this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

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What is Lemmy?

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

Major Changes

This 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.

Upgrade instructions

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

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

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

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

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[–] AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 118 points 2 years ago

80% reduction is crazy! Good job!

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 65 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Update on lemmy finances (not including cryptocurrencies)

patreon: $1,591/month

liberapay: $374.22 per week (about 1609 per month)

open collective: $2082 (29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023)

Assuming 63K active users , the per user monetization of 0.08 dollar per user (Reddit's revenue per monthly user is roughly $1.19).

Estimated developer salary for the two main developers is about 2600$, estimated median salary for developer in the US is about 10K a month.

For comparison firefish made about 1424$ ((29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023) with an active users count of 11868 (or 8146 if you don't count calckey, which i think is important because they added a pop up asking for donation, but i don't know if that is after the name change) so that gives a per user monetization of 0.11 dollar per user ( or 0.17 not counting calckey).

Corrections are welcomed.

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 years ago

Thanks for the insight!

[–] wren@sopuli.xyz 63 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 56 points 2 years ago (2 children)

It was actually easy because a lot of data was stored which was never used at all.

[–] wren@sopuli.xyz 45 points 2 years ago

Shhh let me compliment youuuu

[–] netburnr@lemmy.ml 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I was saving that data, you never know when it might come in handy.

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[–] phiresky@lemmy.world 40 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I want to clarify that most/ a lot of the DB work of this release actually came from others e.g. nutomic, RocketDerp, Sh4d ;)

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 16 points 2 years ago

Thank you all for your work!

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml

[–] nachtigall@feddit.de 27 points 2 years ago

Thank you for your and the contributors' work!

[–] yoz@aussie.zone 27 points 2 years ago (1 children)

🙏 Thank you Devs.

Kind People, please donate .

[–] JaneDoe@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

As a donor I had to spend some amount of time finding where to donate, that could be more explicit

[–] MarsAgainstVenus@fedimav.win 26 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Upgraded without issue (other than manually restarting docker after upgrading)! Thanks!

I did it with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy by simply running sudo ./deploy.sh -y

[–] lemmy@linkopath.com 6 points 2 years ago

Same, updated effortlessly.

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

well my Lemmy backups did exceed 10MB, but the 0.18.3 database optimizations brought me under 10MB again lol

11M Jul 28 22:35 bak-lemmy-2023-07-28_22.35.52.zip
8.8M Jul 28 22:39 bak-lemmy-2023-07-28_22.38.59.zip

(hosting an instance with communities but no users doesn't need much hardware at all btw)

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Willing to share any numbers? How many communities and how many resources?

[–] Die4Ever@programming.dev 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

there's not a lot on there

https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities

10 communities, few hundreds of subs, maybe like 30 posts

unzipped storage usage:

# du -h --max-depth=2 . | sort -h
8.0K    ./volumes/lemmy-ui
9.5M    ./volumes/pictrs
76M     ./volumes/postgres
85M     .
85M     ./volumes
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[–] mvuvi@baraza.africa 22 points 2 years ago

Neat!

If you can, please keep supporting the devs with some resources.

[–] ohai@subsubd.com 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

docker compose down && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d update was flawless. nice!

[–] tcely@fosstodon.org 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

You can pull new images while the old ones continue running happily. That docker-compose down command is completely unnecessary.

@ohai
@dessalines

[–] ohai@subsubd.com 8 points 2 years ago

that's fair, just force of habit, i guess. thanks for the heads up! :)

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

docker compose down &&

Looks like the & parsing in code blocks is another bug in 0.18.3 like the post title one. I'll add your comment to the GitHub issue.

[–] skycat@beehaw.org 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Please make Lemmy easily crawable by search engines so people can get useful search results

[–] morrowind@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 years ago

It is, the problem is search engines aren't designed to deal with federation. Ty search-lemmy.com for one that is

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Heads-up that a new issue on GitHub reporting this problem upgrading from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3:

thread 'main' panicked at 'Couldn't run DB Migrations: Failed to run 2023-07-08-101154_fix_soft_delete_aggregates with: syntax error at or near "trigger"', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:221:25 note: run with 'RUST_BACKTRACE=1' environment variable to display a backtrace

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3756

If you use "Lemmy from scratch" install,

you may be on an older PostgreSQL that Ubuntu distro provides, not the same as the Docker install method.

[–] katie@lemmy.tillicumnet.com 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yes, I had to upgrade from Postgres 13 to get this working. I’m not sure if there’s a minimum Postgres version specified anywhere in the docs, I took a quick look but couldn’t find it.

For anyone else running Debian like me, you can add the official Postgres repo and use the pg_upgrade script to migrate to the new version.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 9 points 2 years ago

I’m not sure if there’s a minimum Postgres version specified anywhere in the docs, I took a quick look but couldn’t find it.

I do not find it in the "From Scratch Install" documentation. I will work to revise those documents this weekend to warn people that 0.18.3 and later is incompatible. Thank you again for sharing.

[–] anon_water@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 years ago

Thank you for all of your hard work devs! I'm a supporter with monthly payments.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 12 points 2 years ago

Upgraded! No issues.

Again, thank you for your amazing work!! :D

[–] wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.com 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

Ran into this issue with database migrations:

Failed to run 2023-07-08-101154_fix_soft_delete_aggregates with: syntax error at or near "trigger"', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:221:25

Will open an issue on GitHub.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

That has to do with you running a custom install with an older postgres that lemmy doesn't support.

[–] wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.com 16 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I'll update to a newer Postgres version and report back. It would be nice to know what the minimum supported version is, maybe that should be added to the documentation.

EDIT: Upgrading to Postgres 15 resolved my issue, but not without some pain since the migration scripts had already tried to run on my Postgres 13 database. So after dumping the 13 database, I had to make some modifications after the fact to satisfy the migration scripts. It was a pretty janky process but I seem to be in a good place now.

I would highly advise communicating to people that they should upgrade past Postgres 13 before trying to upgrade Lemmy to 0.18.3 or higher, or you're gonna have a bad time.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Thank you for sharing.

[–] phil@l3mmy.com 8 points 2 years ago

Super straightforward upgrade via docker compose, thanks for all the hard work ❤️

[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you for the continuing work! Just one bug report: when I click to load lemmy (either .world or .ml) from my homepage of various links, I'm logged out. If I refresh the page though, I'm logged in!

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

You might have to clear your browser cache, we saw that issue a few times with lemmy-ui 0.18.0

[–] eugenia@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Thank you, I just did. The problem remains.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

The only thing else I can think of, is that a browser plugin might be affecting it. Try a different browser and see if it's still a problem.

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I wish clicking this link would actually show the context instead of just refreshing the page.

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[–] buwho@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

you're all amazing! thank you and keep up the good work!

[–] Filler5581@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Thanks to everyone who are working hard on these improvements! You guys are awesome.

[–] xtremeownage@lemmyonline.com 6 points 2 years ago

And... upgraded. Thanks!

[–] ravermeister@lemmy.rimkus.it 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

and again, docker images for arm64 are ready as well :)

[–] skycat@beehaw.org 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think Lemmy is cool if search engines crawls the contents easily so people can get useful answers

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Can't we already use https://search-lemmy.com/? I actually found some answers so my questions today thanks to it

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

That’s awesome. I was wondering just today that lemmy may have already accumulated enough content to provide hits for a number of searches.

[–] RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Heads-up for anyone who compiles the Rust code from source and is testing/integrating their own manual changes/patches to the code... the main git branch is not what Lemmy 0.18.3 is based on. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3602

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