This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2540874

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.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

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.

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.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

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.

For any UI devs:

I've starting working on a lemmy front end called lemmy-ui-leptos using leptos, a Rust UI framework with isomorphic support, and tailwind + daisyUI for the component styling. This could eventually replace the frankenstein's monster that lemmy-ui has become.

Some reasons for doing this:

• lemmy-ui uses infernojs, which is based on the react model. IMO is largely superseded by signal-based reactivity in use in android jetpack-compose, SolidJS, and most new UI frameworks.
• I had to hack on isomorphic support / server-side-rendering to infernoJS, and it's very messy. Leptos has isomorphic support out of the box.
• All the benefits of Rust over javascript.
  • Since leptos is in Rust, we can import the lemmy types directly.
  • I've been waiting for years for a good rust UI framework, and I think we're finally here with leptos or sycamore.
• lemmy-ui uses bootstrap, which is showing its age and limitations. Tailwind (and daisyUI) seem to be much more future-proof.

I plan on leaving the site design and component styling to other, more skilled UI devs, while I work mostly on the auth, services, params, and overall back-end structure.

• Please use daisyUI classes tho whenever possible over exhaustive tailwind ones.
• I'd also like it if the UI could match that of jerboa's (whenever possible), so that a change in one could be represented in the other, and so that things like badge appearance for admins, could be recognizeable across lemmy's front ends.

You don't really need to learn rust to help out with this, as the components look very similar to JSX. Instructions for running it are in the CONTRIBUTING.md . Feel free to contribute!

Right now only the home page, and post pages are working, but ready to be styled.

It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it's users will not be allowed to proceed.

We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1808829

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 release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

Upgrade instructions

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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.

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 release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

Upgrade instructions

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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.