This is a follow-up to my previous post asking for design suggestions for the new donation dialog. It gave a lot of valuable feedback which is why I'm making another similar post.

This time it's about the donation page on join-lemmy.org (linked above). What can be done to improve the texts and design? For a start I already changed the text to the same one from the donation dialog. Here more space is available, so a longer text with more details could be written (possibly below the donation buttons).

What do you think about the available donation options? Do they work for you or would you prefer to donate through a different platform? On the other hand it is possible that the number of available options is already too confusing. Would it help to add a short description for each button?

Below are lists of contributors, translators and sponsors. They haven't been updated in two years and no one complained, which indicates that they don't serve as motivation for people to contribute or donate. So I would remove that whole section which will leave a lot of free space. What else can we put there, maybe a list of reasons why people should donate?

By the way I plan to make a recurring series of posts like this. The next ones will likely cover onboarding for new users, the reports page and more. If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.

Edit: The changes are now deployed, but you are welcome to make further suggestions.

Lemmy Release v0.19.11

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

I know Nicole has kinda become a meme but for me it's just annoying. Is there a way we can get some type of plugin one inboxes so that we can set up a regex to look out for, "hi, I'm Nicole, the Fediverse chick" and all variations of and automatically bounce them?

Are we nearing 1.0.0? What does such a release mean?

I really like public endorsements in forums, when the comment/post shows the names of ppl who like it, it lets me know if I can trust an opinion, especially if I've seen those names before, which is common here.

Instead of ppl commenting seconded or I agree, they could endorse a post to publically show their name next to a like/upvote. The inverse would also be nice as well, downvote/disagree and show your username, both would be helpful information, becoming more valuable overtime.

As an addition to upvoting/downvoting, not replacing it.

The next Lemmy version will add a donation dialog, which is shown once a year to every user, in order to increase the amount of donations for Lemmy development. You can see the current text in the screenshot above and in the translations repo. You can also checkout the frontend PR. Is there anything you would change about the text?

Edit: This is how the final design looks like:

In short: I made a post that people did not like and it got removed and I got banned from the community, the whole thing is not the point of this post.

After all this, I got one account which is trying to dox me in the comments, I reported and blocked him and moved on.

Moments ago I noticed couple of notifications, upon checking them I saw that one account is commenting on every recent post of me saying that I am spamming Russian propaganda, I blocked him.

My question here, is there is a better way to handle this other than blocking?

I am asking because I hate using block function on Lemmy, because it hide their comments from me, but does not hide my posts for them.

Will it just edit the link to point to a server's local copy of a post? Will it use ap:// links, or some other fancy type (for example !comm@instance/post or similar.)?

Is there a way to disable DMs? I keep being spammed by users from an instance called sh.itjust.works promoting some weird out-of-platform personal profiles.

They usually send this stuff and then immediately seem to get banned, but I still see their stuff since images are displayed by default. Seems like a big oversight to allow this.

Is there a way to block receiving DMs? Or at least have some sort of Accept/Decline dm feature like on Reddit?

Nutomic:

This is implemented in the main branch now. If you want to develop a plugin for Lemmy, have a look at the RFC and the examples. If you have questions about plugin development, feel free to post in the Matrix dev chat, [email protected] or open an issue.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3562#issuecomment-2760779122

Examples in multiple languages: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-plugins#lemmy-plugins (only a few examples currently, more languages are possible including Python)

Anyone planning to start working on a plugin?

I've noticed an issue with the search functionality on Lemmy. When using the search filters for "top" posts, it doesn't seem to matter whether you select "day," "week," "month," or "year" – the results always show the top posts of all time. This makes it difficult to find recent discussions or trending topics within a specific timeframe.

Has anyone else encountered this problem? Is there already an issue for it on Github?

This comes up surprisingly often, but this comment chain in the recent AMA prompted me to start a general discussion to maybe put this discussion to rest.

The only other place I'm aware that this has been discussed in detail is this pull request from 2023, which the creator ultimately closed.

What I'm ultimately in favour of, and what actually gets requested (one, two, three), is letting mods edit the metadata around a post. Things like the NSFW toggle, or post tags in 1.0.

But I'm throwing this out to the floor. What, if anything, do you think mods should be able to change about a user's content?

The only time I got a photo in DMs was when Nicole switched from text to photos.

In all seriousness, disabling Pictures in DMs will prevent Spam, Trolling and NSFL pictures that could be sent to bother people.

In my opinion, there is really no use case for pics in DMs for Lemmy.

Title. I'd like to filter some posts from Lemmy. Can this be done, either natively, either by some extensions (for chromium, in my case), either using a different frontend...?

Thank you in advance.

Does anyone know about the culture of different Lemmy instances?

I saw in this post that the culture between instances can vary quite a bit: https://lemmy.ca/post/40916774

What are the differences between the major instances?

For work browsing safety, my strategy is to use two instances:

• lemm.ee – because it doesn’t allow pornographic content.
• lemmynsfw.com – for anything I wish to subscribe to that falls into the opposite category.

I saw that a user was banned by moderator on my instance and their comments removed. I don't have a moderator, it's just me, I'm the only user. I thought I accidently fumble fingrred the ban button and restored their comments and appologize. Come to find out that they were banned from their own instance.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. On one hand it's good if it's a really bad user posting spam or worse. On the other hand it is a conduit for censorship. If an admin doesn't like what you post on another instance, then they can censor you everywhere. On top of that, it makes it look like I am banning people, and I don't like that at all if they're just making normal comments. It should say something else and I should get some kind of alert that lets me know so that I can decide if the comments on my instance are appropriate.

I'd like to start a discussion about a potential feature for our platform.

As someone who moderates religious-based communities here on Lemmy, I've encountered a recurring issue: frequent brigading by anti-religious users.

This got me thinking about community management options.

Currently, Lemmy allows communities to be public or mod-only.

However, I personally believe that Lemmy could potentially benefit from additional options similar to those available on Reddit:

1. Restricted Communities: Where anyone can view, but only approved members can post/comment.
2. Private Communities: Where only approved members can view and participate.

Questions for discussion:

• Do you think these additional privacy options would be beneficial for Lemmy?
• How might this impact the overall user experience and community dynamics?
• Could this help address issues like brigading in sensitive topic areas?
• Are there potential downsides or concerns about implementing such features?
• How would this align with Lemmy's philosophy and goals as a platform?

I'm interested in hearing your thoughts, experiences, and perspectives on this matter.

So, I built a web client with some experimental and questionable design choices. I spent the whole weekend on it, so it's pretty much a finished product*. The project isn't very serious, but maybe I'll keep working on it.

Try it here

git repo

~*only the feed works, and it works poorly.~

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/40761824

Sorry everyone I know how much you love the attention she gives you, but I've implemented some quick and dirty filtering for private messaging.

We now have the ability to automatically mark PM's as deleted or read, depending on content inside of them. If we accidentally filter something you legitimately wanted (ie, not Nicole) please let me know.

If any other instances would like to implement this, here's the code. Note that you'll need to set your hostname at the top here for some reason I haven't exactly identified.

SET lemmy.protocol_and_hostname = 'https://lemmy.ca/';

CREATE TABLE private_message_filters (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    phrase TEXT NOT NULL,
    behavior VARCHAR(10) NOT NULL CHECK (behavior IN ('delete', 'mark_read'))
);

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION filter_private_messages()
RETURNS trigger AS $$
DECLARE
    banned_phrase_record private_message_filters%ROWTYPE;
BEGIN
    FOR banned_phrase_record IN 
        SELECT * FROM private_message_filters
    LOOP
        IF LOWER(TRIM(NEW.content)) ILIKE '%' || LOWER(TRIM(banned_phrase_record.phrase)) || '%' THEN
            IF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'delete' THEN
                NEW.deleted := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            ELSIF banned_phrase_record.behavior = 'mark_read' THEN
                NEW.read := true;
                RETURN NEW;
            END IF;
        END IF;
    END LOOP;
    RETURN NEW;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;

CREATE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages
AFTER INSERT ON private_message
FOR EACH ROW
EXECUTE FUNCTION filter_private_messages();

To add filter words:

insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('delete', 'spamtestdelete');
insert into private_message_filters (behavior, phrase) values ('mark_read', 'spamtestread');

If you want to quickly disable / enable filtering while testing:

ALTER TABLE private_message DISABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;
ALTER TABLE private_message ENABLE TRIGGER trg_filter_private_messages;

I'll leave it up to you to figure out what phrases to filter on. MAKE SURE YOU TEST. If there's an error, private messaging could break completely. You should not get an error message from the UI while sending a message with a banned word.

Edit: I like flamingos-cant's solution here better: https://lemmy.ca/post/40761824/15209462

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1192921

Lemmy Just Reached 1 Million Posts

Lemmy just reached a new milestone: 1 million posts, across 1,323 servers.

Source: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats&days=90

Is there a github issue or discussion about implementing pods for lemmy?

I’d like to know if someone has been successfully hosting Lemmy with yunohost because I’m pondering to start doing it but it’s not available on arm so I cannot test it without start paying a vps.

So ye, are there any hiccups or weird behaviors?

This link was a really intriguing post entitled, "How did you get your job?" I was planning to read through some more of the comments (it got really popular quickly), but the author deleted the post for some reason!

I don't have a Github account after deleting it some time after it was ought by Microsoft. Given the rise of anti-US sentiment and calls to stop using their products, more people leaving Github might be a real occurrence. How can I and others who have left, are leaving, and will leave Github, be able to contribute?

I am not very familiar with the technical workings of lemmy, so if this is a really shitty idea, just tell me.

I joined lemmy a week ago and it kind of bothered me that there is not THE me_irl or not THE programming_humor. Would it be possible to add the functionality to link communities together. In my naive opinion, this would solve my "problem" and add the opportunity to not only federate reddit, but to also federate single communities on lemmy.

What would be the pros and cons of such an approach? Looking forward for your comments!