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

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

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.

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: 0.15.0 -> 0.16.0 .

Config

• The config changes are here.

This should help us cut down on the trolls. We recommend other instances do the same, because they will likely be targeted also.

I apologize for all their gore-posts as well, no one should have to see that. We'll try to look for more admins from different time-zones as well to get them faster.

The two other possibilities we have currently as options, are turning on required email verification, and as a last resort, closing signups. I personally would rather not do either, but they are options.

Many thanks to @k_o_t@lemmy.ml and @AgreeableLandscape@lemmy.ml for banning those trolls.

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

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

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)

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?

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

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)

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:

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation

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 .

Some websites block lemmy.ml links, for example Facebook as you can see in the screenshot below.

I dont know if this is because of the .ml domain (which is free and might be used by spammers), or because they are scared of Lemmy. Anyway, this doesnt mean that it is impossible to share content from lemmy.ml on Facebook or other sites, thanks to federation there is a relatively easy workaround:

1. Find another Lemmy instance, ideally one that is relevant to your audience
2. Copy the lemmy.ml link, and paste it into the search field of your chosen instance
3. You should get a search result for the post, comment, community or user, click on it
4. Copy the link and share!

There are a few caveats though: In the case of a post, comments and votes will be missing. You can fetch comments in the same way through the search. The other instance will also not receive any new posts/comments/votes made in the community, unless a user from the remote instance is following the lemmy.ml community.

The easiest way to avoid these problems is for you to make an account on the other instance and follow the community from it. Then every post/comment/vote will be delivered to the other instance, and the community should look identical on both instances.

Our server went down last night, after we received some messages from our provider that someone had uploaded illegal pornographic photos.

They stated that they had contacted us before ( they didn't ) which would give us opportunity to remove them before the site going down.

The user and community where these pictures were located, we'd banned about a month ago, and it wouldn't be possible to view them from lemmy itself, but we have yet to code purging dangling pictrs images automatically with user and community deletion, obviously now a priority for us.

We were able to trace things down and delete them, and bring the site up this morning.

Again sry for the site being down. If you find any pornographic materials on lemmy ( against our site rules ), let us know so we can remove them ASAP and keep lemmy running.

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:

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation

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 .

Recently there have been some discussions about the political stances of the Lemmy developers and site admins. To clear up some misconceptions: Lemmy is run by a team of people with different ideologies, including anti-capitalist, communist, anarchist, and others. While @dessalines and I are communists, we take decisions collectively, and don't demand that anyone adopt our views or convert to our ideologies. We wouldn't devote so much time to building a federated site otherwise.

What's important to us is that you follow the site rules and Code of Conduct. Meaning primarily, no-bigotry, and being respectful towards others. As long as that is the case, we can get along perfectly fine.

In general we are open for constructive feedback, so please contact any member of the admin team if you have an idea how to improve Lemmy.

Slur Filter

We also noticed a consistent criticism of the built-in slur filter in Lemmy. Not so much on lemmy.ml itself, but whenever Lemmy is recommended elsewhere, a few usual suspects keep bringing it up. To these people we say the following: we are using the slur filter as a tool to keep a friendly atmosphere, and prevent racists, sexists and other bigots from using Lemmy. Its existence alone has lead many of them to not make an account, or run an instance: a clear net positive.

You can see for yourself the words which are blocked (content warning, link here). Note that it doesn't include any simple swear words, but only slurs which are used to insult and attack other people. If you want to use any of these words, then please stay on one of the many platforms that permit them. Lemmy is not for you, and we don't want you here.

We are fully aware that the slur filter is not perfect. It is made for American English, and can give false positives in other languages or dialects. We are totally willing to fix such problems on a case by case basis, simply open an issue in our repo with a description of the problem.

A community for the modern day library of alexandria:

!libgen@lemmy.ml

Site mirror.

Lemmy v0.9.0 Release (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.

• Community bans now federating.
• Local posts sometimes got marked as remote.
• Creator of post/comment was not notified about new child comments.
• Community deletion now federated.

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.

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation

Known issues

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Instructions for running your own lemmy instance.

For the moment, lemmy.ml is using an explicit allowlist for instances we federate with. If you currently run an instance, and would like to be added to join.lemmy.ml:

• Let us know either on !lemmy_instances, or commenting here.
• We'll add you to our allowlist.
• Add this block to your server's lemmy.hjson config (for open federation):

federation: {
  enabled: true
  tls_enabled: true
  # allowed_instances: lemmy.ml,other_instance.tld,... uncomment this to use an allowlist
}

• Type [!announcements@lemmy.ml](/c/announcements@lemmy.ml) into your server's search box, and subscribe to it to connect the two instances.

After almost a year of hard work implementing ActivityPub support on Lemmy, it is finally done! Anything that works here on dev.lemmy.ml, also works over federation between different instances (with one notable exception, community mods have to be on the same instance as the community for now).

Before we consider federation ready for production, some more testing is needed. And that's where you come in: go to our test instances enterprise.lemmy.ml, ds9.lemmy.ml and voyager.lemmy.ml, and try things like:

• post, comment and vote
• delete and restore posts/comments
• send private messages
• create communities, remove/restore posts and ban/unban users
• setup your own lemmy instance, and federate with enterprise.lemmy.ml or ds9.lemmy.ml

If you notice any bugs, please report them on Github, as comments on this post, or in our Dev Chat on Matrix. Please keep in mind that our code of conduct also applies to the test instances.

The more you test, the sooner we will feel confident to enable federation on dev.lemmy.ml. Happy testing!

Lemmy v0.8.0 Release (2020-10-16)

:partying face:

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

• with manual Docker installation
• with Ansible installation

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](/c/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](/c/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](/c/main@ds9.lemmy.ml) will now show up on your front page, or /c/All

Credit to @eiknat@dev.lemmy.ml , and masterstur for their help with this effort.

Our postgres CPU usage has gone wayyyy down.

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

Just a public service announcement.

Here's what we have so far for the governing documents, also pasted below. Feedback / additions / changes would be much appreciated.

Lemmy Council

• A group of lemmy developers and users that use a well-defined democratic process to steer the project in a positive direction, keep it aligned to community goals, and resolve conflicts.

Voting / Decision-Making

Process

• Anything is open for discussion
• Voting done through matrix chat reacts (thumbs up/thumbs down)
• Require a simple majority for votes. (Maybe 2/3rds for more debated decisions).
• Once a decision is reached democratically, the dicision is binding and all group members have to follow it
• All members of the Lemmy council have equal voting power.
• Voting must stay open for at least 2 days.

What gets voted on

• Membership (joining, removing)
• Coding direction
  • Priorities / Emphasis
  • Controversial features (For example, an unpopular feature should be removed)
• Communication mediums
• Conflict resolution
• dev.lemmy.ml (domain and server)
• lemmy.ml and subdomains (excluding communism.lemmy.ml)
• git repo including mirrors (on github, gitea, etc)
• Any official accounts of the Lemmy project, for example the Mastodon account or the Liberapay account
• Changes to these rules

Joining

• We use the following process: anyone who is active around Lemmy can recommend any other active person to join the council. This has to be approved by a majority of the council.
• Active users are defined as those who contribute to Lemmy in some way for at least an hour per week on average, doing things like reporting bugs, discussing rules and features, translating, promoting, developing, or doing other things that aim to improve Lemmy as a whole. -> people should have joined at least a month ago.
• The member list is public.
• Note: we would like to have a process where community members can elect candidates for the council, but this is not realistic because a single user could easily create multiple accounts and cheat the vote.
• Limit growth to one new member per month at most.

Removing members

• Inactive members should be removed from the council after a few months of inactivity, and after receiving a notification about this.
• Members that dont follow binding council decisions should be removed.
• Any member can be removed in a vote.

Goals

• We encourage the membership of groups such as LGBT, religious or ethnic minorities, abuse victims, etc etc, and strive to create a safe space for them to express their opinions. We also support measures to increase participation by the previously mentioned groups.
• The following are banned, and will always be harshly punished: fascism, abuse, racism, sexism, etc etc,

Communication

• A private Matrix chat for all council members.
• (Once private communities are done) A private community on dev.lemmy.ml for issues.

Member List / Contact Info

General Contact @LemmyDev Mastodon

• Dessalines Matrix
• Nutomic Matrix, Mastodon

You can see it on the sidebar on the main page.

Let us know what you think about them.

An open chat. Recent comments on the right —>