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.

Changes

This release fixes a security vulnerability which allows an attacker to delete images uploaded by other users. You can read the details in the security advisory. Thanks to @Nothing4You for discovering and fixing it.

A new donation dialog is shown to users once per year, to help fund Lemmy development.

There are also various backports from the development branch. Importantly the "Private instance" setting can now be used with federation enabled. This way only logged-in users can browse posts and comments, which stops AI crawlers from overloading the server. Also moderators can now view votes in the post/comment options.

Backend

• Remove unnecessary pictrs purge calls (#5566)
• Donation dialog (#5559)
• Send out email after registration denied, email confirmed (#5553)
• Change private instance setting to allow federation (#5530)
• Proxy post.url if it is an image (#5545)
• When creating community copy allowed languages from creator profile (#5490)
• Include image alt text in post search (#5449)
• Add config option to enable json logging (#5471, #5557)
• Embed images in RSS feeds (#5488)
• Fix federation of sticky posts (#5593)
• Deleted user shouldnt break federation outbox (#5443, #5573)
• Fix some image embeds by escaping alt text (#5506)
• Properly federate distinguish comment (#5586)
• Increase default registration rate limit to 10 per hour (#5600)
• Remove debug ratelimit being used in production (#5551)

Frontend

• Implement donation dialog (#3034)
• Hide images in private message reports (#3053)
• Dont render images in private message (#3043)
• Changed checkbox text "Only moderators can post to this community" from legend to label on the Create Community page (#3046)
• Trigger toast error on community request failure (#3045)
• Add local link next to fedilink on posts (#3033)
• Add banned badges to post and comment listings (#3030)
• Linkify user @ mentions (#3029)
• Adding ability for mods to view votes. (#3027)
• Upvote, downvote, view source, and favorite icons become larger when pressed to improve visibility on grayscale screens (#2960)
• Improve colour contrast of the mini-overlay in the top right corner of link or image post thumbnails (#2961)
• Improve screenreader accessibility by adding a main element to more pages (issue #2891) (#2944)
• Using input group for allowed and block instance buttons. (#2905)
• Moving totp and delete account settings into their own cards. (#2907)
• Hide NSFW field for create post form, for NSFW communities. (#2887)
• Modify the logic for appending the URL after uploading an image, placing the image URL after the cursor. (#2804)

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 are able to develop Lemmy as an open source platform free of tracking and ads thanks to the generosity of our users. Once a year we ask you to consider donating to support our work. Financial security allows us to continue maintaining and improving the platform. If you’d like to make a one-time or recurring donation simply use the links below. Thank you for using Lemmy.

Nutomic and Dessalines, Lemmy Developers

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

We'd also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What's something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?

Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We'd like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.

We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:

• @flamingos
• @dullbananas
• @phiresky
• @sleeplessone

Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.

• August 2023
• January 2024

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.

Developer AMA

Next week we are going to hold an "Ask me Anything" where users can ask the Lemmy developers all sorts of questions. They will be answered by @dessalines and @nutomic who have been working on Lemmy since the beginning in 2019. Other maintainers may also chime in. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

The AMA thread will be opened next Tuesday, March 25 in !announcements@lemmy.ml. We will start responding one day later. Until then you can let other people know about the AMA, think of good questions and read our previous AMAs:

• August 2023
• January 2024

Changes

• Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
• Also remove private messages when banning user with "remove content" (goodbye Nicole) #5414
• Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can't see most posts #5485
• Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
• Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
• Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009
• Optimize migrations which were included in 0.19.6 #5301

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

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

DraconicNEO

• Include image alt text in post search

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add HTML classes to mentions
• Add new setting to block NSFW content

travis-jeans

• Add Verdana and Arimo fonts to Litely and Darkly variables file before Helvetica (Issue 1537)
• Improve colour contrast of the mini-overlay in the top right corner of link or image post thumbnails
• Upvote, downvote, view source, and favorite icons become larger when pressed to improve visibility on grayscale screens
• Improve screenreader accessibility by adding a main element to more pages (issue #2891)

dessalines

• Been working on getting lemmy-ui up to date for 1.0.0 .
• Extracting pagination cursor utils into a trait.

Nutomic

• Removing aggregates tables (fixes #4869)
• Enable english for all users to fix language issues
• Ignore accept-language header if not site languages are specified
• Add more options for image uploads
• Use connection url to configure email (fixes #5472)
• Use version from git to indicate unreleased changes
• Add config option to enable json logging
• Also search url field by default
• Fix federation of unban action (fixes #5454)
• Get rid of Option<Vec<_>> in api structs (fixes #2820)

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

travis-jeans

• colorList includes CSS variables so theme developers can change the comment left border color (issue 2890)

dessalines

• Fix matrix id import. #5063
• Add ability to view your own sent reports.
• Use rust:1.81 for CI.
• Adding ability to resend verification email.
• Show comments for hidden communities.
• When verifying email, add note about waiting for approval.
• Adding a can_mod field to CommentView, PostView, and CommunityView.
• Adding a variable time_range_limit, rather than having many post sorts like TopSixHours
• Adding blurhash to image_details.
• Adding listing_type filter for modlog.
• Fix corepack bug.

Nutomic

• Show posts/comments from followed communities despite instance block
• Simplify slur regex
• Deleted user shouldnt break federation outbox (fixes #5441)
• Reduce usage of async_trait
• Rate limit changes (fixes #5287)
• Allow sending report only to admins (fixes #2414)
• Also remove private messages when banning user with "remove content"
• Ignore follow requests from kbin, mbin for private communities
• Fix hash check for pictrs binary
• Enable emails in Chinese
• Cors policy should allow any origin by default (fixes #5405)
• Merge functions for formatting local urls

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Lemmy v0.19.9 Release

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.

Changes

This version fixes a potential security problem, by preventing Lemmy from accessing localhost URLs. There is also a fix for a crash during markdown parsing. Lemmy now uses mimalloc instead of the system allocator (usually glibc), which should improve performance and prevent unlimited memory growth over time.

Lemmy

• Error handling for thumbnail generation
• Use mimalloc as memory allocator
• Additional security checks for URLs (details) . Security Advisory
• Fix crash while rewriting markdown
• Fix peertube federation
• Append attachments to comments (@flamingo-cant-draw)
• Enable site languages for new user

Lemmy-UI

• Enforce required validation on signup answers (@anhcuky)
• copy thumbnail URL during crossposting (@anhcuky)
• Adding a bottom-margin to spoiler details tag.
• Fixing login password limits.
• Adding zh-CN as default for zh lang.
• Updated translations

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

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

andrewmoise

• Use different counts for denominator in scaled rank for posts

timothyhay256

• Improve email notification text

dessalines

• Removing upx.
• Converting joins, filters, and selects to common functions for DB views.
• Using different corepack install method to fix corepack bug.
• Adding listing_type.ModeratorView for list communities.
• Only print migration output when running migrate command
• Search combined
• Adding post_id and type_ filters to combined reports.
• Adding zh-CN as default for zh lang.

Nutomic

• Fix crash while rewriting markdown (fixes #5380)
• Rename actor_id columns to ap_id
• Include saved date in api responses (fixes #5184)
• Fix peertube federation (ref #3837)
• Use mimalloc as memory allocator
• Federate "resolve report" action
• Deny invalid config fields
• Remove instrument macros
• Only list local banned users (fixes #2961)
• Add some url validation
• Allow setting multiple values for cors_origin (fixes #5198)

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

SleeplessOne1917

• RFC for REST-based API redesign
• lemmy-client-rs Release v1.0.4

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add media filter setting

dullbananas

• Prevent incorrectly using delete instead of uplete
• Clean up LemmyError::status_code
• Optimize migrations
• Changes to get_random_community_id: add filters for nsfw and private, use algorthm that doesn't scan the entire table
• Correctly paginate PostView when read_only is enabled
• Add community reports (only the database part)

dessalines

• Adding a slim comment_view variant, without post or community.
• Adding combined inbox
• Adding Combined modlog
• Fixing person_content_combined migration uniques.
• Using input group for allowed and block instance buttons.
• Moving totp and delete account settings into their own cards.
• Adding fedilink translation for link titles.
• Fixing login password limits.

Nutomic

• Change println! to debug!
• Move middleware code into api_routes for faster compilation
• Send federated reports to all community mods
• Change federation community restricted check to apply only locally
• Skip api test for community follower count (fixes #5179)
• Implement request idempotency (fixes #4735)
• Return correct status code for rate limit error (ref #5332)
• Add support for donation dialog (fixes #4856)
• Pictrs delete token
• Image api rework

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

There have been lots of changes since the last dev update. Contributors have been more active than usual during the Christmas holidays, and also the last dev update was already a whole month ago.

phiresky

• Community post tags (part 1)

leoseg

• New parameter read_only for /api/v3/post/list

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add markdown-it-footnotes

Nothing4You

• Reduce false positives in URL blocklist to reduce scunthorpe problem …

Integral-Tech

• refactor: avoid using format! when String creation is unnecessary
• refactor: replace static with const for global constants

anhcuky

• reset_password API to always return success
• Add Thumbnail URL When Crossposting
• Enforce required validation on signup Answers

dullbananas

• Fix incorrectly using delete instead of uplete in update_banned_when_expired
• Add custom migration runner, forbid some diesel migration commands, fix old migrations
• Fix incorrect comment in report_combined_view test
• Shorten "options" variable name

dessalines

• Combine comment and post reports
• Automatically marking posts created in an NSFW community as NSFW.
• Adding combined person content and person saved tables.
• Don't send out new user email verifies to admins, if already verified.
• Applying some clippy fixes.
• Hide NSFW field for create post form, for NSFW communities.
• Using video tag for embed video urls that are videos.
• Adding a bottom-margin to spoiler details tag.

Nutomic

• Change default image_mode to proxy, remove deprecated option
• Remove unused apub audience field (fixes #5278)
• Correct HTTP status for NotFound error (fixes #5309)
• Remove unused params on CreateSite/EditSite
• Error handling for thumbnail generation (ref #5196)
• Fix startup errors, add unit test for scheduled task errors (fixes #5209)
• Reorganize api endpoints (fixes #2022)
• Increase metadata fetch limit to 1 MB (fixes #5208)
• Allow admins to view deleted users (fixes #5249)
• Consider remote instance as dead if it returns any status 4xx or 5xx
• Only accept database connection by uri

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• 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.

Changes

This release includes a few minor fixes and improvements. Merry Christmas Everyone!

Lemmy

• Fix post thumbnails by properly determining file type
• Provide health endpoint for pictrs at /pictrs/healthz
• Allow bypassing image proxy for specific domains (can be configured via config value pictrs.proxy_bypass_domains, and i.imgur.net is bypassed by default)
• API returns content of removed comments for admins

Lemmy-UI

• Updated translations

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

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We should also have a bugfix release for a few issues with the last release, and have 0.19.8 sometime soon.

flamingo-cant-draw

• Use magic number to detemine file type

avdb13

• PKCE support for SSO

dessalines

• Add report_counts to post and comment aggregate tables.
• Upgrading diesel and a few other deps.

Nutomic

• Add test cases for community with non-ascii name (ref #5239)
• Return content of removed comments for admins (ref #5232)
• Add note wrapper (fixes #2657) (#5221)
• Enable site languages for new user (fixes #5234)
• Instance blocks with mod log entry and expiration (fixes #2506)
• Allow bypassing image proxy for specific domains
• Add note wrapper (fixes #2657)
• Proxy pictrs healthz endpoint
• More test coverage for private community, fix some bugs
• Guess image mime type from file extension (fixes #5196)
• Dont sanitize RSS content manually (fixes #5171)

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

We should also have a bugfix release for a few issues with the last release, and have 0.19.7 ready today or sometime soon.

karminski

• Modify the logic for appending the URL after uploading an image

dullbananas

• Combine action tables. This will greatly improve the performance of lemmy's post database queries by simplifying the number of joined tables.

SleeplessOne1917

• Simplify regex for user/community name validation
• Bump versions used in compose

Nutomic

• Always assign default language before checking if language is allowed
• Fetch community mods synchronously
• Move aggregates to replaceable_schema, fix error (fixes #5186)
• Implement private communities
• Run analyze after changing post.url type (ref #4983)

dessalines

• Add ability to mark multiple posts as read.
• Add user setting to auto-mark fetched posts as read.
• Change "mark post as read", "hide post" api calls to take single post instead of multiple
• Fixing cors origin wildcard.
• Upping default max_image_size from 256 to 512.
• Allow disabling private messages. Fixes #3640
• Fix postgres connection options causing slow query speed.
• Removing strip = true from release profile.
• Add filter to hide posts with comments.
• Fix fullsize post image
• Fix modlog mod_id filtering not working.
• Cleanup post action forms

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

sunaurus

• Always save remote image data

netbrum

• Replace clippy::unwrap_used in tests

dullbananas

• Apply scheduled post limit to future posts instead of past posts, and verify this in test

N4taaa

• UX - Swap "Select Language" and "Cancel/Preview/Reply" button locations around in commentsReverse order of buttons in Reply TextArea

matc-pub

• SortType, Tagline, Emojis
• Fix date-fns dynamic import

SleeplessOne1917

• Add skip_serialize_none to OAuth structs with option fields
• Fix jump to content

Nutomic

• Resolve links to remote posts into local URL
• Attempt to fix test for fetching deeply nested comment
• Avoid stack overflow when fetching nested comments, reduce max comment depth to 50
• Handle partial settings backup (fixes #4307)
• Avoid breaking changes, keep response fields as deprecated
• Replace clippy allow annotation with expect (fixes #5012)
• Cleanup remaining use of Result<bool, Error> (fixes #4862)
• Post scheduling (fixes #234)
• Conditionally hide comments on nsfw posts (fixes #4237)
• Simplify handling of NotFound SQL errors (fixes #4633)
• Post scheduling

dessalines

• Adding a get_random_community endpoint.
• Adding local site settings to reject federated upvotes or downvotes.
• Add modlog entries for bulk removals.
• Adding skip_serializing_none to another OAuth API request.
• Removing a few more Result<Bool>.
• Add ability to search for Community by its description (or title only).
• Remove redundant local_user.auto_expand setting.
• Adding saved_only, liked_only, and disliked_only filters to search.
• Get rid of a lot of pointless mut form initializations.
• Fixing titleOnly, PostSort, and CommentSort.
• Updating git cliff.

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• 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.

Major Changes

This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer <jwt>. The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

• Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

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 three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

This week we finally started deploying 0.19 release candidates to lemmy.ml, as a final testing step before release. Unfortunately there are some nasty authentication which we have been attempting to debug all week, without success so far. So it will take some more time to fix this and other issues before publishing the final version.

@rasklyd made Lemmy releases for ARM64 platforms possible. @kroese did the same for lemmy-ui. This means that official releases from Lemmy 0.19 will work on devices such as Raspberry Pi.

@dessalines has been very busy attempting to fix the previously mentioned authentication bug. He also worked on other bug fixes and upgraded Jerboa for Lemmy 0.19.

@nutomic again fixed various problems that were introduced during 0.19 development, to get ready for the release.

@Sleeplessone1917 implemented the frontend for user settings import/export. He also started work on an overhaul of context menus.

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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

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

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 fixes the problem of comment context not loading properly. It also fixes a couple other bugs.

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.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

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.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

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

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That's why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn't send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can't access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy's web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance's icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy's web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text "404 error message here".

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml's home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy's database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy's main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

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.

Its been a long time coming 🥳 .

Excerpt from the link:

Major Changes

Language Tags

Content can now be tagged to indicate the language it is written in. These tags can be used to filter content, so that you only see posts in languages which you actually understand. Instances and communities can also specify which languages are allowed, and prevent posting in other languages.

In the future this will also allow for integrated translation tools.

Comment trees

Lemmy has changed the way it stores comments, in order to be able to properly limit the comments shown to a maximum depth.

Included are proper comment links (/comment/id), where you can see its children, a count of its hidden children, and a context button to view its parents, or the post.

Featured posts

Admins and mods can now "feature" (this used to be called "sticky" ala reddit) posts to the top of either a community, or the top of the front page. This makes possible announcement and bulletin-type posts.

Special thanks to @makotech for adding this feature.

Federation

Lemmy users can now be followed. Just visit a user profile from another platform like Mastodon, and click the follow button, then you will receive new posts and comments in the timeline.

Votes are now federated as private. This prevents other platforms from showing who voted on a given post, and it also means that Lemmy now counts votes from Mastodon.

This release also improves compatibility with Pleroma. If you previously had trouble interacting between Pleroma and Lemmy, give it another try.

We've extracted the main federation logic into its own library, activitypub-federation-rust. It is open source and can be used by other projects to implement Activitypub federation, without having to reinvent the wheel. The library helps with handling HTTP signatures, sending and receiving activities, fetching remote objects and more.

Other changes

• Admins can now purge content and pictures from the database.
• Mods can distinguish a comment, "stickying" it to the top of a post. Useful for mod messages and announcements.
• Number of new / unread comments are now shown for each post.
• Lemmy now automatically embeds videos from Peertube, Youtube and other sites which provide an embed link via Opengraph attribute.
• You can give your site "taglines", short markdown messages, which are shown at the top of your front page. Thanks to @makotech for adding this.
• You can now report private messages.
• Most settings have been moved from the config file into the database. This means they can be updated much easier, and apply immediately without a restart.
• When setting up a new Lemmy instance, it doesn't create a default community anymore. Instead this needs to be done manually.
• Admins can choose to receive emails for new registration applications.
• An upgrade of diesel to v2.0, our rust -> postgres layer.

All the old pictures are restored from a backup, and should be working now. We've bought more hard drive space too, so we should be okay for a while.

A few bug fixes:

• Fix missing auth on new post refresh. (#764)
• Change CSP rule for connect-src (websocket) to wildcard (fixes #730) (#737)
• Increase default search rate limit. (#2424)
• Rejected federated pm from blocked users (fixes #2398) (#2408)
• Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
• Revert "Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)"
• Handle Like, Undo/Like activities from Mastodon, add tests (fixes #2378) (#2380)
• Dont allow login if account is banned or deleted (fixes #2372) (#2374)
• Fix panics in search_by_apub_id() (fixes #2371) (#2373)

Sry for not announcing sooner.

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

A full list of fixes is below, but this patch release includes federation compatibility and bug fixes, as well as fixing vulnerabilities in our websocket rate limiting.

Upgrade notes

Besides the addition of a search rate limit to the lemmy.hjson, there are no config or API changes.

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost two years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation. If you would like to support our efforts, please consider donating.

If you'd like to support development, and make sure that we will always be available to work full time on Lemmy, consider donating to support its development. We've spent hundreds of hours on Lemmy, and would like to be able to add more developers to our little open-source co-op as time goes on.

Changes

Lemmy Server

• Federate user account deletion (fixes #1284) (#2199)
• Dont federate initial upvote (#2196)
• Add missing mod log entries for federated actions (fixes #1489) (#2198)
• Make sure application questionaire is required. Fixes #2189
• Fix verify_mod_action check for remote admin actions (#2190)
• Run cargo upgrade (#2176)
• Migrate towards using page.attachment field for url (ref #2144) (#2182)
• Exclude removed/deleted posts from community outbox (#2184)
• Fetch community outbox in parallel (fixes #2180) (#2181)
• Adding a ban expires update job. Fixes #2177
• Add email translations (#2175)
• Add test files for Friendica federation (fixes #2144) (#2167)
• Lowering search rate limit. Fixes #2153 (#2154)
• Rate limit ws joins (#2171)
• Delete unused diesel.toml file (#2166)
• Rate limit websocket joins. (#2165)
• Doing tests in sequential order. Fixes #2158 (#2163)
• Dont log errors when rate limit is hit (fixes #2157) (#2161)
• Fix rate limit check for register. Fixes #2159
• GNU social compatibility (#2100)
• Consolidate and lower reqwest timeouts. Fixes #2150 (#2151)
• Check that config is valid before saving (#2152)
• Dont log error if duplicate activity is received (fixes #2146) (#2148)
• WIP: Email localization (fixes #500) (#2053)
• If viewed actor isnt in db, fetch it from other instance (#2145)
• Show rate limit algorithm. Fixes #2136
• Adjust retry interval for sending activities (#2141)
• Add jerboa link to readme. Fixes #2137
• Forbid remote URLs for avatars/banners (fixes #1618) (#2132)
• Remove docker/prod unused files (fixes #2086) (#2133)
• Rework error handling (fixes #1714) (#2135)
• Dont allow admin to add mod to remote community (#2129)
• Reject federated downvotes if downvotes are disabled (fixes #2124) (#2128)

Lemmy UI

• Dont allow community urls like /c/{id} (fixes #611) (#612)
• Fix loading indicator on search page (fixes #443) (#606)
• Upgrade deps (#604)
• Remove auth token from error message. Fixes #600 (#601)
• Fix error during new site setup (#596)
• Differentiate between mods and admins in mod log (#597)
• Fix comment fedilink (fixes #594) (#595)

A few bug fixes:

Lemmy

• Revert "Add logging to debug federation issues (ref #2096) (#2099)" (#2130)
• Dont allow admin to add mod to remote community (#2129)
• Reject federated downvotes if downvotes are disabled (fixes #2124) (#2128)

Lemmy-ui

• Fix error during new site setup (#596)
• Differentiate between mods and admins in mod log (#597)
• Fix comment fedilink (fixes #594) (#595)