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 brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

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.

This upgrade takes ~5 minutes for the database migrations to complete.

You may need to run sudo chown 1000:1000 lemmy.hjson if you have any permissions errors.

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

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 includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

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.

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.

The new major version of Lemmy is now ready, and we need your help with testing. Most importantly it uses HTTP for API requests now, which is much more efficient than websocket. Additionally Two-factor-auth is supported. There are also countless other improvements and bug fixes.

You can register on any of the following servers to start testing, no approval required. You can post to your hearts content to find out if anything is broken. The test instances only federate with each other to avoid affecting production instances with spam.

• Enterprise
• Voyager
• DS

If you encounter any bugs that aren't present in 0.17, open an issue and mention in the title that it happened with a release candicate version. Over the next days we will publish new RC versions to fix bugs that will invariably pop up.

Instance admins can try the new version by using Docker images dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.0-rc.2 and dessalines/lemmy:0.18.0-rc.1. Make sure that working backups are in place. For production instances its better to wait at least some days for the major issues to be fixed.

Its been a hectic week everyone, so I apologize that I haven't been as responsive as usual. We realized that we could either spend all our day answering questions, or coding to make lemmy better, so we're prioritizing the latter.

Reddit caught us right in the middle of one of our larger performance improvements, so I apologize for the instability of instances like this one. But I'm confident that lemmy will improve, especially due to all the new contributors helping out with performance, security fixes, and stability.

Please use our the issue trackers for the various lemmy projects to report issues, otherwise they will likely get lost.

Call for testers

• You can help us test patch releases like this one at https://enterprise.lemmy.ml
• We're readying the 0.18.0 release soon, you can help us test at https://voyager.lemmy.ml , and https://ds9.lemmy.ml
  • App devs should use voyager.lemmy.ml to test and prepare for 0.18.0, which should come in the next few weeks. The API changes and new types can be seen here.
  • 0.18.0 should give servers a big performance boost by removing websockets and switching entirely to HTTP. It also will add a lot of features like 2fa / TOTP.

Mostly bugfixes.

Changelog

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.

We're getting ready to release a new version of Lemmy, which will require a database upgrade, so we'll have a few hours of downtime.

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)

I was going to ask for help with finding a site but I realized there was no community for that so I created TOMT (first time creating a community, sorry if I did something wrong).

not sure how marking posts as solved would work since there are no flairs on lemmy, feel free to suggest if you have any ideas

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)

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

Theming

Customizing Lemmy is now much easier than before. Instance admins can select a default instance theme under /admin which applies to all users who are not logged in, and those who haven't explicitly picked a theme.

It is also possible now to add custom themes to an instance, without having to recompile lemmy-ui. When running with Docker, make sure that these lines are present in docker-compose.yml (Ansible will add them automatically if you updated the repo). Then put your .css file into ./volumes/lemmy-ui/extra_themes. The new theme can then be selected by users, or set as instance default.

For native installation (without Docker), themes are loaded by lemmy-ui from ./extra_themes folder. A different path can be specified with LEMMY_UI_EXTRA_THEMES_FOLDER environment variable.

For instructions how to create a new theme, have a look at the documentation.

Federation

@nutomic made many changes to federation to increase compatibility with other software. Lemmy can now receive deletions from [Pleroma], comments from [Friendica] and communities from lotide. Other actions were already compatible before. Mastodon can now display communities even when a user with identical name exists (but the user can't be viewed in that case). There were no breaking changes necessary, so federation is fully compatible with 0.15. If you notice something in another project that doesn't federate but should, please open an issue.

Multiple users have pointed out that posts, comments and votes don't federate reliably. We first attempted to fix this in Lemmy 0.15.4 a few days ago, but that didn't help much. Later @nutomic noticed that Lemmy was only sending out activities with 4 worker threads, which is not enough for a big instance like lemmy.ml. At the same time, many of those workers were taken up by sending to broken instances, trying to connect for a minute or more. This version adds a timeout and increases the number of workers.

Federated bans

Until now, only community bans were federated, and the "Remove content" option didn't work over federation. The new version fixes this behaviour, so that both site bans and community bans federate, including "Remove content" option and expiry. Note that this change only affects new bans, those which were issued before upgrading to 0.16 will not be federated.

Hide communities

@dayinjing implemented a funcionality for instance admins to hide controversial communities. A hidden community is only visible to those users who subscribe to it. This represents a milder alternative to removing a community. This functionality is not implemented in lemmy-ui yet, but admins can hide a community like this via command line:

curl -X PUT https://example.com/api/v3/community/hide \   
    -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -d \
    '{"community_id":3,"hidden":true,"reason":"*reason for mod log*","auth":"*admin jwt token*"}'

Jerboa: a new android app

To help adoption, and since most people use social media through their smartphones nowadays, @dessalines has been working on a native android app for Lemmy called Jerboa, which is now on F-Droid and Google Play.

It is still at an alpha level, but is very usable. We'd love to have experienced android developers contribute to it.

This now makes three smartphone apps for Lemmy: Lemmur and Jerboa for Android, and Remmel for iOS.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

There are three lemmy.hjson config changes. See defaults.hjson for comments and default values.

• changed boolean email.use_tls to email.tls_type
• added setup.default_theme
• added federation.worker_count

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

API

• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.15.0 -> 0.16.0 .

Config

• The config changes are here.

This should help us cut down on the trolls. We recommend other instances do the same, because they will likely be targeted also.

I apologize for all their gore-posts as well, no one should have to see that. We'll try to look for more admins from different time-zones as well to get them faster.

The two other possibilities we have currently as options, are turning on required email verification, and as a last resort, closing signups. I personally would rather not do either, but they are options.

Many thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected] for banning those trolls.

Lemmy now has private instances, optional registration applications, optional email verification, and temporary bans! These are described in detail below.

Special thanks to @asonix for adding tokio-console and Jaeger + opentelemetry to our dev setups, so we can better identify performance bottlenecks.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to communities you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote and comment on them. Lemmy isn't just a reddit alternative; its a network of interconnected communities ran by different people and organizations, all combining to create a single, personalized front page of your favorite news, articles, and memes.

Major Changes

Required email verification

Admins can turn this on, and new users will need to verify their emails. Current users will not have to do this.

Registration applications

Admins can now optionally make new users fill out an application to join your server. There is a new panel in their top bar where they can approve or deny pending applications.

This works in conjunction with the require_email field. If that is also turned on, the application will only be shown after their email has been verified. The user will receive an email when they have been accepted.

Closed / Private instances

The instance settings now includes a private instance option, which if turned on, will only let logged in users view your site. Private instances was one of our first issues, and it was a large effort, so its great to finally have this completed.

Temporary Bans

When banning users from your site or community, moderators can now optionally give a number of days for the ban to last.

Allow comment replies from blocked users

It used to be that if a user blocked you, you couldn't respond to their public posts and comments. This is now fixed. They won't see your content, but others can.

Upgrade notes

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Support development

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

API

We've removed a list of banned users from GetSite, added a few endpoints related to registration applications, made a few changes allowing temporary bans, site settings, made a few changes to the login response. These are non-destructive and current clients should work with this release.

• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.14.0 -> 0.15.0 .

Config

There is a new rate limit for creating new comments in the config.hjson.

Lemmy Server

• Adding temporary bans. Fixes #1423 (#1999)
• Add console-subscriber (#2003)
• Opentelemetry (#1992)
• Use correct encoding when fetching non-UTF-8 site metadata (#2015)
• Adding a banned endpoint for admins. Removing it from GetSite. Fixes #1806
• Prevent panic on InboxRequestGuard
• Case-insensitive webfinger response. Fixes #1955 & #1986 (#2005)
• First pass at invite-only migration. (#1949)
• Upgrading pictrs. (#1996)
• Trying out an upgraded version of html5ever. #1964 (#1991)
• Adding min setup password length to the docs. Fixes #1989 (#1990)
• Test pleroma follow (#1988)
• Remove awc (#1979)
• Consolidate reqwest clients, use reqwest-middleware for tracing
• Don't drop error context when adding a message to errors (#1958)
• Change lemmur repo links (#1977)
• added deps - git and ca-certificates (for federation to work) and changed adduser to useradd so that user can be added non-interactively (#1976)
• Allow comment replies from blocked users. Fixes #1793 (#1969)
• Fix retry infinite loops. Fixes #1964 (#1967)
• Add lotide activities to tests
• Allow single item for to, cc, and @context
• Adding a captcha rate limit. Fixes #1755 (#1941)
• Dont send email notifications for edited comments (fixes #1925)
• Fix API dupes query. #1878
• Fixing duped report view for admins. Fixes #1933 (#1945)
• Adding a GetComment endpoint. Fixes #1919 (#1944)
• Fix min title char count for post titles. Fixes #1854 (#1940)
• Adding MarkPostAsRead to API. Fixes #1784 (#1946)
• background-jobs 0.11 (#1943)
• Add tracing (#1942)
• Remove pointless community follower sort. (#1939)
• Use once_cell instead of lazy_static
• Adding unique constraint for activity ap_id. Fixes #1878 (#1935)
• Making public key required. Fixes #1934
• Change NodeInfo links to an array
• Fixing fuzzy_search to escape like chars.
• Fix build error in #1914
• Fix login ilike bug. Fixes #1920
• Fix Smithereen webfinger, remove duplicate webfinger impl (fixes #1916)
• Dont announce comments, edited posts to Pleroma/Mastodon followers
• Community outbox should only contain activities sent by community (fixes #1916)
• Remove HTTP signature compatibility mode (its not necessary)
• Implement rate limits on comments

Lemmy UI

• Fixed an issue with post embeds not being pushed to a new line #544
• Adding as and lt languages, Updating translations.
• Temp bans (#524)
• Fix banner. Fixes #466 (#534)
• Making the modlog badge stand out more. Fixes #531 (#539)
• Add some fallback properties for display in older browsers (#535)
• Private instances (#523)
• Add nord theme. Fixes #520 (#527)
• Dont receive post room comments from blocked users. (#516)
• Using console.error for error logs. (#517)
• Fix issue with websocket buffer.
• Switching to websocket-ts. #247 (#515)
• Fix native language issue. (zh_Hant) (#513)
• Fix tippy on component mount. Fixes #509 (#511)
• Fix docker latest (#510)
• Enabling html tags in markdown. Fixes #498
• Fix comment scroll bug. Fixes #492
• Fixing error for null person_block. Fixes #491
• Trying to catch promise and json parse errors. #489 (#490)

Today is an exciting day for the Lemmy project.

Almost one year after first enabling federation, we now federate with other projects for the first time! According to some people's definition, this finally makes us part of the Fediverse.

It took a lot of work to make this possible, so big thanks to NLnet for funding our full time work on Lemmy, and to @lanodan and @asonix for helping to figure out how Pleroma and Mastodon federation works (it's difficult because they have almost no documentation).

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to communities you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote and comment on them. Lemmy isn't just a reddit alternative; its a network of interconnected communities ran by different people and organizations, all combining to create a single, personalized front page of your favorite news, articles, and memes.

Major Changes

Federation code rewrite

The rewrite of the federation code started by @nutomic in August is now mostly complete. As a result, the code is much cleaner, and has tests to guarantee no breaking changes between Lemmy versions. As a side effect of this rewrite, it was now relatively easy to enable federation with other projects.

Mastodon and Pleroma users can:

• View Lemmy communities, user profiles, posts and comments
• Follow Lemmy communities to receive new posts and comments
• Replies (mentions) work in both directions, including notifications

In addition, Pleroma users can exchange private messages with Lemmy users.

Note that Pleroma and Mastodon rely on a compatibility mode in Lemmy, which means that they won't receive events like Deletes or Votes. Other projects whose federation works similar to Pleroma/Mastodon will likely also federate.

Hardcoded slur filter removed

Lemmy finally has essential moderation tools (reporting, user/community blocking), so the hardcoded filter isn't necessary anymore. If you want to keep using the slur filter, copy these lines to your config file when upgrading, and adjust to your liking.

Upgrade notes

If you installed Lemmy without Ansible, you need to edit the nginx config file to follow this example. Otherwise Mastodon won't be able to fetch objects or actors from Lemmy. Ansible applies this change automatically.

No other changes are necessary for federation with Mastodon/Pleroma. Just make sure your allowlist/blocklist allows it. Then get started by searching the URL of a Lemmy user or Community in Mastodon.

Note that Mastodon and Pleroma are much, much bigger than Lemmy at this point, with a combined 3 milion users and 4500 instances, compared to 20.000 users and 35 instances for Lemmy (source). The existing mod tools in Lemmy might not be adequate to handle that at the moment.

Be aware that if you have federation enabled in the Lemmy config, Mastodon and Pleroma users can now fetch all posts and comments, to view them and share with their followers. The Lemmy blocklist/allowlist can not prevent this, it only prevents posts/comments from blocked instances to be shown on your own instance. The only solution to this problem is disabling federation, or waiting for signed fetch to be implemented.

If you want to use federation, but review new instances before federating with them, use the allowlist. You can switch from open federation to allowlist federation by pasting the output of the command below into federation.allowed_instances in the Lemmy config.

curl https://your-instance.com/api/v3/site | jq -c .federated_instances.linked

The lemmy.hjson additional_slurs field has changed its name to slur_filter.

Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.

Lemmy-Ansible

We've now separated our ansible install method (the preferred way to deploy Lemmy) into its own repo, lemmy-ansible. Let us know if you need help migrating existing installations over to it.

Changes

API

• There is now a GetUnreadCount in the API to check the count of your unread messages, replies, and mentions.
• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.13.0 -> 0.14.0-rc.1 .

Lemmy Server

• More federation compat (#1894)
• Adding clippy:unwrap to husky. Fixes #1892 (#1893)
• Remove header guard for activitypub routes
• Add federation test cases for Smithereen and Mastodon
• Reduce stack memory usage in apub code
• Remove ActivityFields trait, deserialize into another struct instead
• Check if post or comment are deleted first. Fixes #1864 (#1867)
• Correctly use and document check_is_apub_id_valid() param use_strict_allowlist
• Convert note.content and chat_message.content to html (fixes #1871)
• Upgrade background_jobs to 0.9.1 #1820 (#1875)
• Fix husky fmt hook. (#1868)
• Renaming to slur_filter. Fixes #1773 (#1801)
• Three instance inbox bug (#1866)
• Remove ansible from this repo. (#1829)
• Rewrite collections to use new fetcher (#1861)
• Dont blank out post or community info. Fixes #1813 (#1841)
• Format config/defaults.hjson before committing (#1860)
• Breaking apub changes (#1859)
• Pleroma federation2 (#1855)
• Create a custom pre-commit hook, generates config/defaults.hjson (#1857)
• Add cargo metadata to all crates (#1853)
• Add both (De)Serialize to all models (#1851)
• Adding GetUnreadCount to the API. Fixes #1794 (#1842)
• Federate reports (#1830)
• Fix saved posts and hide read posts issue. Fixes #1839 (#1840)
• Dont allow posts to deleted / removed communities. Fixes #1827 (#1828)
• Dont swallow API errors (fixes #1834) (#1837)
• Fix federation of initial post/comment vote (fixes #1824) (#1835)
• Fix clippy warnings added in nightly (#1833)
• Admins can view all reports. Fixes #1810 (#1825)
• Adding a message_id to emails. Fixes #1807 (#1826)
• Generate config docs from code (#1786)
• Trying a background_jobs fix. #1820 (#1822)
• mark parent as read on reply (#1819)
• Move code to apub library (#1795)
• Adding honeypot to user and post creation. Fixes #1802 (#1803)
• Add database host back into config file (#1805)

Lemmy UI

• Updating translations.
• Fixing unload (#487)
• Fix setup password. Fixes #478 (#484)
• Adding post comment scrolling hack. Fixes #480 #486
• Navbar links (#476)

Since our last release earlier this month, we've had ~30 commits to Lemmy.

Major Changes

• Added comment and post reporting in the front end, and cleaned up the reporting API.
  • Note: these are local-only currently, reports are not yet federated.
• The JWT secret is now auto-generated by the database.
  • Note: this will log out all users, so users will have to log in again.
• Lots of smaller UI fixes listed below.

Upgrade notes

Servers

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.13.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation

Changes

Lemmy Server

General

• Adding a user agent. Fixes #1769
• Ansible changes (#1781)
• Clean up reporting (#1776)
• Implement webmention support (fixes #1395)
• Move jwt secret from config to database (fixes #1728)
• Set a 10 char minimum password length.
• Dont pass accept-encoding header to pictrs (ref #1734) (#1738)

API

• There are no breaking API changes, only the addition of reporting endpoints.
• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.12.0 -> 0.13.0 .

Federation

• Rewrite fetcher (#1792)

Lemmy UI

• Adding bn, ml, and cs langs
• Reporting (#434)
• Splitting login and signup pages. Fixes #386 (#431)
• Fixing image in newtab. Fixes #382 (#430)
• Navigate away from login page if already logged in. (#429)
• Add username validation message. Fixes #387 (#428)
• Password strength meter (#427)
• Fix community display name overflow. Fixes #390 (#425)
• Fix logout bug. Fixes #391 (#424)
• Fix up post, profile and community forms. Fixes #409 (#423)
• Adding markdown audio and video embeds. Fixes #420 (#421)
• Adding Si simplifier (#418)
• Fix profile paging. Fixes #416 (#417)
• Use my fork of inferno-i18next. Fixes #413 (#415)
• Add version to package.json . Fixes #411

Fixed several critical websocket bugs.

• Wasn't correctly getting comment parent user for mark as read. Fixes #1767
• Was using all recipients for simple comment return. Fixes #1766
• Fix comment scrolling bug. Fixes #394

Since our last release in April, we've had ~80 commits to Lemmy.

Lemmy Server

Major Changes

Note: Issue links are below.

• @nutomic did a major rewrite of the federation code. It is much simpler now, and reduced from 8000 lines of code to 6400. Functionality is mostly the same, but future changes will be much easier.
• You can now block users and communities, and their posts / comments won't show up in your feed.
• Removed IFramely: Lemmy can now fetch site metadata on its own.
• New API docs at: https://join-lemmy.org/api

General

• Fix prod deploy script and clippy (#1724)
• Fix image uploads. Fixes #1725 (#1734)
• Adding more site setup vars. Fixes #678 (#1718)
• Dont append ? to url when cleaning it (#1716)
• User / community blocking. Fixes #426 (#1604)
• Swap out iframely (#1706)
• Adding ModTransferCommunity to modlog in API. Fixes #1437
• Make sure bots aren't included in aggregate counts (#1705)
• Don't allow deleted users to do actions. Fixes #1656 (#1704)
• When banning a user, remove communities they've created (#1700)
• Distribute Lemmy via crates.io
• Simplify config using macros (#1686)
• Simplify lemmy_context() function (dont return errors)
• Blank out extra info for deleted or removed content. Fixes #1679 (#1680)
• Add show_new_posts_notifs setting. Fixes #1664 (#1665)
• Adding shortname fetching for users and communities. Fixes #1662 (#1663)
• Upgrading deps, running clippy fix on nightly 1.55.0 (#1638)
• Running clippy --fix (#1647)
• Make captcha case-insensitive
• Remove tracking params from post url (fixes #768)
• Fix IPv6 port setup for Nginx (#1636)
• Fix --cert-name for certbot. (#1631)
• Change join.lemmy.ml to join-lemmy.org (#1628)
• Upgrade pictrs. Fixes #1599 (#1600)
• Invalidate current logins on account deletion. Fixes #1602 (#1603)
• Upgrading api test deps (#1608)
• Fix nsfw posts showing for non-logged in users. Fixes #1614 (#1615)
• Add additional slurs configuration option. Closes #1464. (#1612)
• Updating to rust 1.51.0 (#1598)
• Remove brotli, zstd dependencies for faster compilation

API

• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.12.0 .

Federation

• Move resolving of activitypub objects to separate api endpoint (fixes #1584)
• Rewrite remaining activities (#1712)
• Migrate comment inReplyTo field to single value (ref #1454)
• Fix issue with protocol string in actor id generation (#1668)

Lemmy UI

• Integrating resolve_user into search. (#377)
• Add lazy loading of images. Fixes #329 (#379)
• Adding vi, sk, mnc, and cy languages. (#378)
• Feature/user community block (#362)
• Swapping out iframely. (#374)
• Adding mod transfer community (#373)
• Remove content more (#372)
• Scroll to comments on post's x comments button (#312)
• Remove websocket connection messages. Fixes #355
• Center spinner, make smaller. Fixes #203
• Fix font issues. Fixes #354
• Have setting to disable notifs for new posts. Fixes #132 (#345)
• Remove max length constraints on actors. Fixes #350 (#351)
• Fix captcha replay bug. Fixes #348 (#349)
• Removing community and user routes in favor of shortnames. Fixes #317 (#343)
• Don't use default subscribed for communities page.
• Adding Listing type to communities page, default local. #190 (#342)
• Fix language bug on mobile browsers
• Collapse sidebar on mobile. Fixes #335 (#340)
• Re-organized components folder. (#339)
• Fixing too many large spinners (#337)
• Moving comment link to top bar. Fixes #307 (#336)
• Fix/ws error messages (#334)
• Make spinner bigger. Fixes #203
• Fix preview description html. Fixes #110
• Always show previous paginator, extract paginator component.
• Use better comment collapse icon, and add text. Fixes #318
• Fix symbols issue. Fixes #319
• Don't restore scroll position on page refresh. Fixes #186
• Insert triple backticks for 'code' button when multiple lines are selected. (#311)
• Change join.lemmy-ui.ml to join-lemmy-ui.org
• Adding a comment here placeholder. Fixes #301
• Fix non-local community and person links. Fixes #290
• Fix navbar bug. Fixes #289
• Hide names of mods / admins without priveleges. Fixes #285
• Adding URL search type. Fixes #286
• Add a link to joinlemmy-ui on lemmy-ui.ml signup. Fixes #235
• Fix duped site description. Fixes #281

Upgrade notes

Servers

You may need to add this to your lemmy.hjson:

pictrs_url: "http://pictrs:8080/"

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.12.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation

Clients / Apps

• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.12.0 .

Changes

Since our last release, we've had ~30 commits to Lemmy, and ~60 to Lemmy UI.

Lemmy Server

• Blank out extra info for deleted or removed content. Fixes #1679
• Add show_new_posts_notifs setting. Fixes #1664
• Fix issue with protocol string in actor id generation #1668
• Adding shortname fetching for users and communities. Fixes #1662
• Make captcha case-insensitive.
• Remove tracking params from post url (fixes #768)
• Upgrade pictrs. Fixes #1599
• Invalidate current logins on account deletion. Fixes #1602
• Fix nsfw posts showing for non-logged in users. Fixes #1614
• Add additional slurs configuration option. Closes #1464.
• Updating to rust 1.51.0

Lemmy UI

• Have setting to disable notifs for new posts. Fixes #132
• Remove max length constraints on actors. Fixes #350
• Fix captcha replay bug. Fixes #348
• Removing community and user routes in favor of shortnames. Fixes #317
• Add front end helpers 1 (#346)
• Don't use default subscribed for communities page.
• Adding Listing type to communities page, default local. #190
• Fix language bug on mobile browsers.
• Collapse sidebar on mobile. Fixes #335
• Re-organized components folder. (#339)
• Moving comment link to top bar. Fixes #307
• Make spinner bigger. Fixes #203
• Fix preview description html. Fixes #110
• Update darkly, make danger darker. Fixes #16
• Always show previous paginator, extract paginator component.
• Use better comment collapse icon, and add text. Fixes #318
• Fix symbols issue. Fixes #319
• Don't restore scroll position on page refresh. Fixes #186
• Insert triple backticks for 'code' button when multiple lines are selected. (#311)
• Adding a comment here placeholder. Fixes #301
• Fix non-local community and person links. Fixes #290
• Fix navbar bug. Fixes #289
• Hide names of mods / admins without priveleges. Fixes #285
• Adding URL search type. Fixes #286
• Add a link to joinlemmy on lemmy.ml signup. Fixes #235
• Fix duped site description. Fixes #281

API

• Added show_new_posts_notifs boolean to SaveUserSettings, and LocalUserSettings.
• A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.11.3 .

Federation

• No changes in this release, but there will be many soon.

Upgrade notes

To upgrade your instance to 0.11.3, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

• Upgrade with manual Docker installation
• Upgrade with Ansible installation