/lock post actions (#2203)

Lemmy-UI

Adding Legal info (#666)
Add nightly dev drone cron build. (#664)
Add LEMMY_UI_CUSTOM_SCRIPT env var. Fixes #655 (#656)
Turn off html in markdown. Fixes #650 (#657)
Add posting restricted to mods (#642)
Add default post listing (#645)
Don't render markdown for summaries. Fixes #658 (#659)
Set content security policy http header for all responses (#621)
Adding site sidebar for remote communities. Fixes #626 (#640)
Properly debouncing tribute mentions. Fixes #633 (#639)
Adding litely-red and darkly-red themes. (#636)
Fixing initial loading of admin page. Fixes #635 (#638)
Fixing helmet theme bug. Fixes #628 (#629)
Adding site ban from profile page. Fixes #588 (#627)
Adding sidebar and subscribed collapse. Fixes #609 (#622)
Adding a LEMMY_UI_DEBUG flag for eruda debugging (#624)
Adds OC (#620)

Lemmy v0.16.3 Release: Federation Bug Fixes (2022-04-08)

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.16.3 Release: Federation Bug Fixes (2022-04-08)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-04-08

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

A full list of fixes is below, but this patch release includes federation compatibility and bug fixes, as well as fixing vulnerabilities in our websocket rate limiting.

Upgrade notes

Besides the addition of a search rate limit to the lemmy.hjson, there are no config or API changes.

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost two years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation. If you would like to support our efforts, please consider donating.

Changes

Lemmy Server

Federate user account deletion (fixes #1284) (#2199)
Dont federate initial upvote (#2196)
Add missing mod log entries for federated actions (fixes #1489) (#2198)
Make sure application questionaire is required. Fixes #2189
Fix verify_mod_action check for remote admin actions (#2190)
Run cargo upgrade (#2176)
Migrate towards using page.attachment field for url (ref #2144) (#2182)
Exclude removed/deleted posts from community outbox (#2184)
Fetch community outbox in parallel (fixes #2180) (#2181)
Adding a ban expires update job. Fixes #2177
Add email translations (#2175)
Add test files for Friendica federation (fixes #2144) (#2167)
Lowering search rate limit. Fixes #2153 (#2154)
Rate limit ws joins (#2171)
Delete unused diesel.toml file (#2166)
Rate limit websocket joins. (#2165)
Doing tests in sequential order. Fixes #2158 (#2163)
Dont log errors when rate limit is hit (fixes #2157) (#2161)
Fix rate limit check for register. Fixes #2159
GNU social compatibility (#2100)
Consolidate and lower reqwest timeouts. Fixes #2150 (#2151)
Check that config is valid before saving (#2152)
Dont log error if duplicate activity is received (fixes #2146) (#2148)
WIP: Email localization (fixes #500) (#2053)
If viewed actor isnt in db, fetch it from other instance (#2145)
Show rate limit algorithm. Fixes #2136
Adjust retry interval for sending activities (#2141)
Add jerboa link to readme. Fixes #2137
Forbid remote URLs for avatars/banners (fixes #1618) (#2132)
Remove docker/prod unused files (fixes #2086) (#2133)
Rework error handling (fixes #1714) (#2135)
Dont allow admin to add mod to remote community (#2129)
Reject federated downvotes if downvotes are disabled (fixes #2124) (#2128)

Lemmy UI

Dont allow community urls like /c/{id} (fixes #611) (#612)
Fix loading indicator on search page (fixes #443) (#606)
Upgrade deps (#604)
Remove auth token from error message. Fixes #600 (#601)
Fix error during new site setup (#596)
Differentiate between mods and admins in mod log (#597)
Fix comment fedilink (fixes #594) (#595)

Free Lemmy instance hosting

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Free Lemmy instance hosting

Written by @nutomic, 2022-03-17

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a selfhosted 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.

To see how it works in practice, you can browse the list of existing Lemmy instances.

Free instance hosting

After two years of full-time development, Lemmy is in a very usable state. The main problem facing the project now is a lack of users, and low awareness of the project. To remedy this, we the Lemmy developers are launching a new promotion initiative. We will host selected instances for free, for one year. This can be about any topic, like video games, art, or a general forum for your country. The only exception is politics (there are many political instances already).

The main purpose of this initiative is to promote the Lemmy project, so that more people will use it. For this reason, you should have a plan for growing and promoting the instance. For example, posting about it on your existing blog, posting on other forums, or inviting friends and colleagues. Paid advertising is unnecessary. Additionally, the topic should not be too narrow, but have relatively wide appeal.

At this time, most existing Lemmy instances and users are concentrated in Europe and North America. For this reason, we especially want to encourage people from other parts of the world to apply, and create instances for their own regions. All languages can be used.

If you are interested, send an email to contact@join-lemmy.org (in English) with a summary of the instance you want to create, how you plan to promote it, and some relevant details about yourself. The deadline is on 2022-04-18.

If the application gets accepted, you will be an administrator, which involves a few responsibilities. First of all, you need a domain (the address under which the site can be reached, like join-lemmy.org). Then you will have to configure the instance name, description, rules, and a few other settings. And finally, you will be responsible for the moderation, which means removing spam, banning trolls, and dealing with other unwanted content. As the number of users grows, it makes sense to add more administratos to help with these things. After one year (or earlier at your request), we will transfer all the data to you, so that you can run the instance yourself. Then you need a server to install Lemmy on (or find someone else to help).

Remember, if your potential instance doesn't meet the criteria or is not accepted, you can always setup your own. People will be happy to help with any problems in our Matrix channel or /c/lemmy_support forum.

Please consider sharing this announcement with others who might be interested.

Lemmy v0.16.0 Release: Theming and Federation improvements (2022-03-08)

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.16.0 Release: Theming and Federation improvements (2022-03-08)

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-03-08

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

Theming

Customizing Lemmy is now much easier than before. Instance admins can select a default instance theme under /admin which applies to all users who are not logged in, and those who haven't explicitly picked a theme.

It is also possible now to add custom themes to an instance, without having to recompile lemmy-ui. When running with Docker, make sure that these lines are present in docker-compose.yml (Ansible will add them automatically if you updated the repo). Then put your .css file into ./volumes/lemmy-ui/extra_themes. The new theme can then be selected by users, or set as instance default.

For native installation (without Docker), themes are loaded by lemmy-ui from ./extra_themes folder. A different path can be specified with LEMMY_UI_EXTRA_THEMES_FOLDER environment variable.

For instructions how to create a new theme, have a look at the documentation.

Federation

@nutomic made many changes to federation to increase compatibility with other software. Lemmy can now receive deletions from [Pleroma], comments from [Friendica] and communities from lotide. Other actions were already compatible before. Mastodon can now display communities even when a user with identical name exists (but the user can't be viewed in that case). There were no breaking changes necessary, so federation is fully compatible with 0.15. If you notice something in another project that doesn't federate but should, please open an issue.

Multiple users have pointed out that posts, comments and votes don't federate reliably. We first attempted to fix this in Lemmy 0.15.4 a few days ago, but that didn't help much. Later @nutomic noticed that Lemmy was only sending out activities with 4 worker threads, which is not enough for a big instance like lemmy.ml. At the same time, many of those workers were taken up by sending to broken instances, trying to connect for a minute or more. This version adds a timeout and increases the number of workers.

Federated bans

Until now, only community bans were federated, and the "Remove content" option didn't work over federation. The new version fixes this behaviour, so that both site bans and community bans federate, including "Remove content" option and expiry. Note that this change only affects new bans, those which were issued before upgrading to 0.16 will not be federated.

Hide communities

@dayinjing implemented a funcionality for instance admins to hide controversial communities. A hidden community is only visible to those users who subscribe to it. This represents a milder alternative to removing a community. This functionality is not implemented in lemmy-ui yet, but admins can hide a community like this via command line:

curl -X PUT https://example.com/api/v3/community/hide \
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d \
    '{"community_id":3,"hidden":true,"reason":"*reason for mod log*","auth":"*admin jwt token*"}'

Jerboa: a new android app

To help adoption, and since most people use social media through their smartphones nowadays, @dessalines has been working on a native android app for Lemmy called Jerboa, which is now on F-Droid and Google Play.

It is still at an alpha level, but is very usable. We'd love to have experienced android developers contribute to it.

This now makes three smartphone apps for Lemmy: Lemmur and Jerboa for Android, and Remmel for iOS.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

There are three lemmy.hjson config changes. See defaults.hjson for comments and default values.

changed boolean email.use_tls to email.tls_type
added setup.default_theme
added federation.worker_count

Support development

Changes

API

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.15.0 -> 0.16.0 .

Config

The config changes are here.

Lemmy Server

Make delete activities backwards compatible with 0.15 (#2114)
Make activity queue worker count configurable, log stats (#2113)
Add timeout for sending activities (#2112)
Update actix-* dependencies to stable v4.
Show nsfw communities if you are logged in and searching communities (#2105)
Fix resending activities (fixes #1282) (#2109)
Dont hardcode site id in Site::update (#2110)
send plain-text in email along with html (#2107)
Add site option for default theme (#2104)
Hide community v2 (#2055)
Reorganize federation tests (#2092)
Add logging to debug federation issues (ref #2096) (#2099)
Adding a reqwest timeout. Fixes #2089 (#2097)
Upgrade to Rust 2021 edition (#2093)
Merge different delete activities for better compatibility (fixes #2066) (#2073)
Implement instance actor (#1798)
Use doku(skip) for opentelemetry_url config value (ref #2085) (#2091)
Alpha-ordering community follows. Fixes #2062 (#2079)
Add federation tests for Friendica, improve parsing of source field (fixes #2057) (#2070)

Lemmy UI

Rename theme files from _.min.css to _.css (#590)
Custom themes (#584)
Add option to set site default theme (fixes #559)
Adding nofollow to links. Fixes #542 (#543)
Fix language names (#580)
Move fedi link in post listing location. Fixes #569 (#583)
Don't redirect on server error. Fixes #570 (#582)
Smart select inner content after bold or italics. Fixes #497 (#577)
Fix comment jumping. Fixes #529 (#576)
Add federated post and comment links. Fixes #569 (#575)
Fix community comments iso fetch. Fixes #572 (#574)
Don't allow transfer site. (#551)
Fix report page bugs. Fixes #558 (#568)
Fix post title link bug. Fixes #547 (#563)
Add markdown footnotes. Fixes #561 (#562)

Lemmy Release v0.15.1: Private instances, New User Registrations, Email Verification, and Temporary Bans

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.15.1: Private instances, New User Registrations, Email Verification, and Temporary Bans

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2022-01-12

Lemmy now has private instances, optional registration applications, optional email verification, and temporary bans! These are described in detail below.

Special thanks to @asonix for adding tokio-console and Jaeger + opentelemetry to our dev setups, so we can better identify performance bottlenecks.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to communities you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote and comment on them. Lemmy isn't just a reddit alternative; its a network of interconnected communities ran by different people and organizations, all combining to create a single, personalized front page of your favorite news, articles, and memes.

Major Changes

Required email verification

Admins can turn this on, and new users will need to verify their emails. Current users will not have to do this.

Registration applications

Admins can now optionally make new users fill out an application to join your server. There is a new panel in their top bar where they can approve or deny pending applications.

This works in conjunction with the require_email field. If that is also turned on, the application will only be shown after their email has been verified. The user will receive an email when they have been accepted.

Closed / Private instances

The instance settings now includes a private instance option, which if turned on, will only let logged in users view your site. Private instances was one of our first issues, and it was a large effort, so its great to finally have this completed.

Temporary Bans

When banning users from your site or community, moderators can now optionally give a number of days for the ban to last.

Allow comment replies from blocked users

It used to be that if a user blocked you, you couldn't respond to their public posts and comments. This is now fixed. They won't see your content, but others can.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Support development

Changes

API

We've removed a list of banned users from GetSite, added a few endpoints related to registration applications, made a few changes allowing temporary bans, site settings, made a few changes to the login response. These are non-destructive and current clients should work with this release.

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.14.0 -> 0.15.0 .

Config

There is a new rate limit for creating new comments in the config.hjson.

Lemmy Server

Adding temporary bans. Fixes #1423 (#1999)
Add console-subscriber (#2003)
Opentelemetry (#1992)
Use correct encoding when fetching non-UTF-8 site metadata (#2015)
Adding a banned endpoint for admins. Removing it from GetSite. Fixes #1806
Prevent panic on InboxRequestGuard
Case-insensitive webfinger response. Fixes #1955 & #1986 (#2005)
First pass at invite-only migration. (#1949)
Upgrading pictrs. (#1996)
Trying out an upgraded version of html5ever. #1964 (#1991)
Adding min setup password length to the docs. Fixes #1989 (#1990)
Test pleroma follow (#1988)
Remove awc (#1979)
Consolidate reqwest clients, use reqwest-middleware for tracing
Don't drop error context when adding a message to errors (#1958)
Change lemmur repo links (#1977)
added deps - git and ca-certificates (for federation to work) and changed adduser to useradd so that user can be added non-interactively (#1976)
Allow comment replies from blocked users. Fixes #1793 (#1969)
Fix retry infinite loops. Fixes #1964 (#1967)
Add lotide activities to tests
Allow single item for to, cc, and @context
Adding a captcha rate limit. Fixes #1755 (#1941)
Dont send email notifications for edited comments (fixes #1925)
Fix API dupes query. #1878
Fixing duped report view for admins. Fixes #1933 (#1945)
Adding a GetComment endpoint. Fixes #1919 (#1944)
Fix min title char count for post titles. Fixes #1854 (#1940)
Adding MarkPostAsRead to API. Fixes #1784 (#1946)
background-jobs 0.11 (#1943)
Add tracing (#1942)
Remove pointless community follower sort. (#1939)
Use once_cell instead of lazy_static
Adding unique constraint for activity ap_id. Fixes #1878 (#1935)
Making public key required. Fixes #1934
Change NodeInfo links to an array
Fixing fuzzy_search to escape like chars.
Fix build error in #1914
Fix login ilike bug. Fixes #1920
Fix Smithereen webfinger, remove duplicate webfinger impl (fixes #1916)
Dont announce comments, edited posts to Pleroma/Mastodon followers
Community outbox should only contain activities sent by community (fixes #1916)
Remove HTTP signature compatibility mode (its not necessary)
Implement rate limits on comments

Lemmy UI

Fixed an issue with post embeds not being pushed to a new line #544
Adding as and lt languages, Updating translations.
Temp bans (#524)
Fix banner. Fixes #466 (#534)
Making the modlog badge stand out more. Fixes #531 (#539)
Add some fallback properties for display in older browsers (#535)
Private instances (#523)
Add nord theme. Fixes #520 (#527)
Dont receive post room comments from blocked users. (#516)
Using console.error for error logs. (#517)
Fix issue with websocket buffer.
Switching to websocket-ts. #247 (#515)
Fix native language issue. (zh_Hant) (#513)
Fix tippy on component mount. Fixes #509 (#511)
Fix docker latest (#510)
Enabling html tags in markdown. Fixes #498
Fix comment scroll bug. Fixes #492
Fixing error for null person_block. Fixes #491
Trying to catch promise and json parse errors. #489 (#490)

Lemmy Release v0.14.0: Federation with Mastodon and Pleroma

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.14.0: Federation with Mastodon and Pleroma

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-11-17

Today is an exciting day for the Lemmy project.

Almost one year after first enabling federation, we now federate with other projects for the first time! According to some people's definition, this finally makes us part of the Fediverse.

It took a lot of work to make this possible, so big thanks to NLnet for funding our full time work on Lemmy, and to @lanodan and @asonix for helping to figure out how Pleroma and Mastodon federation works (it's difficult because they have almost no documentation).

What is Lemmy?

Major Changes

Federation code rewrite

The rewrite of the federation code started by @nutomic in August is now mostly complete. As a result, the code is much cleaner, and has tests to guarantee no breaking changes between Lemmy versions. As a side effect of this rewrite, it was now relatively easy to enable federation with other projects.

Mastodon and Pleroma users can:

View Lemmy communities, user profiles, posts and comments
Follow Lemmy communities to receive new posts and comments
Replies (mentions) work in both directions, including notifications

In addition, Pleroma users can exchange private messages with Lemmy users.

Note that Pleroma and Mastodon rely on a compatibility mode in Lemmy, which means that they won't receive events like Deletes or Votes. Other projects whose federation works similar to Pleroma/Mastodon will likely also federate.

Hardcoded slur filter removed

Lemmy finally has essential moderation tools (reporting, user/community blocking), so the hardcoded filter isn't necessary anymore. If you want to keep using the slur filter, copy these lines to your config file when upgrading, and adjust to your liking.

Upgrade notes

If you installed Lemmy without Ansible, you need to edit the nginx config file to follow this example. Otherwise Mastodon won't be able to fetch objects or actors from Lemmy. Ansible applies this change automatically.

No other changes are necessary for federation with Mastodon/Pleroma. Just make sure your allowlist/blocklist allows it. Then get started by searching the URL of a Lemmy user or Community in Mastodon.

Note that Mastodon and Pleroma are much, much bigger than Lemmy at this point, with a combined 3 milion users and 4500 instances, compared to 20.000 users and 35 instances for Lemmy (source). The existing mod tools in Lemmy might not be adequate to handle that at the moment.

Be aware that if you have federation enabled in the Lemmy config, Mastodon and Pleroma users can now fetch all posts and comments, to view them and share with their followers. The Lemmy blocklist/allowlist can not prevent this, it only prevents posts/comments from blocked instances to be shown on your own instance. The only solution to this problem is disabling federation, or waiting for signed fetch to be implemented.

If you want to use federation, but review new instances before federating with them, use the allowlist. You can switch from open federation to allowlist federation by pasting the output of the command below into federation.allowed_instances in the Lemmy config.

curl https://your-instance.com/api/v3/site | jq -c .federated_instances.linked

The lemmy.hjson additional_slurs field has changed its name to slur_filter.

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Lemmy-Ansible

We've now separated our ansible install method (the preferred way to deploy Lemmy) into its own repo, lemmy-ansible. Let us know if you need help migrating existing installations over to it.

Changes

API

There is now a GetUnreadCount in the API to check the count of your unread messages, replies, and mentions.
A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.13.0 -> 0.14.0-rc.1 .

Lemmy Server

More federation compat (#1894)
Adding clippy:unwrap to husky. Fixes #1892 (#1893)
Remove header guard for activitypub routes
Add federation test cases for Smithereen and Mastodon
Reduce stack memory usage in apub code
Remove ActivityFields trait, deserialize into another struct instead
Check if post or comment are deleted first. Fixes #1864 (#1867)
Correctly use and document check_is_apub_id_valid() param use_strict_allowlist
Convert note.content and chat_message.content to html (fixes #1871)
Upgrade background_jobs to 0.9.1 #1820 (#1875)
Fix husky fmt hook. (#1868)
Renaming to slur_filter. Fixes #1773 (#1801)
Three instance inbox bug (#1866)
Remove ansible from this repo. (#1829)
Rewrite collections to use new fetcher (#1861)
Dont blank out post or community info. Fixes #1813 (#1841)
Format config/defaults.hjson before committing (#1860)
Breaking apub changes (#1859)
Pleroma federation2 (#1855)
Create a custom pre-commit hook, generates config/defaults.hjson (#1857)
Add cargo metadata to all crates (#1853)
Add both (De)Serialize to all models (#1851)
Adding GetUnreadCount to the API. Fixes #1794 (#1842)
Federate reports (#1830)
Fix saved posts and hide read posts issue. Fixes #1839 (#1840)
Dont allow posts to deleted / removed communities. Fixes #1827 (#1828)
Dont swallow API errors (fixes #1834) (#1837)
Fix federation of initial post/comment vote (fixes #1824) (#1835)
Fix clippy warnings added in nightly (#1833)
Admins can view all reports. Fixes #1810 (#1825)
Adding a message_id to emails. Fixes #1807 (#1826)
Generate config docs from code (#1786)
Trying a background_jobs fix. #1820 (#1822)
mark parent as read on reply (#1819)
Move code to apub library (#1795)
Adding honeypot to user and post creation. Fixes #1802 (#1803)
Add database host back into config file (#1805)

Lemmy UI

Updating translations.
Fixing unload (#487)
Fix setup password. Fixes #478 (#484)
Adding post comment scrolling hack. Fixes #480 #486
Navbar links (#476)

Lemmy Release v0.13.0: Comment and Post reporting are here!

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.13.0: Comment and Post reporting are here!

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-09-30

Since our last release earlier this month, we've had ~30 commits to Lemmy.

Major Changes

Added comment and post reporting in the front end, and cleaned up the reporting API.
- Note: these are local-only currently, reports are not yet federated.
The JWT secret is now auto-generated by the database.
- Note: this will log out all users, so users will have to log in again.
Lots of smaller UI fixes listed below.

Upgrade notes

Servers

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.13.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Changes

Lemmy Server

General

Adding a user agent. Fixes #1769
Ansible changes (#1781)
Clean up reporting (#1776)
Implement webmention support (fixes #1395)
Move jwt secret from config to database (fixes #1728)
Set a 10 char minimum password length.
Dont pass accept-encoding header to pictrs (ref #1734) (#1738)

API

There are no breaking API changes, only the addition of reporting endpoints.
A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.12.0 -> 0.13.0 .

Federation

Rewrite fetcher (#1792)

Lemmy UI

Adding bn, ml, and cs langs
Reporting (#434)
Splitting login and signup pages. Fixes #386 (#431)
Fixing image in newtab. Fixes #382 (#430)
Navigate away from login page if already logged in. (#429)
Add username validation message. Fixes #387 (#428)
Password strength meter (#427)
Fix community display name overflow. Fixes #390 (#425)
Fix logout bug. Fixes #391 (#424)
Fix up post, profile and community forms. Fixes #409 (#423)
Adding markdown audio and video embeds. Fixes #420 (#421)
Adding Si simplifier (#418)
Fix profile paging. Fixes #416 (#417)
Use my fork of inferno-i18next. Fixes #413 (#415)
Add version to package.json . Fixes #411

Lemmy.ml now uses open federation

Sat, 04 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy.ml now uses open federation

Written by @dessalines, 2021-09-04

You no longer have to ask us to add you manually, you can subscribe and interact without the approval process.

Lemmy Release v0.12.0. User and Community blocking, lean federation, and a whole lot more

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.12.0. User and Community blocking, lean federation, and a whole lot more

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-09-03

Since our last release in April, we've had ~80 commits to Lemmy.

Lemmy Server

Major Changes

Note: Issue links are below.

@nutomic did a major rewrite of the federation code. It is much simpler now, and reduced from 8000 lines of code to 6400. Functionality is mostly the same, but future changes will be much easier.
You can now block users and communities, and their posts / comments won't show up in your feed.
Removed IFramely: Lemmy can now fetch site metadata on its own.
New API docs at: https://join-lemmy.org/api

General

Fix prod deploy script and clippy (#1724)
Fix image uploads. Fixes #1725 (#1734)
Adding more site setup vars. Fixes #678 (#1718)
Dont append ? to url when cleaning it (#1716)
User / community blocking. Fixes #426 (#1604)
Swap out iframely (#1706)
Adding ModTransferCommunity to modlog in API. Fixes #1437
Make sure bots aren't included in aggregate counts (#1705)
Don't allow deleted users to do actions. Fixes #1656 (#1704)
When banning a user, remove communities they've created (#1700)
Distribute Lemmy via crates.io
Simplify config using macros (#1686)
Simplify lemmy_context() function (dont return errors)
Blank out extra info for deleted or removed content. Fixes #1679 (#1680)
Add show_new_posts_notifs setting. Fixes #1664 (#1665)
Adding shortname fetching for users and communities. Fixes #1662 (#1663)
Upgrading deps, running clippy fix on nightly 1.55.0 (#1638)
Running clippy --fix (#1647)
Make captcha case-insensitive
Remove tracking params from post url (fixes #768)
Fix IPv6 port setup for Nginx (#1636)
Fix --cert-name for certbot. (#1631)
Change join.lemmy.ml to join-lemmy.org (#1628)
Upgrade pictrs. Fixes #1599 (#1600)
Invalidate current logins on account deletion. Fixes #1602 (#1603)
Upgrading api test deps (#1608)
Fix nsfw posts showing for non-logged in users. Fixes #1614 (#1615)
Add additional slurs configuration option. Closes #1464. (#1612)
Updating to rust 1.51.0 (#1598)
Remove brotli, zstd dependencies for faster compilation

API

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.12.0 .

Federation

Move resolving of activitypub objects to separate api endpoint (fixes #1584)
Rewrite remaining activities (#1712)
Migrate comment inReplyTo field to single value (ref #1454)
Fix issue with protocol string in actor id generation (#1668)

Lemmy UI

Integrating resolve_user into search. (#377)
Add lazy loading of images. Fixes #329 (#379)
Adding vi, sk, mnc, and cy languages. (#378)
Feature/user community block (#362)
Swapping out iframely. (#374)
Adding mod transfer community (#373)
Remove content more (#372)
Scroll to comments on post's x comments button (#312)
Remove websocket connection messages. Fixes #355
Center spinner, make smaller. Fixes #203
Fix font issues. Fixes #354
Have setting to disable notifs for new posts. Fixes #132 (#345)
Remove max length constraints on actors. Fixes #350 (#351)
Fix captcha replay bug. Fixes #348 (#349)
Removing community and user routes in favor of shortnames. Fixes #317 (#343)
Don't use default subscribed for communities page.
Adding Listing type to communities page, default local. #190 (#342)
Fix language bug on mobile browsers
Collapse sidebar on mobile. Fixes #335 (#340)
Re-organized components folder. (#339)
Fixing too many large spinners (#337)
Moving comment link to top bar. Fixes #307 (#336)
Fix/ws error messages (#334)
Make spinner bigger. Fixes #203
Fix preview description html. Fixes #110
Always show previous paginator, extract paginator component.
Use better comment collapse icon, and add text. Fixes #318
Fix symbols issue. Fixes #319
Don't restore scroll position on page refresh. Fixes #186
Insert triple backticks for 'code' button when multiple lines are selected. (#311)
Change join.lemmy-ui.ml to join-lemmy-ui.org
Adding a comment here placeholder. Fixes #301
Fix non-local community and person links. Fixes #290
Fix navbar bug. Fixes #289
Hide names of mods / admins without priveleges. Fixes #285
Adding URL search type. Fixes #286
Add a link to joinlemmy-ui on lemmy-ui.ml signup. Fixes #235
Fix duped site description. Fixes #281

Upgrade notes

Servers

You may need to add this to your lemmy.hjson:

pictrs_url: "http://pictrs:8080"

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.12.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Clients / Apps

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.12.0 .

Promoting Lemmy

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Promoting Lemmy

Written by @nutomic, 2021-08-09

I think most of us agree that the main problem which Lemmy has today is its lack of users. This is not for technical reasons, as we know it is quite stable and usable. The main cause is that the project is not widely known yet. In this post I will propose what we can do to change that.

First, lets clarify why we should promote Lemmy. Clearly there are many different reasons, and every person prioritizes them differently. So I will just give some common examples:

Promote open source (and all the benefits that entails)
No advertising or tracking
Allow communities to manage themselves, instead of being controlled by corporations
Making Lemmy more active, particularly if you would like to see more discussions on certain topics

So how can we promote Lemmy?

I think one of the most effective thing we can do at this point is to post about Lemmy in other communities where we are active. This has the benefit that other people already trust us to some degree. Open source projects looking to setup a forum might also be a good target. When doing this, we should consider which aspects of the project would be most important to the target audience, and emphasize those.

Another option is to contact bloggers, video creators, podcasters or others, and suggest that they report about Lemmy. As above, it is important to adjust the message to the target audience. Because Lemmy is quite small, it is unlikely that major tech magazines or professional content creators would care about it. Instead we should focus on smaller creators. This will also lead to more sustainable growth, and give us some legitimacy in the eyes of bigger creators.

In both cases, we should avoid doing anything that might be perceived as spam. It is better to create one or two high-quality messages, which will give a good impression of the project, rather than a dozen generic ones that tarnish the reputation.

It is worth noting that some important features are still missing in Lemmy, particularly mod tools (we are going to implement them in the next ~12 months). There also aren't many different instances yet.

When promoting Lemmy like this, please avoid linking to lemmy.ml directly. This instance is already too big relative to other instances, and it is not meant to be a "flagship instance" (What is lemmy.ml?). Instead you should try to find an appropriate instance on join-lemmy.org and link to it, or link to the joinlemmy site directly. You can also explicitly encourage the creation of new instances.

On a side note, it might be worth mentioning the many ways that people can contribute to Lemmy (again depending on the audience). There are the obvious ones, like writing code for lemmy and lemmy-ui, writing documentation or translating. There are also multiple interesting options to create new projects, such as:

Create an alternative frontend: nojs frontend like lemmy-lite, a traditional forum frontend or something like stackoverflow
Create a new client, be it for mobile, desktop or terminal.
Gather instance statistics using lemmy-stats-crawler, and build some nice graphs.

By the way, Lemmy is not just a Reddit alternative, so there is no reason to limit the promotion to Reddit.

To help with these promotion efforts, @dessalines and I would be happy to give interviews via email (in English, German or Spanish). For that, they can get in touch by mailing contact@lemmy.ml.

Lemmy Release v0.11.0

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.11.0

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-04-27

Since our last release this month, we've had ~60 commits to Lemmy.

Lemmy Server

Major Changes

Add option to disable strict allowlist ( #1486) documentation
Add option to limit community creation to admins only (#1587)
Many search improvements:
- Don't search for communities or users when the id is included.
- Add creator id to search.

General

Adding a user setting to show / hide scores. Fixes #1503
Add option to hide read posts. Fixes #1561
Mark accounts as bot, and hide bot posts/comments
Adding a short site description, to be used for joinlemmy instance list
Adding matrix id validation. Fixes #1520
Adding users active monthly for community sort. Fixes #1527
Don't allow zero-space char in display name. Fixes #1317
Adding more rust captcha features. Fixes #1248
Fixing slur filter regex. Fixes #1593

API

Added ChangePassword as a separate endpoint from SaveUserSettings
No other breaking changes, but many fields that were previously required are now optional.
A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.10.0 -> 0.11.0 .

Federation

Implement federated bans fixes #1298
Remote mods can update/delete/undelete communities.

Lemmy UI

Updating translations.
Add UI version to UI via docker. Fixes #263
Add Korean language
Add check for unused languages in update_translations.sh
Validate matrix id on the front end. Fixes #245
Communities page sorts by monthly active users. Fixes #244
Correctly render HTML in popup notifications
Fix html notif bug. Fixes #254
Fixing issue with debounce. Fixes #236

Upgrade notes

Servers

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.11.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Clients / Apps

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.10.0 -> 0.11.0 .

Lemmy v0.10.0 Release

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy v0.10.0 Release

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-04-05

Changes

Since our last release in February, we've had ~150 commits to Lemmy. The biggest changes, as we'll outline below, are a split of Lemmy's user tables into federated and local tables, necessitating a v3 of Lemmy's API, federated moderation, i18n support in join.lemmy.ml, and lots of back-end cleanup.

Lemmy Server

General

Rewrote config implementation, finally allowing us to use newer Rust versions.
Removed categories.
Various refactors.

API

A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.9.9 -> 0.10.0 .
Login invalidation on password change, thanks to @Mart-Bogdan

Federation

It is now possible to add users from other instances as community mods.
Federating Matrix ID.
Many changes for better compatibility with ActivityPub standard.

Database

Split the user_ into person and local_user tables.
Strictly typed commonly used ID columns, to prevent DB errors using i32 as ids.
Strictly typed URL fields, thanks to ajyoon.
Created default DB forms, now used in all the unit tests.

Lemmy UI

Now using utf-8 emojis.
Support for all the above changes to Lemmy.
Typescript-safe i18n strings, thanks to @shilangyu.
Added expandable post text (click on open book icon).
Prettier cross-posting, which does smart quoting.
Bugfixes for restoring scroll position on post page, custom site favicons, and autocomplete for login fields.

Lemmy Docs

Gazconroy built an Async API spec for Lemmy, that now serves as our main API docs.

join.lemmy.ml

Rewrote in inferno isomorphic, added i18n support via weblate.
Added a section on the support page thanking contributors.
Changed some page urls / titles

Upgrade notes

Important: there are multiple breaking changes:

Configuration via environment variables is not supported anymore, you must have all your config in the lemmy.hjson file ( except for LEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATION ).
The config format for allowed_instances and blocked_instances has changed, and you need to adjust your config file manually:
- before: allowed_instances: ds9.lemmy.ml,enterprise.lemmy.ml
- now: allowed_instances: ["ds9.lemmy.ml", "enterprise.lemmy.ml"] , and only one of the allowed_instances or blocked_instances blocks can be set.
The API has been upgraded from v2 to v3, so all clients need to be updated: lemmy-js-client: 0.9.9 -> 0.10.0 .

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.10.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Compilation time

	v0.9.0 (Rust 1.47)	v0.10.0 (Rust 1.47)	v0.10.0 (Rust 1.51)
Clean	140s	146s	119s
Incremental	28s	22s	19s

Despite ongoing efforts to speed up compilation, it has actually gotten slower when comparing with the same Rust version. Only thanks to improvements in newer Rust versions has our build process gotten faster. This could be simply because we added more code, while Lemmy v0.9.0 had 22.4k lines of Rust, v0.10.0 has 23.8k (an increase of 6%).

v0.9.0 build graph:

v0.10.0 build graph:

We extracted the crates lemmy_api_crud and lemmy_apub_receive from lemmy_api and lemmy_apub, respectively, and renamed lemmy_structs to lemmy_api_common. In the second graph you can see how parts of the api and apub crates are now built nicely in parallel, speeding up builds on multi-core systems.

On the other hand, some crates have gotten much slower to compile, in particular lemmy_db_queries (6.5s slower), lemmy_apub (6.5s slower if we include lemmy_apub_receive). And lemmy_db_views is quite slow, just as before.

Lemmy Release v0.9.0

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.9.0

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2021-01-25

Changes

Since our last release in October of last year, and we've had ~450 commits.

The biggest changes, as we'll outline below, are a re-work of Lemmy's database structure, a v2 of Lemmy's API, and activitypub compliance fixes. The new re-worked DB is much faster, easier to maintain, and now supports hierarchical rather than flat objects in the new API.

We've also seen the first release of Lemmur, an android / iOS (soon) / windows / linux client, as well as Lemmer, a native iOS client. Much thanks to @krawieck, @shilangyu, and @uuttff8 for making these great clients. If you can, please contribute to their patreon to help fund lemmur development.

LemmyNet projects

Lemmy Server

Moved views from SQL to Diesel. This was a spinal replacement for much of lemmy.
- Removed all the old fast_tables and triggers, and created new aggregates tables.
Added a v2 of the API to support the hierarchical objects created from the above changes.
Moved continuous integration to drone, now includes formatting, clippy, and cargo build checks, unit testing, and federation testing. Drone also deploys both amd64 and arm64 images to dockerhub.
Split out documentation into git submodule.
Shortened slur filter to avoid false positives.
Added query performance testing and comparisons. Added indexes to make sure every query is < 30 ms.
Added compilation time testing.

Federation

This release includes some bug fixes for federation, and some changes to get us closer to compliance with the ActivityPub standard.

None of these are breaking changes, so federation between 0.9.0 and 0.8.11 will work without problems.

Lemmy javascript / typescript client

Updated the lemmy-js-client to use the new v2 API. Our API docs now reference this project's files, to show what the http / websocket forms and responses should look like.
Drone now handles publishing its npm packages.

Lemmy-UI

Updated it to use the v2 API via lemmy-js-client, required changing nearly every component.
Added a live comment count.
Added drone deploying, and builds for ARM.
Fixed community link wrapping.
Community Titles are now used instead of names.
Various other bug fixes.

Lemmy Docs

We moved documentation into a separate git repository, and support translation for the docs now!
Moved our code of conduct into the documentation.

Upgrading

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

Known issues

Some older self-comments are being marked as unread in your inbox, click Mark all as read to resolve this.

Lemmy Release v0.8.0 - Federation beta!

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Lemmy Release v0.8.0 - Federation beta!

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2020-10-20

Changes

We've been working at warp speed since our v0.7.0 release in June, adding over 870 commits since then. :sweat:

Here are some of the bigger changes:

LemmyNet projects

Created LemmyNet, where all lemmy-related projects live.
Split out the frontend into a separete repository, lemmy-ui
Created a lemmy-js-client, for any js / typescript developers.
Split out i18n lemmy-translations, that any app or site developers can import and use. Lemmy currently supports ~30 languages!

Lemmy Server

Federation

The first federation public beta release, woohoo :fireworks:
All Lemmy functionality now works over ActivityPub (except turning remote users into mods/admins)
Instance allowlist and blocklist
Documentation for admins and devs on how federation works
Upgraded to newest versions of @asonix activitypub libraries
Full local federation setup for manual testing
Automated testing for nearly every federation action
Many additional security checks
Lots and lots of refactoring
Asynchronous sending of outgoing activities

User Interface

Separated the UI from the server code, in lemmy-ui.
The UI can now read with javascript disabled!
It's now a fully isomorphic application using inferno-isomorphic. This means that page loads are now much faster, as the server does the work.
The UI now also supports open-graph and twitter cards! Linking to lemmy posts (from whatever platform you use) looks pretty now:
Improved the search page ( more features incoming ).
The default view is now Local, instead of All, since all would show all federated posts.
User settings are now shared across browsers ( a page refresh will pick up changes ).
A much leaner mobile view.

Backend

Re-organized the rust codebase into separate workspaces for backend and frontend.
Removed materialized views, making the database a lot faster.
New post sorts Active (previously called hot), and Hot. Active shows posts with recent comments, hot shows highly ranked posts.
New sort for Local ( meaning from local communities).
Customizeable site, user, and community icons and banners.
Added user preferred names / display names, bios, and cakedays.
Visual / Audio captchas through the lemmy API.
Lots of API field verifications.
Upgraded to pictrs-v2 ( thanks to @asonix )
Wayyy too many bugfixes to count.

Contributors

We'd also like to thank both the NLnet foundation for their support in allowing us to work full-time on Lemmy ( as well as their support for other important open-source projects ), those who sponsor us, and those who help translate Lemmy. Every little bit does help. We remain committed to never allowing advertisements, monetizing, or venture-capital in Lemmy; software should be communal, and should benefit humanity, not a small group of company owners.

Upgrading

Testing Federation

Federation is finally ready in Lemmy, pending possible bugs or other issues. So for now we suggest to enable federation only on test servers, or try it on our own test servers ( enterprise, ds9, voyager ).

If everything goes well, after a few weeks we will enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml, at first with a limited number of trusted instances. We will also likely change the domain to https://lemmy.ml . Keep in mind that changing domains after turning on federation will break things.

To enable on your instance, edit your lemmy.hjson federation section to enabled: true, and restart.

Connecting to another server

The server https://ds9.lemmy.ml has open federation, so after either adding it to the allowed_instances list in your config.hjson, or if you have open federation, you don't need to add it explicitly.

To federate / connect with a server, type in !community_name@server.tld, in your server's search box like so.

To connect with the main community on ds9, the search is !main@ds9.lemmy.ml.

You can then click the community, and you will see a local version of the community, which you can subscribe to. New posts and comments from !main@ds9.lemmy.ml will now show up on your front page, or /c/All

NLnet funding, and Lemmy v0.7.0 with new image hosting!

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

NLnet funding, and Lemmy v0.7.0 with new image hosting!

Written by @dessalines and @nutomic, 2020-06-23

Let's start with the biggest news first: Lemmy is receiving funding from the NLnet foundation! The funding is for a total amount of 45.000 €, which will allow /u/dessalines and me (/u/nutomic ) to work on Lemmy full-time for at least half a year.

We have created various milestones for the work we are planning to do. Most of them are about getting ActivityPub federation ready for production. In addition, we will work on:

better accessibility
private communities and instances
reworking search
creating a joinlemmy.ml type site
the option to block other users or communities

The details of the milestones will be posted on our github issue tracker soon.

We're very excited about this opportunity, and can't wait to finish federation.

In other news, we have just released Lemmy v0.7.0. Most importantly, this update switches to Pict-rs for image hosting, due to various performance-related issues with Pictshare. Pict-rs was coded from scratch in Rust by the amazing @asonix, who also created the ActivityPub library for Rust. We can't thank him enough for all the work he is doing for Lemmy!

We'd also like to thank the following people for their contributions:

@iav for their work in building arm compatible rust docker images and builds.
@ernestwisniewski and @bytesnake for code contributions.
Many others for contributing translations via the Lemmy weblate.
Our Patreon and Liberapay supporters who help us devote more time to Lemmy (We're still very far from these being able to sustain two developers)
Everyone else who contributes to Lemmy, be it by coding, hosting instances or just using it and spreading the word!

Other than that, since v0.6.0 in January we've closed over 100 issues, fixed tons of bugs and added many new features.

You can find the full changelog and upgrade instructions here.

Edit: Here are the milestones for the funding

Avatars, email notifications, and a whole lot more

Thu, 16 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Avatars, email notifications, and a whole lot more

Written by @dessalines, 2020-01-16

v0.6.0 is here, and we've closed 41 issues!

This is the biggest release by far:

Avatars!
Optional Email notifications for username mentions, post and comment replies.
Ability to change your password and email address.
Can set a custom language.
Lemmy-wide settings to disable downvotes, and close registration.
A better documentation system, hosted in lemmy itself.
Huge DB performance gains (everthing down to < 30ms) by using materialized views.
Fixed major issue with similar post URL and title searching.
Upgraded to Actix 2.0
Faster comment / post voting.
Better small screen support.
Lots of bug fixes, refactoring of back end code.

Another major announcement is that Lemmy now has another lead developer besides me, @felix@radical.town. Theyve created a better documentation system, implemented RSS feeds, simplified docker and project configs, upgraded actix, working on federation, a whole lot more.

https://dev.lemmy.ml

RSS feeds, custom language, url archiving, lots of bugs fixed

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

RSS feeds, custom language, url archiving, lots of bugs fixed

Written by @dessalines, 2019-12-09

Special thanks to @felix@radical.town for the RSS work!

https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/milestone/14?closed=1

Username mentions, Default sorts, Vaporwave theme, Password Recovery, Arm64

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Username mentions, Default sorts, Vaporwave theme, Password Recovery, Arm64

Written by @dessalines, 2019-11-02

Lemmy Release v0.4.0 - Username mentions, Default sorts, Vaporwave theme, Password Recovery, Arm64 support.

Closed issues here.

Special thanks to @iav for assistance with Arm Dockerfiles.

Vaporwave theme:

Themes, Auto-Updating front page, perma-deletes, custom rate limits

Tue, 15 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Themes, Auto-Updating front page, perma-deletes, custom rate limits

Written by @dessalines, 2019-10-15

Closed issues here.

How to change theme:

Image Uploads, Stickied Posts, Online Users count, View Source button

Thu, 19 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Image Uploads, Stickied Posts, Online Users count, View Source button

Written by @dessalines, 2019-09-19

Issue list on Github

Emojis, Usable Search urls, mod actions on post creators, UI Tweak

Fri, 06 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Emojis, Usable Search urls, mod actions on post creators, UI Tweak

Written by @dessalines, 2019-09-06

Issue list on Github