Here are some of the major changes made over the past month:

• @travis-jeans added themes from RBlind.com to lemmy-ui (#3159).
• @Nothing4You made improvements for media deletion and purging
• @momentary-lapse also improved image deletion, and cleaned up database forms.
• @dullbananas implemented federation for community reports (#5496)
• @xaegit made changes to show nsfw images by default if content_warning is enabled.
• @SleeplessOne1917 removed the browser cache for lemmy-ui which will reduce storage use.
• @dessalines worked on various changes for the 1.0 release.
• @nutomic made different changes to speedup compilation, and reported bugs with slow compilation in Rust (first, second).

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

Starting now, we are changing the dev update to a monthly schedule. This is more predictable and gives us more time to write it.

Last month saw the release of Lemmy 0.19.11. It included a lot of changes backported from the development branch. This way improvements can already reach users while the main branch is still under heavy development in preparation for the 1.0 release.

There were numerous other contributions:

• Leoseg added a new keyword filter.
• SolninjaA added support for using separate subdomains for federation and web interface.
• [email protected] made various accessibility improvements to the UI.
• @[email protected] added some NSFW-related fixes.
• Nutomic and [email protected] fixed different federation bugs and got Peertube federation working again.
• Nothing4You and Matc-pub also contributed different bug fixes, speedups, and picture fixes.
• [email protected] helped with some release-related tasks, and backported some existing mainline bug-fixes.

On the 1.0 front Dessalines was busy with different rewrites of the database to improve pagination, adding read, liked, and hidden content endpoints, speeding up compilation time, and also getting lemmy-ui updated.

For Lemmy to have a future, it's been a long-term goal to ensure that donations can cover the two full-time devs' living expenses, and possibly add more developers to the co-op. Nutomic worked on various tasks to aid this, including:

• A redesign of the donation page on join-lemmy.org.
• A new donation dialog shown directly in the Lemmy web interface.
• A call for donations which was widely shared and discussed.

Although the goal is not reached yet, it looks like a success as the amount of recurring donations was almost doubled within a few days. It also helped to clarify and resolve some of the reasons why people were unwilling to donate.

You can see the full list of changes for April 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 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

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 [email protected]. 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

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 is a small bugfix release with the following:

• Fixing cors origin wildcard. by @dessalines in #5194
• Fetch community mods synchronously by @Nutomic in #5169
• Move aggregates to replaceable_schema, fix error (fixes #5186) by @Nutomic in #5190

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

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

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 took a long time to complete due to a major performance problem which brought lemmy.ml to a crawl every time we tried to deploy the new version. It took a lot of testing (in production) to narrow it down to a single commit, and finally fix the problem.

The release itself contains numerous bug fixes and minor improvements:

Lemmy

Enhancements

• Parallel federation sending by @phiresky in #4623
• Reduce CPU usage for generating link previews by @phiresky in #4957
• Switch from OpenSSL to rustls by @kwaa in #4901
• Increase max post url length to 2000 characters by @dessalines in #4960
• Increase max length of user bio to 1000 charactes by @dessalines #5014
• Reduce maximum comment depth to 50 by @nutomic #5009
• Resize post thumbnails by @nutomic #5107/files
• Add category to RSS feeds by @nutomic #5030
• Allow users to view their own removed/deleted communities by @dessalines in #4912
• Add backend check to enforce hierarchy of admins and mods by @dessalines in #4860
• Do pictrs transformations for proxied image urls by @dessalines in #4895
• Enable more build optimizations by @nutomic in #5168
• Calculate "controversial" ranking with exponent instead of multiply (just like Reddit) by @dullbananas in #4872
• Automatically remove tracking parameters from URLs by @dessalines #5018
• Relax timeout for sending activities by @Nothing4You in #4864

Bug Fixes

• Fix admin notification for new user registration (fixes #4916) by @Nutomic in #4925
• Allow community settings changes by remote mods @flamingo-cant-draw in #4937
• Fix problem with connecting to Postgres with TLS @FenrirUnbound in #4910
• Fix bug when commenting in local-only community by @dessalines in #4854 and @abdel-m in #4920
• Fix scheduled task to delete users with denied applications by @Nothing4You in #4907

API

• Return image dimensions and content type in API responses by @dessalines in #4704
• Adding a show_read override to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4846
• Add show_nsfw override filter to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4889
• Require authentication for site metadata fetch endpoint by @dessalines in #4968
• Add the ability to fetch a registration application by person_id by @dessalines in #4913
• Order community posts by published data, not id by @dullbananas in #4859
• Throw error when non-mod posts to mod-only comm or when URL is blocked by @flamingo-cant-draw in #4966
• Add option to search exclusively by post title by Carlos-Cabello #5015

Database

• Approve applications in transaction by @Nothing4You in #4970
• Use trigger to generate apub URL in insert instead of update, and fix query planner options not being set when TLS is disabled by @dullbananas in #4797

Lemmy-UI

• Fix full-size post images. by @dessalines in #2797
• Fix modlog ID filtering. by @dessalines in #2795
• Allow Arabic and Cyrillic characters when signing up or creating community by @SleeplessOne1917
• UX - Swap "Select Language" and "Cancel/Preview/Reply" button locations around in commentsReverse order of buttons in Reply TextArea
• Fix jump to content by @SleeplessOne1917
• Fixing peertube and ordinary video embeds. by @dessalines in #2676
• Changing sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax. by @dessalines in #2677
• Remove show new post notifs setting. by @dessalines in #2675
• Fix memory leak around emojis on server render by @makotech222 in #2674
• Enable spellcheck for markdown text area by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2669
• Pre release dep bump by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2661
• Add ability to fill magnet link title on post creation. by @dessalines in #2654
• Registration application view by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2651
• Add torrent help by @dessalines in #2650
• More moderation history by @dessalines in #2649
• Fix tribute related bug by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2647
• Remove min and max length from password input when using login form by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2643
• Remove trending communities card from home. by @dessalines in #2639
• Set data-bs-theme based on the presence of "dark" in theme name by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2638
• Fixing modlog filtering to allow admins and mods to filter by mod. by @dessalines in #2629
• Fix issue from logo bugfix by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2620
• Make more post params cross-postable by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2621
• Fix wonky comment action icon button alignment by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2622
• Prevent broken logo from crashing site by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2619
• Add rate limit info message. by @dessalines in #2563
• Fix getQueryString by @matc-pub in #2558

New Contributors

• @abdel-m made their first contribution in #4920
• @johnspurlock made their first contribution in #4917
• @FenrirUnbound made their first contribution in #4910
• @kwaa made their first contribution in #4901
• @Daniel15 made their first contribution in #4892

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

Upgrade instructions

This upgrade could take as long as ~30 minutes for larger servers, due to needing to recalculate controversy ranks for all historical posts.

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.

Special shout out to @SleeplessOne1917, @phiresky, @dullbananas, @mv-gh, @Nothing4u, @asonix, @sunaurus, @flamingo-cant-draw, and @Freakazoid182 for their many code contributions and helpful insights.

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 also apologize for all the downtime on lemmy.ml recently, but thanks to @Nutomic and @phiresky, we've narrowed down the issue, and have a fix for it.

This was a blocker for the 0.19.6 release, so that should be ready to go soon, with 0.20.0 not long after.

flamingo-cant-draw

• Append attachments to comments

SleeplessOne1917

• Allow Arabic and Cyrillic characters when signing up or creating community

Nothing4You

• Allow admins to resolve removed or deleted objects via API

Integral-Tech

• refactor: destructure tuples to enhance readability

dessalines

• Compress binary with upx.
• Adding community description in addition to sidebar, like site.

Nutomic

• Remove individual user/community inboxes
• Remove comment_like.post_id column which is unnecessary (ref #5122)
• Support markdown sub/superscript, use external crate for spoilers

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.

stevenvergenz

• Add community alphabetic sorting

SleeplessOne1917

• Implement support for Single Sign-On

Nutomic

• Resize post thumbnails (fixes #4053)

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

Here is an update that explains what we have been working on recently (apologies for not having these for a few months, summer vacations and all that). This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

@privacyguard added Single-Sign-On (SSO) support to lemmy (this still needs some UI work and testing, but the bulk of the work is done). Special thanks to Privacy Portal for working on this!

@carlos-cabello added a way to filter posts by title only (and not body) when searching.

@Freakazoid182 added custom emoji and tagline views.

@nothing4u made our scheduled cleanup job delete denied users.

@sunaurus made a few image proxy fixes.

@sleepless has been working hard on lemmy-ui-leptos, which may eventually replace lemmy-ui. He made improvements to how posts are displayed; made SI formatting consistent with how the current UI handles it; added translations; added post content actions, creator, and community listings; and made some plugins for markdown-it.

@nutomic cleaned up the issue tracker by closing invalid issues and adding tags like good first issue. He also made some simple improvements, like adding a category to RSS feeds, fixing an issue with activitypub ids, and removing the enable_nsfw setting in favor of content_warning.

@dessalines integrated a new rust clearurls library into lemmy that will remove tracking params for any post or comment text (Much thanks to @jendrikw for creating this library), increased the bio max length from 300 to 1000, removes lemmy's reliance on openssl, made the list logins response more uniform, added the ability to restore content on an unban, added a default comment sort type for both the local site, and your user.

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 is a smaller bugfix release, with the following changes:

Lemmy

• Don't change encoding style in clean_url_params.
• Fix for federation last_successful_id.
• Fixing featured_local trigger.
• Fix postres TLS connection.

Lemmy-UI

• Fix for fetch page title.
• Fix create post focus resets.
• Make media uploads viewable only on your own profile.
• Fixing an auto-download bug.
• Regenerating lemmy-ui themes.

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

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.

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.

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 (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 v0.19.4 release is a big one, with > 200 pull requests merged since v0.19.3. 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 changelogs at the bottom of this post.

Local Only Communities

Communities have a new visibility setting, which can be either Public (current behaviour) or LocalOnly. The latter means that the community won't federate, and can only be viewed by users who are logged in to the local instance. This can be useful for meta communities discussing moderation policies of the local instance, where outside users shouldn't be able to participate. It is also a first step towards implementing private communities. Local only communities still need more testing and should be considered experimental for now.

Image Proxying

There is a new config option called image_mode which provides a way to proxy external image links through the local instance. This prevents deanonymization attacks where an attacker uploads an image to his own server, embeds it in a Lemmy post and watches the IPs which load the image.

Instead if image_mode is set to ProxyAllImages, image urls are rewritten to be proxied through /api/v3/image_proxy. This can also improve performance and avoid overloading other websites. The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.

Many thanks to @asonix for adding this functionality to pict-rs v0.5.

Post hiding

You can now hide a post as a dropdown option, and there is a new toggle to filter hidden posts in lemmy-ui. Apps can use the new show_hidden field on GetPosts to enable this.

Moderation enhancements

With the URL blocklist admins can prevent users from linking to specific sites.

Admins and mods can now view the report history and moderation history for a given post or comment.

The functionality to resolve reports automatically when a post is removed was previously broken and is now fixed. Additionally, reports for already removed items are now ignored.

The site.content_warning setting lets admins show a message to users before rendering any content. If it is active, nsfw posts can be viewed without login.

Mods and admins can now comment in locked posts.

Mods and admins can also use external tools such as LemmyAutomod for more advanced tools.

Media

There is a new functionality for users to list all images they have previously uploaded, and delete them if desired. It also allows admins to view and delete images hosted on the local instance.

When uploading a new avatar or banner, the old one is automatically deleted.

Instance admins should also checkout lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner which can delete thumbnails for old posts, and free significant amounts of storage.

Federation

Lemmy can now federate with Wordpress, Discourse and NodeBB. So far there was only minor testing and these projects are still under heavy development. If you encounter any issues federating with these platforms, open an issue either in the Lemmy repo or in the respective project's issue tracker. You can test it by fetching the following posts:

• Wordpress
• Discourse
• NodeBB

In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts. The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.

Reliability and security of federation have been improved, and numerous bugs squashed. Signed fetch was broken and is fixed now.

Vote display user setting

There is now a user setting to change the way vote counts are displayed, called vote display mode.

You can specify which of the following vote data you'd like to see (or hide): Upvotes, Downvotes, Score, Upvote Percentage, or none of the above. The default (based on user feedback) is showing the upvotes + downvotes.

App developers will need to update their apps to support this setting.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds now include post thumbnail and embedded images.

Security Audit

A security audit was recently performed on Lemmy. Big thanks to Radically Open Security for the generous funding, and to Sabrina Deibe and Joe Neeman for carrying out the audit. The focus was on federation logic, and discovered various problems in this area. Most of the problems are being mitigated as part of this release. Fortunately no critical security vulnerabilities were discovered.

This is already the third security audit of Lemmy, all organized by ROS. We're greatly indebted to them for their support.

Other Changes

• Added Community local_subscribers count
• Support for custom post thumbnail
• For new user accounts the interface language and discussion languages are set automatically based on accept-language HTTP header
• Added instance-level default sort type
• Indicate to user when they are banned from community
• Added alt_text for image posts
• Dont require leading ! or @ to fetch a user or community
• Extra fields for PostReport and CommentReport views

Full Changelog

• API changes - lemmy-js-client 0.19.3 -> 0.19.4
• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

Upgrade instructions

Warning: This version requires both a Postgres and Pictrs version upgrade, which requires manual intervention.

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.

Special thanks goes to Radically Open Security, @sleepless and @matc-pub for their work on lemmy-ui and lemmy-ui-leptos, @dullbananas for their help cleaning up the back-end, DB, and reviewing PRs, @phiresky for federation work, @MV-GH for their work on Jerboa and API suggestions, @asonix for developing pictrs, @ticoombs and @codyro for helping maintain lemmy-ansible, @kroese, @povoq, @flamingo-cant-draw, @aeharding, @Nothing4U, @db0, @MrKaplan, for helping with issues and troubleshooting, and too many more to count.

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.

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 (scroll to bottom of page)