Lemmy.World Announcements

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This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

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founded 2 years ago
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1
 
 

Hello World,

we will be replacing a faulty memory module on our server today. As this will require powering down the server, we will also combine this with a few other system maintenance tasks.

Our hosting provider has confirmed their work between 14:00-14:30 UTC, our full maintenance window is 13:45-14:45 UTC to have a little extra buffer and be able to deal with our additional maintenance work.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-12-05T13%3A45%3A00.000Z


Update 12:25 UTC: Hosting provider confirmed the maintenance window


Update 14:20 UTC: Memory module has been replaced and all maintenance work has been completed

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Hello World,

as some of you might be aware, there have been various accusations against one of our former community team members, Jordan Lund.

We have removed Jordan as a member of our community team a week ago, on 23rd of September, due to various behavior that we do not consider acceptable for a member of our team. We haven't posted about this earlier, as we're still in the progress of reviewing and making decisions, and we originally expected to be able to conclude this earlier, within a time frame where we could have presented the final outcome in the first post.

During his time with Lemmy.World, Jordan has been helping out our team with various admin-level tasks, as well as moderating a few large communities, including !news@lemmy.world, !world@lemmy.world and !politics@lemmy.world. As far as we can tell, most of his actions, including moderation actions, were in alignment with both our instance rules and also rules and spirit of the affected communities.

Unfortunately, this does not apply to all his actions. We have identified multiple cases of conduct that do not align with what we expect from members of our team. We currently do not have any explicit rules or code of conduct for our community team or other team members like instance admins on top of our ToS/bylaws, as we expected to have a common understanding of acceptable behavior. In the past we already had discussions with Jordan about some of this behavior and we believed that to be enough at that time. Going forward, we will be working on a code of conduct applicable to all members of our team, including community team and anyone above.

Being a member of our community team provides additional privileges for selected members, such as the ability to appoint community moderators, update our community spotlight or even banning users. In Jordan's case this included permissions to appoint community moderators and ban users from the instance.

As of today, we are not aware of misuse of these additional privileges. Once we have reviewed other actions taken by Jordan we will also review these types of actions taken by Jordan in the recent past. If you believe that you or someone else was incorrectly banned from Lemmy.World, you're welcome to appeal your ban by reaching out to our team. As we currently have some technical issues with our ticket system, I recommend sending an email to report at lemmy dot world for the time being, visting our Matrix room #general:lemmy.world or reaching out to @MrKaplan@lemmy.world directly, also possible via Matrix at @mrkaplan:lemmy.world.

Following our instance rules, we have a few cases in which we may remove community moderators from their communities:

  1. Grossly committing a violation of the Terms of Service
  2. Acting repeatedly against the local community rules
  3. Extended periods of inactivity, as evident by lack of public interaction and/or failure to respond to reports

We are still discussing whether we consider his behavior a "gross violation of our ToS", as there are definitely some arguments to be made in favor of that. This includes for example using incorrect gendered pronouns, which we will update in our ToS in the coming days to make it more clear to everyone that this will not be tolerated. Due to his previous and current position we are still discussing what our final resolution to this issue will be as far as instance rules are concerned. Whether or not a person is trolling does not justify using incorrect pronouns for them. We have also informed Jordan that we expect his behavior in this regard to change immediately.

We're currently also in conversations with other moderators of communities moderated by Jordan to review their position on his behavior within their communities and whether they believe that his actions in those communities were appropriate and in line with the community rules. As a reminder, the order of community moderators in the sidebar has direct impact on the moderator hierarchy, where a moderator listed earlier is able to remove any moderators later in the list. This means even if an action might not (yet) be taken by instance admins, other community moderators may be able to remove moderators if they're no longer desired to be part of the team. Especially community rules about civility and respectful conduct do not appear to have been followed in a number of cases, and we are reviewing with the community moderators whether this is in line with other content they would usually moderate/not moderate.

It should also be noted that not all things reported to us are actually or clearly violating our rules, even if we may not agree with them. For example, we currently do not have rules about moderators removing other people's arguments, especially as "misinformation", to strengthen their own misguided arguments, and then continue to accuse the other side of misinformation later on. We do expect our team members to not use positions of power to "win arguments" or falsely accuse others of misinformation, when this isn't actually the case. Therefore, while this example is not something we tolerate for members of our team, having this happen on community level (by a person who isn't also holding a role above community mod at that time) is currently not something we are enforcing.

Once we have worked out a CoC for members of our team, we will post about this separately and also gather community feedback on whether you believe that enforcement of that (or parts of it, or more things) should also include moderators of Lemmy.World communities.

Additionally, we will also be looking at expanding our community team a bit in the near future, as we have both lost some people over time and recently also Jordan. We will also be posting about this separately, currently expected to be in a few weeks, with a description of expectations and responsibilities.

We will also be updating this post over the coming days until we have finished our review and actions.


Update 2025-10-06 01:27 UTC:

After reviewing various comments and actions by Jordan, he has received a warning, especially relating to following our rules at https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#1-attacks-on-people-or-groups. Going forward, if we see additional violations of our rules, especially when it comes to attacking others, we will consider additional consequences in the form of a temporary or permanent ban. If you still see Jordan's behaving in ways violating our ToS, please report this directly to us, e.g. through a pm to @lwreport@lemmy.world. We always review messages received by this account in our team.

In line with our current rules about potentially removing community moderators, we have reviewed the communities Jordan is currently a moderator in:

  1. !politics@lemmy.world: This community has active moderators above Jordan Lund, such as @aidan@lemmy.world.
  2. !news@lemmy.world This community has active moderators above Jordan Lund, such as @JonsJava@lemmy.world.
  3. !world@lemmy.world: We have moved Jordan from being top moderator to being bottom moderator. New top moderator is @Tenthrow@lemmy.world.
  4. !business@lemmy.world: No other active mods
  5. !comicbooks@lemmy.world: No other active mods
  6. !portland_oregon@lemmy.world: No other active mods
  7. !thepoliceproblem@lemmy.world: We have moved Jordan from being top moderator to being bottom moderator. New (active) top moderator is @JonsJava@lemmy.world.
  8. !hottubs@lemmy.world: No other active mods
  9. !keeptrack@lemmy.world: No other active mods

Any community moderator above Jordan will be able to remove him from his moderator position, should they decide that he is not a good fit for the community. It is up to those community moderators whether they want to keep him on the team.

We generally intend to limit our involvement in community moderation to enforcement of instance rules. Without disallowing other community mods to add Jordan back as a moderator, there would also not be much impact of removing him entirely, as they could just add him back right away. If you do not agree with the rules in a community or the way it is moderated, it's always possible to look for alternative communities with different rules, different mods, or creating your own community.

Having said this, we're still working on our team CoC, and will be gathering community feedback in a standalone post to determine whether we should enforce additional standards for community moderators.

Our review of Jordan's delegated admin actions (instance bans) are still pending. Unless we find evidence of this having been abused, we we do not currently expect additional consequences to arise from this.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello world,

Due to an error in a spam filter, Automod accidentally deleted all comments for a period of about 15 minutes. We are working hard to restore them. You might get a notification that your post was removed with the reason: "automod: suspicious activity", please ignore that notification.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for being on the Fediverse.

With regards, The LW admin team

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Hello World,

we will be performing an update to Lemmy 0.19.12 in just over an hour.

We are planning for around 15 minutes of downtime today at 20:00-20:15 UTC.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-06-17T20%3A00%3A00.000Z

Most of the changes for 0.19.12 were already backported by us when we deployed 0.19.11.

This update will bring us the remaining changes listed in the release notes.

We were mostly just missing some technical changes:

  • building with Rust 1.81 instead of 1.80
  • updating various dependencies
  • a small logic change to count local users more accurately for statistics
  • database index additions, which should improve performance of some less frequently used queries

There is one more notable change: Lemmy now ships with the RBlind theme


Update 20:35 UTC: The update has been completed successfully and services were back up at 20:20 UTC, 5 minutes later than planned due to a stuck DB query blocking migrations.

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Hello World,

we know one of the most important indicators of comment and post community interest is votes. Beyond that, reports help to regulate comments and posts that go beyond down-votes and into the rule-breaking territory.

Unfortunately, Lemmy's current reporting system has some shortcomings. Here are a few key technical points that everyone should be aware of:

  • Reports are NOT always visible to remote moderators. (See Full reports federation · Issue #4744 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub)
  • Resolving reports on a remote instance does not federate if the content isn't removed.
  • Removal only resolves reports in some cases, e.g. individual content removal. Some people remove individual content before banning the user, especially when the ban is with content removal, as individual content removals resolve reports on all instances. Bans with the remove content checkbox selected will not currently resolve reports automatically.

Our moderators are also volunteers with other demands on their time: work gets busy, people take vacations, and life outside of Lemmy goes on. But that doesn't mean content that causes distress to users should stick around any longer than reasonable. Harmful content impacts both Lemmy.world users AND users of all other instances as well. We always strive to be good neighbors.

While the devs work on the technical issues, we can work to improve the human side of things. To help keep the reports queue manageable and help reports be resolved in a REASONABLE amount of time we will be enabling global notifications for all stale reports. Open reports older than 1 day will trigger a notification for 1 week every 2 days so as not to overwhelm community moderators endlessly. If a community moderator does not wish to receive these reports, they may simply block the bot, but we still expect them to address unresolved reports.

We expect that this feature will eventually be removed once Lemmy has a better reporting system in place.

As an aside, we recommend that all LW communities have at least two moderators so there is some redundancy in resolving reports themselves, and to reduce the workload on individual moderators. We know this can be harder for smaller communities, but this is just a recommendation.

We recommend that moderators have alt accounts on Lemmy.world to resolve reports that are from federated instances.

As always feedback is welcome. This is an active project which we really hope will benefit the community. Please feel free to reply to this thread with comments, improvements, and concerns.

Thanks!

FHF / LemmyWorld Admin team 💖

Additional mods

We recommend using the Photon front-end for adding mods to your community.

With the standard lemmy-ui, additional mods can only be appointed if the account has made a post or comment in the community.

Photon (https://p.lemmy.world/) does not have this limitation. You can use the community sidebar, click Gear (settings) icon, then click the Team tab, and add any user as a mod.

6
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links


Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.


Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.


Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team


EDIT: Added org operations contact info

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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca's post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world/ you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world/. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.

8
 
 

Hello World!

As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

9
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world's users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.

This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

10
 
 

We've launced a public discord server at https://discord.gg/lemmyworld

The reason for why we choose discord is because it was easier to moderate and manage than other options. Besides we also had a discord-bot guru by the name of Rooki who created a neat bot that allowed us to connect/verify discord users to their Lemmy World account.

So if you are a moderator and you are looking for some extra hands to moderate your community, or if you need to contact anyone from the LW team, this is the most efficient way to do it!

Come have a look!

11
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submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by ruud@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Looks like it works.

Edit still see some performance issues. Needs more troubleshooting

Update: Registrations re-opened We encountered a bug where people could not log in, see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3422#issuecomment-1616112264 . As a workaround we opened registrations.

Thanks

First of all, I would like to thank the Lemmy.world team and the 2 admins of other servers @stanford@discuss.as200950.com and @sunaurus@lemm.ee for their help! We did some thorough troubleshooting to get this working!

The upgrade

The upgrade itself isn't too hard. Create a backup, and then change the image names in the docker-compose.yml and restart.

But, like the first 2 tries, after a few minutes the site started getting slow until it stopped responding. Then the troubleshooting started.

The solutions

What I had noticed previously, is that the lemmy container could reach around 1500% CPU usage, above that the site got slow. Which is weird, because the server has 64 threads, so 6400% should be the max. So we tried what @sunaurus@lemm.ee had suggested before: we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers). And used nginx to load balance between them.

Et voilà. That seems to work.

Also, as suggested by him, we start the lemmy containers with the scheduler disabled, and have 1 extra lemmy running with the scheduler enabled, unused for other stuff.

There will be room for improvement, and probably new bugs, but we're very happy lemmy.world is now at 0.18.1-rc. This fixes a lot of bugs.

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13
 
 

Not that it is not interesting but I would like just a tad more variety on the front page.

Edit btw for those who are wondering the two communities I started are https://lemmy.world/c/newmusic and https://kbin.social/m/musicfeedback/microblog (not sure if I have the links correct for people)

14
 
 

I'm going to miss AITA. Even if someone makes it a community, it will take a long time to populate.

15
 
 

Don't be a vote connoisseur here please. Redefine how you think about voting and participating.

Do you miss your communities from elsewhere. Well guess what, you are that core community now. If you want it back, the only thing holding you back is you. Don't wait on someone else to start posting. You don't need to worry about the perfect polished quality of your content or if it has been done before elsewhere. The current bar is, umm, poorly defined. No one is judging you. Call it practice. EVERY time you see something interesting, get in the habit of posting it please. Maybe go out of your way to grab a reference or two and post them.

Along these lines, think of how unsure and uncomfortable this may seem to most of us former lurker connoisseurs. You can play hard and thick skinned all you want, but you know exactly what post or comment you posted elsewhere that got the most votes or interaction. Why? Because it matters to you. So upvote everything you can. It matters to someone else too. Don't upvote just for the value or interest you have in the content. Do it just to say "hey, thanks for making the effort to participate and make this place a few lines longer." Please rethink how you handle voting, at least for now, think of a down vote as FU for participating, no votes as I wish you weren't here. We are all likely accustomed to a lot more interaction and validation in our own little niches. This is really an underpinning value of social media, we are here to engage with people, so tell people who are new and unsure about a new and different place, "hey, thanks for participating." You may not know or really appreciate their interests, but you can help us grow a core that can evolve into your favorite niches as the community grows. You are the core community. We can all make it grow if we make it a place people want to be.