nutomic

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.

Ibis is a federated encyclopedia with numerous features. If you want to start a wiki for a TV series, a videogame, or an open source project then Ibis is for you! You can register on an existing instance or install it on your own server. Then you can start editing on the topic of your choice, and connect to other Ibis instances for different topics. Federation ensures that articles get mirrored across many servers, and can be read even if the original instance goes down. Ibis is written in Rust and Webassembly, fully open source to make future enshittification impossible.

With this version Ibis can finally federate with other Fediverse platforms such as Lemmy (example) and others. If you notice any federation problems please open an issue. Note that Mastodon currently ignores activities sent by Ibis for unknown reasons. See the article for more details how federation works.

There are many improvements to signup and account management. Admins can configure OAuth so that users can login with existing accounts from other platforms. Email is also supported now, with a config option email_required to enable email verification for new users. Notifications can also be sent by email if desired. And there is an account settings page to change password and email.

When creating a new article, users can choose which instance it should reside on. Admins can remove articles, making the config option article_approval obsolete. Various other parts of the api were also changed. Additionally the code was split into different crates for faster development. There have also been many bug fixes and minor improvements.

If you are interested what a federated wiki can do, join and give it a try. You can register on ibis.wiki, open.ibis.wiki or other instances. You can also install Ibis on your own server. It is very lightweight and can easily run on an existing server alongside other software. This release includes an additional installation method using Docker. To discuss the project, report problems or get support use the following links:

Lemmy | Matrix | Github

Here is a (somewhat messy) list of all the changes in this version.

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