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

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

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

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)