jgrim

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Lemmy.One and R.NF are currently blocked. This is a temporary measure to prevent the spread of CSAM. The instance appears to have inactive admins who have not responded to requests. We will remain defederated with them until they respond and clean up the traces of CSAM.

Is anyone using this community? If not, I'm going to disable the bot and close it.

Hello all,

Some of our sister sites will be closing down June 1st, 2025.

Bye Utter.Online (Mastodon)

It has been decided that the Mastodon instance Utter.online will be shut down on June 1st, 2025, due to a lack of interest from the community. There are many Mastodon instances available for people to choose from. We could not create an Instance that stood out and encouraged growth. I'm okay with this because I, too, lack interest in micro-blogging. In the coming days, I will migrate some users to a new Mastodon Instance, such as @discussonline@utter.online.

Bye Social.Photo (Pixelfed)

It has also been decided that the Pixelfed instance Social.photo will be shut down on June 1st, 2025. This instance has been growing in popularity slowly, and the decision to shut it down stems from frustrations with sustaining a Pixelfed service.

Is it because of money?

Closing these two services down also provides cost benefits from not having to renew domains and run the services. Mastodon and Pixelfed use a lot of storage because they have very active photography communities. Cost benefits were not a driving factor but were tipping points to make decisions. Neither the Utter.Online nor the Social.Photo communities donate to continue services.

What about "my" data?

I will not be giving any data to anyone. If you wish to have your data, you must export it before June 1st, 2025. All data and backups will be forever deleted on that date.

Continuing the services.

I can transfer the domains to the right person if they wish to continue the service. However, I will not be providing user data or databases. I can provide any key used for Instance identification; however, users will need to export their data and import once the transfer is complete.

Thanks a lot, jgrim

Hello!

I’m going to implement a variant of this.

-jgrim

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/40761824

Sorry everyone I know how much you love the attention she gives you, but I've implemented some quick and dirty filtering for private messaging.

We now have the ability to automatically mark PM's as deleted or read, depending on content inside of them. If we accidentally filter something you legitimately wanted (ie, not Nicole) please let me know.

If any other instances would like to implement this, here's the code. Note that you'll need to set your hostname at the top here for some reason I haven't exactly identified.

SET lemmy.protocol_and_hostname = 'https://lemmy.ca/';

CREATE TABLE private_message_filters (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    phrase TEXT NOT NULL,
    behavior VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL CHECK (behavior IN ('delete', 'mark_read'))
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION filter_private_messages()
RETURNS trigger AS $$
DECLARE
    banned_phrase_record private_message_filters%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
    FOR banned_phrase_record IN 
        SELECT * FROM private_message_filters
    LOOP
        IF LOWER(TRIM(NEW.content)) ILIKE '%' || LOWER(TRIM(banned_phrase_record.phrase)) || '%' THEN
            IF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'delete' THEN
                NEW.deleted := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            ELSIF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'mark_read' THEN
                NEW.read := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            END IF;
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages
AFTER INSERT ON private_message
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION filter_private_messages();

To add filter words:

insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('delete', 'spamtestdelete');
insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('mark_read', 'spamtestread');

If you want to quickly disable / enable filtering while testing:

ALTER TABLE private_message DISABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;
ALTER TABLE private_message ENABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what phrases to filter on. MAKE SURE YOU TEST. If there's an error, private messaging could break completely. You should not get an error message from the UI while sending a message with a banned word.

Howdy,

I wanted to share with instance users that I've been mucking around with services to improve stability and security.

I used to announce before I did it but I haven't been recently. I'll get better at it again.

Let me know if you have any issues or questions!

Other services we run are social.photo and utter.online.

Edit: I should also mention we have status pages for all services:

• status.discuss.online
• status.matrix.discuss.online
• status.social.photo (coming soon: I just realized I forgot to add it)
• status.utter.online

Thanks, jgrim

Hello!

You may have noticed some instability and performance issues with the web client of Discuss.online. I have made some infrastructure changes to hopefully improve stability. In the process, I also updated to the latest version of Lemmy.

Let me know if you have issues or comments!

We have a target api now!

Hello!

Please welcome our newest admin, @m_f@discuss.online!

They joined to help increase community engagement, moderation, & perhaps some help raising funding. We're looking forward to their help and experience in improving our instance and the fediverse as a whole.

Here is a quick introduction from m_f.

I started getting involved in Lemmy mod duties over at !msp@midwest.social when the only mod went AWOL. That gave me the confidence to create a few communities for comics that didn't have any Lemmy communities yet, and then a community for posting loops. When !AskUSA@discuss.online needed a moderator, I volunteered to help out there, and now I'm helping out on admin duties for the instance. Moral of the story is, stepping up to help out is a great low-effort way to help Lemmy grow

• jgrim