Why? Do they think this is a videogame??

On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as "A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse". In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.

So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.

By the way the second title "Follow communities Anywhere in the world" will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below ("Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. ...").

Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:

• https://joinmastodon.org/
• https://joinpeertube.org/
• https://pixelfed.org/

When people are told about Lemmy and look for it in a search engine, join-lemmy.org is one of the first pages that comes up. Here they should be able to find out what Lemmy is, and be able to register an account to start posting.

At the moment this still seems too complicated, so I'm looking for your suggestions to improve it:

• On the main page, is the text relevant and up to date or should anything be changed?
• How about the instance selection wizard (click "join a server" on the homepage), which lets you select topics and languages to select instances. Do the current options make sense?
• The instance list itself, is there any information missing, or potential design improvements?
• And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.
• Any other suggestions you may have.

Since yesterday I already made a couple of improvements:

• Use biased random for instance list, so large instances are always near the top
• Rename Join to Sign Up in instance list
• Fix icon overflows by using inline-flex (by @dessalines)
• Add button to visit random instance (not merged yet)

Edit: Here is a draft for some changes to the frontpage: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524

See here for examples:

• https://bsky.app/profile/unitedkingdom.feddit.uk.ap.brid.gy
• https://retrolemmy.com/post/31790836/17287584

There is still more testing and development needed, check the issue for more details.

Last month saw more cleanup and bug fixes for the development version. We also setup nightly builds which are automatically deployed to voyager.lemmy.ml, as detailled in the 0.19.15 announcement post.

This upcoming month we'll be working on the existing lemmy-ui 1.0 milestone and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues. Our work should be reflected nightly on voyager.lemmy.ml, so we'd much appreciate anyone helping to find bugs and issues

Here are the major changes from December:

• Enable source maps for lemmy-ui to simplify debugging
• Refactor and simplify cursor pagination logic
• Let admins ban deleted accounts

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

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. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to resolve this.

Changes

We messed up the previous release and did not include the full list of changes. In fact there were a handful of other bug fixes, and notably a maximum page limit of 10 to prevent a DDoS attack. Some users were also hitting this limit, so with this version the limit is increased to 100. We apologize for these mistakes.

Here is the full changelog since 0.19.13:

• Don't allow accessing page numbers greater than 10 by @dessalines #6017
• Update deps based on cargo audit by @Nutomic in #6258
• Increase page limit to 100 by @Nutomic in #6252
• Ban federation for deleted users by @Nutomic in #6207
• Federate mod actions on deleted users by @Nutomic in #6199
• Allow admins to view deleted user profiles by @Nutomic in #6194
• Adding creator and community indexes for post_aggregates. by @dessalines in #6025
• Ignore apub person banners which cannot be parsed by @Nutomic in #6015u

Now for the good news, the development version of Lemmy 1.0 is available for testing on voyager.lemmy.ml with lots of new features. Registration is open, you're welcome to create an account. Feel free to post spam and try everything out. Here is only a short overview:

• Multi-communities: Combine different communities together into a custom feed.
• Post scheduling: Specify when your post should be published.
• Keyword filter: Automatically hide posts about certain topics.
• Private communities: Only followers can view the content, and need to be approved manually by mods. Other community visibilities are also available (unlisted, local only).
• New notification system: Including notifications for mod actions, and subscribing to communities and posts to be notified about new comments.
• OAuth: Login to Lemmy with existing account from another website. Use this link to signup with your Github account (the UI still needs to be improved).
• Post Tags: Categorize posts within a community (UI part not implemented yet).
• User vote totals: You can see the total number of upvotes and downvotes given to each user.
• User notes: You can keep notes on other users.
• Combined Feeds: View your saved, liked posts and comments together in a single list.
• Comment Locking: Mods can now lock comments recursively.
• GDPR style data exporting: You can now export your full posting history as a JSON file.
• Plugins: Can be written in JS, Python, Rust, and any other language that targets Webassembly. The test server has a plugin for automatic language tagging of posts.
• Cursor pagination: Don't lose your place in the feed when switching pages.
• API v3 compat: Lemmy 1.0 can be used by existing apps with no changes (but most new features are only available via the new API v4).
• More: Countless smaller features, bug fixes and improvements, too much to list here.

All the above mentioned features are already implemented and fully working, but may need some polishing. If you encounter any problems, please open an issue (backend, frontend). voyager.lemmy.ml is automatically updated to the latest development version every night, so that changes can immediately be tested.

Keep in mind that Lemmy 1.0 is still in alpha state. There may be breaking changes and critical bugs, so do not attempt to upgrade your own instances yet. We intend to publish the first beta version in January, along with API docs and upgrade instructions for test servers.

We hope that you are as excited about these new features as we are. With all this said, happy testing and Merry Christmas!

Upgrade instructions

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, donating and reporting bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

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

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. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to resolve this.

Changes

Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.

The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.

Upgrade instructions

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.

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

During the past month, we've been working rapidly on adding features to lemmy-ui. We also finished up the last major backend changes. This means we can soon go to the beta phase for 1.0, which will focus on testing, bug fixing and helping Lemmy clients to start updating for the new API. After that will be the release candidate phase when version 1.0 will be live tested on lemmy.ml.

You can see the changes in action on the test server voyager.lemmy.ml (which was recently wiped). Registration is open, you are welcome to try things out. To stay up to date with our progress look at the lemmy-ui 1.0 and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues.

The major changes during October were:

• Speeding up migrations for 1.0 and reducing database size
• Notify users about moderation actions
• Default data for new instances (welcome post and popular communities)
• Card views for post listing
• Showing community sidebar on create post page
• Blurhash for images

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Until now it has been very complicated to work on the official Lemmy frontend, as you had to set up an entire local Lemmy stack with Postgres database and Rust backend built from source. Now there is a much easier way, as lemmy-ui can directly connect to a remote production or test instance.

To get started you need to have git and pnpm installed. Then run:

# for development branch (1.0):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive
# for stable branch (0.19):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive -b release/v0.19

# then:
cd lemmy-ui
pnpm install
LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE=enterprise.lemmy.ml pnpm dev

Alternatively you can use ./scripts/test.sh. Finally open http://0.0.0.0:1234/ in your browser. You can replace the value for LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE with any production instance. The local lemmy-ui connects to that instance for all API calls, so you will see the same content. All actions work as usual including login, voting, posting etc.

Note, due to breaking changes in the development version, you may need to switch branches. main is for the new 1.0 version and all new feature development is happening there. With this you can connect to the test instance voyager.lemmy.ml. release/v0.19 is the stable branch, with it you can connect to enterprise.lemmy.ml, or existing production instances. Only bug fixes should be made there.

Hopefully this will encourage some of you to contribute to lemmy-ui. If you have any experience with web development it will be easy get started.

Many of us are currently on summer vacation, but there are a few important additions this last month:

• Thanks to monumental efforts by @matc-pub and @sleeplessone1917, lemmy-ui is now updated to work with the new lemmy 1.0 API, and all that's needed is to support the new features, and work out a few more bugs. Special thanks to both of them for their work.
• MV-GH added video support to jerboa, and has been doing a lot of bug-fixes there.
• @dullbananas has a PR which optimizes some migrations significantly and reduces DB size, which will likely be merged after some code reviews soon.
• We added 1.0 milestones for both lemmy-ui and jerboa, to make sure every new feature gets added to the front ends.

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

In a recent discussion it was mentioned that the search function in Lemmy is awkward to use and could be improved. As a result I already made two small changes:

• Change community selector to use [!community@example.com](/c/community@example.com) format (#3218)
• Search field in community sidebar (#3217)

Are there any other UI or UX changes you can think of to improve searching in Lemmy? Im mainly looking for frontend changes, such as reorganizing the input positions, changing default values etc.