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.

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

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

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.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Hi!

In the Apollo app (basically the reason i started using reddit and the reason i also left reddit lol) there was a very useful feature: friends.

It was not a mutual friendlist like facebook, and not even much of a follow like twitter; it was more a ''favorite users'' list.

Basically I added in there people that always commented stuff I was interested in and this helped me find new communities and interesting post without relying on other discovery ways. Seen the decentralized nature of lemmy, i think it could be even more useful than on reddit.

Don't , we're just doing some server upgrades.

There is "block instance" under "settings > blocks" but what does it do? I added a few onto the list but it seems does nothing to remove contents links to the instance.

What I want to achieve is to block all users post from specific instances when spams are high.

So I've just found out about Lemmy. (Although I'm a big FOSS enthusiast)

Choose this app for my Android device, and boy nothing beats it's minimalism!

An idea I just recently had was to add the ability for users to verify accounts on Lemmy using Matrix accounts as an alternative to Email. I think this would be a great idea since it allows for users to have choices in how they sign-up to their accounts. It would also encourage more usage of Matrix accounts for secure messaging between users, a feature which hasn't seen much use among users here.

It would still in most cases be optional and server admins could choose if it's even enabled at all, just like how email verification is right now. Even if it was required I feel like it should be a supplement to email in most cases but servers could choose to make it required instead of email, especially in cases where they don't have a mail server.

The different states of it could be:

• Matrix or Email Required
• Matrix required, Email optional
• Email Required, Matrix optional
• Email and/or Matrix Optional

Servers could also choose to have the matrix account used for verification be on a server that isn't their own, though this would generally be discouraged and would be specifically for admins who don't have their own infrastructure (like the ones who don't have a mail server).

I made an issue on the Main Lemmy github, feel free to check it out here. Feel free to either share your opinions on this here or on the Github issue.

Slightly triggered by the post My blog now has Lemmy comments, I thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look at another great representative of the Fediverse world: Lemmy. Of course, also with an eye on the possibility of developing another Mentions United Provider Plugin, along the lines of what “Coship” can do, I also can do and that for everyone ;) ...

Hello.

I was developing a system/tutorial on how to build a self-hosted, collaborative content circulation no-code setup, using nocodb and n8n.

n8n does not yet support lemmy, not even through community nodes.

I can try to go through the API using the HTTP node, but I wanted to ask if there's some tutorial with examples that I can use, because so far most of the documentation I've found is focused on building alternative clients and that's a lot of overhead, especially in how I'm supposed to handle the credentials.

That said, I'm opening this postly mostly to see if there would be interest in developing a community node. This should be a quite easy project for anybody familiar with Lemmy and Lemmy's REST API. Here's a community node for mastodon, that looks quite close to what Lemmy's community node could look like.

https://github.com/n8n-community-node/n8n-nodes-mastodon/tree/master/nodes/Mastodon

It's mostly a matter of specifying a bunch of metadata about the fields of the node, and implement a few calls to the API. I know some TS and JS but they are not my strongest language. If somebody is willing to lead this effort though, I could contribute some code and some design documents.

Basically title. I can't send anything without compressing it a lot (to like 256 colors).

Community.

I thought it's weird that I can see my post in my instance, but I can't see it in the lemmy.world instance community page.

My other posts can show up: https://feddit.org/post/4050499

What is happening?

Edit 1: solved.

I feel like there's an easy win to keep up with the fragmentation of discussions without waiting for some implementation of this feature request.

All a frontend needs to do is group all posts with the same URL together and display all their comments in the as one unified comment section. If you reply to the OP, you can either choose which community the comment goes to, and maybe set a default as well.

This functionality should be an extra switch for the frontend, so that the user can disable it and see individual posts.

This also nicely avoids not knowing how to deal with moderation, as each community moderator still maintains control.

Comments from blocked communities would not appear ofc.

This would both prevent seeing the same post multiple times on your feed, but also drive view to smaller communities where comment in their sections are ignored.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/29713631

you don't have to tell me information about why Rui's drive is gone, I just googled it because I forgot their name (I thought it was Anadius' drive at first)

Ref post.

I noticed a huge difference between the post and what I see, which got me curious.

What is the reason?

This is mostly me just typing into the void, but I noticed that my 1,000th post was coming up and decided to do something to commemorate it.

I first joined Lemmy in Janurary 2021, before the June 2023 craze. Lemmy was a much different place back then, practically a ghost town. Eventually, I only used Lemmy for a few months, then reluctantly went back to lurking Reddit.

Fast forward to June 2023, with Reddit announcing their new API changes. People were furious, and you all decided that the best course of action was to move to an open-source, federated Reddit alternative. You all chose wisely.

It took a while, but very soon, Lemmy became (mostly) what Reddit lost, and it's all thanks to you guys! A lot has happened in the past 14 months, with me starting my weekly "disc market share" reports on !homevideo@feddit.uk and me somehow becoming one of the co-moderators of !movies@lemm.ee. So many posts, cross-posts, so many comments, and upvotes.

And now, I've reached my 1,000th Lemmy post. I never imagined that Lemmy would grow to become the second-most popular ActivityPub service! Thanks to the Lemmy devs and all the contributors and users that make this possible!

I'm logged in with my account on boost.

I am thinking of resetting my phone. I don't remember password.

I have tried resetting password multiple times, but not getting any email.

Doing some server upgrade testing.

Time zone converter

Hello, I'm a community moderator and I noticed that my updates to the community sidebar constantly get cancelled. Is this a known bug?

More details:

• I can save the new state and it displays the new state correctly, both from the community's instance and from mine, but it changes back to the previous state after some time, going from a few hours to several days.
• I'm not 100% sure but it seems like the sidebar reverts to its previous state after I make a new post in the community.
• The last time I needed to make a change was in March and it worked perfectly. I've been trying to make this one stick since October 10th.

I apologize if this is not right to post here but im not sure where to go with this one as i havent really found an answer myself.

See, heres the thing, as yall surely know when i hit enter on a line once it will not work, it has to be two.

Is that intentional, if so why?

how does one disable that?

cross-posted from: https://eventfrontier.com/post/150886

I'm pleased to announce the release of Echo for Lemmy! Echo is a Lemmy client for iPhone that I've been working on for a while and I'm excited to finally share it with you all.

Echo for Lemmy is a fully native iOS application built using fully native Apple SDKs. This means it feels right at home on your iPhone and is designed to be fast, efficient, and easy to use. No overhead from web views or cross-platform frameworks.

Here are some of the features available in Echo for Lemmy:

• Connect with communities based on your interests.
• Sort your feed by most active, trending posts, new posts, and many more.
• Upvote and downvote posts & comments.
• Powerful search experience to find the content you're looking for.
• Create posts using share extension from any app on your device.
• Bookmark posts to easily find later.
• Fully native application with dark mode support & accessibility features.

Echo for Lemmy is available for free on the App Store, with subscription plans available for Echo+. You can download it here: Echo for Lemmy on the App Store.

You can also join the official Echo Lemmy community at [!echo@eventfrontier.com](/c/echo@eventfrontier.com).

I'm excited to hear feedback, suggestions, bug reports, and feature suggestions. Feel free to comment here, or create a new post! You can also reach out via email at support@rrainn.com.

This is only the beginning. Much more to come!

Download Echo for Lemmy: https://echo.rrainn.com/download/iphone

Echo Lemmy Community: !echo@eventfrontier.com

Echo Mastodon Profile: @echo@mstdn-social.com

Rather than communities being hosted by an instance, they should function like hashtags, where each instance hosts posts to that community that originate from their instance, and users viewing the community see the aggregate of all of these. Let me explain.

Currently, communities are created and hosted on a single instance, and are moderated by moderators on that instance. This is generally fine, but it has some undesirable effects:

• Multiple communities exist for the same topics on different instances, which results in fractured discussions and duplicated posts (as people cross-post the same content to each of them).
• One moderation team is responsible for all content on that community, meaning that if the moderation team is biased, they can effectively stifle discussion about certain topics.
• If an instance goes down, even temporarily, all of its communities go down with it.
• Larger instances tend to edge out similar communities on other instances, which just results in slow consolidation into e.g. lemmy.ml and lemmy.world. This, in turn, puts more strain on their servers and can have performance impact.

I'm proposing a new way of handling this:

• Rather than visiting a specific community, e.g. worldnews@lemmy.world, you could simply visit the community name, like a hashtag. This is, functionally, the same as visiting that community on your own local instance: [yourinstance]/c/worldnews
  • You'd see posts from all instances (that your instance is aware of), from their individual /worldnews communities, in a single feed.
  • If you create a new post, it would originate from your instance (which effectively would create that community on your instance, if it didn't previously exist).
  • Other users on other instances would, similarly, see your post in their feed for that "meta community".
• Moderation is handled by each instance's version of that community separately.
  • An instance's moderators have full moderation rights over all posts, but those moderator actions only apply to that instance's view of the community.
    • If a post that was posted on lemmy.ml is deleted by a moderator on e.g. lemmy.world, a user viewing the community from lemmy.ml could still see it (unless their moderators had also deleted the post).
    • If a post is deleted by moderators on the instance it was created on, it is effectively deleted for everyone, regardless of instance.
    • This applies to all moderator actions. Banning a user from a community stops them from posting to that instance's version of the community, and stops their posts from showing up to users viewing the community through that instance.
    • Instances with different worldviews and posting guidelines can co-exist; moderators can curate the view that appears to users on their instance. A user who disagreed with moderator actions could view the community via a different instance instead.
• Users could still visit the community through another instance, as we do now - in this case, [yourinstance]/c/worldnews@lemmy.world, for example.
  • In this case, you'd see lemmy.world's "view" of the community, including all of their moderator actions.

The benefit is that communities become decentralized, which is more in line with (my understanding of) the purpose of the fediverse. It stops an instance from becoming large enough to direct discussion on a topic, stops community fragmentation due to multiple versions of the community existing across multiple instances, and makes it easier for smaller communities to pop up (since discoverability is easier - you don't have to know where a community is hosted, you just need to know the community name, or be able to reasonably guess it. You don't need to know that a community for e.g. linux exists or where it is, you just need to visit [yourinstance]/c/linux and you'll see posts.

If an instance wanted to have their own personal version of a community, they could either use a different tag (e.g. world_news instead of worldnews), or, one could choose to view only local posts.

Go ahead, tear me apart and tell me why this is a terrible idea.

For admins and moderators, keeping the comment counts including bot comments visible (especially in a moderators' own communities) may be valuable, but not sure if it's all that valuable for ordinary users.

Would it be possible to make it so bot comments don't add to the counts for regular users, or at least for those that have disabled the display of bot posts/comments? As-is seeing an indication of a comment for a post only for it to turn out to be a bot is slightly disappointing at best, and mildly confusing at worst when their display has been disabled.

It's a great feature while browsing All/Subscribed/Local, but some people (including me) seem to think this can be confusing/annoying while browsing a specific community directly.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2104

Any thoughts on this?

I first became aware of this about 4 months ago.

GitHub issue is 3069:

It would be awesome if we could follow a post to be alerted of new comments added.

As we are at it, why stop with posts? I'd suggest also having such alerts with comment sub-trees would be nice.

I was in a thread in !fediverse@lemmy.world earlier today, and it seems like there is still interest in this feature.

Last I heard, it seemed like progress on this feature is dependent on fixing an SQL Paging and filtering issue.

Any progress on this? Anything we can do to expedite the development of this feature?

We're testing some beta's for the upcoming release, and it had some performance issues, so I had to downgrade and restore from a backup.

We do this testing here so other instances don't have to, and so we can find any bugs before a release. Again, this is my bad, I apologize.

Watch out for that sub. The mods over there don't seem to be in good faith and remove any content they don't like which isn't direct and blatant hate toward religion. If you want to engage in any serious atheist or religious discussion i suggest you to avoid it.