This last month we worked on optimizing database queries for Lemmy 1.0. This was one of the major remaining tasks. We were also busy improving lemmy-ui with new lints and type checks to make it more reliable. Now that this is completed, you can expect the first 1.0-beta version to be published very soon!

On the stable branch we published two smaller bugfix releases which include security fixes. If you didn't upgrade your instance yet, now is the time.

You can follow our development progress with these milestone links:

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/milestone/24
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/milestone/5

If you'd like to see the new features and visual updates in production, you can visit voyager.lemmy.ml which deploys updates every night. Please help by testing the new features and reporting any problems.

If you have any experience with web development or want to learn it, consider contributing to lemmy-ui. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap. If you have experience with Kotlin or Android development, you can help contribute to Lemmy's open source Android app, Jerboa.

Thank you to everyone who has helped out with finding bugs, testing, development, spreading the word about lemmy, and building communities. Your help has brought lemmy from an idea to one of the most vital pieces of software in the fediverse.

Here are the major changes from March:

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• join-lemmy.org
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.

To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

This release fixes federation with Lemmy.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to resolve this.

Changes

This release mitigates a potential security issue with the image endpoint. In short, an attacker can inject query parameters and make proxied requests to arbitrary URLs. See the security advisory for details.

Also there are fixes for the database connection pool. The pool size is now at least two, as a lower size can result in deadlocks. Additionally there are now connection timeouts added. If your server logs show pool timeout errors, you should increase database.pool_size in the Lemmy config.

• Fix for image proxy filetypes by @dessalines in #6357
• Enable DB connection timeout by @Nutomic in #6355
• Use min database pool size of 2. by @dessalines in #6345

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

If you want to develop a plugin and have any questions, feel free to comment here or in the dev chat.

join-lemmy.org regularly crawls all active Lemmy instances to keep the instance list updated. Additionally it also collects data from all Lemmy communities. The data is now publicly available in the following git repository:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-statistics

Check the readme for details about the available data. Interestingly the numbers are quite different from other websites:

Here are some ideas what to do with the data:

• Recreate the Lemmymap, graphically showing the connections or defederations between instances.
• Render graphs, which could be added directly to join-lemmy.org (#532).
• Investigate what is causing the different numbers shown above.
• Run various types of analysis, like this one done by @malsadev.
• Build a tool to help users discover interesting and relevant communities.

join-lemmy.org regularly crawls all active Lemmy instances to keep the instance list updated. Additionally it also collects data from all Lemmy communities. The data is now publicly available in the following git repository:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-statistics

See the readme for details about the available data. Interestingly the numbers are quite different from other websites:

Here are some ideas what to do with the data:

• Recreate the Lemmymap, graphically showing the connections or defederations between instances.
• Render graphs, which could be added directly to join-lemmy.org (#532).
• Investigate what is causing the different numbers shown above.
• Run various types of analysis, like this one done by @malsadev.
• Build a tool to help users discover interesting and relevant communities.

Last month @Nutomic made some posts in !lemmy@lemmy.ml to get feedback and ideas for the official website join-lemmy.org:

• [Help Design Lemmy] Joinlemmy website and New User Onboarding
• [Help Design Lemmy] How to describe Lemmy in a single Sentence?

Based on these we made various changes to the site. Most importantly, visitors can now register on a suggested Lemmy instance with a single click. Additionally the feature overview, app list, and instance list were reworked.

join-lemmy.org is one of the first search results for people who hear about Lemmy, and want to find out what it is. They should easily be able to register an account to become an active user, with as little friction as possible.

So if you have any suggestions for further improvements, please open an issue or comment below. We especially need help from designers to create better images and polish the design. You can also contribute by translating the site to your language via Weblate.

Now on to the Lemmy code itself. On this front it has been mostly the same as last month: Implementing the new backend features in the UI, bug fixing and minor backend changes. You can follow the progress with these milestones:

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/milestone/24
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/milestone/5

If you are impatient to see the new features in production, we share those feelings. But there is still a lot of work needed to make sure the new features work well and make for a good user experience. If you have any experience with web development (or want to learn it), you can also contribute. Checkout the lemmy-ui repo and the milestone above. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap. Additionally you can help by testing the new version on voyager.lemmy.ml and reporting any problems.

Finally here are the major changes from January:

• Added colour field to community tags by iByteABit256
• Make bootstrap instances configurable by Nutomic
• Added dedicated community and multi-community settings pages by Dessalines
• Partial url search and normalization (fixes #4748) by Nutomic

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• join-lemmy.org
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.

To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

join-lemmy.org runs a crawl of all active Lemmy instances every four hours in order to keep the instance list up to date. These statistics are now publicly available in the following git repo:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-statistics

As described in the readme there are a few different output files available. From full crawl data with the entire output of /api/v3/site and /api/v3/federated_instances, to minimal data which only includes the number of users, posts etc. You can also access historical stats through the git history. In the future we may also to provide additional data, such as a full list of communities.

So here are some ideas what you could do with this data:

• Graphs which can be shown directly on join-lemmy.org (#532).
• Website with detailed filters for instance settings.
• Map of Lemmy instances, showing who they federate or defederate with (like the discontinued lemmymap)

Interestingly our stats differ significantly from other websites. It would be interesting to analyze and find out what's causing the differences:

Why? Do they think this is a videogame??

On join-lemmy.org, the project is described as "A forum and link aggregator for the Fediverse". In the previous post, multiple people mentioned that this is not a good description. However I have a hard time coming up with anything better.

So please post your suggestions below, and upvote the ones which are both accurate and easy to understand for new users. Later I pick one of the most upvoted options for the website.

By the way the second title "Follow communities Anywhere in the world" will likely go away (see the pull request for frontpage redesign). After this is decided I may also make another post to get suggestions for the longer description text below ("Lemmy is a selfhosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. ...").

Edit: Please only post concrete suggestions in top-level comments, and use replies to discuss. And here you can see how a few other Fediverse projects do it:

• https://joinmastodon.org/
• https://joinpeertube.org/
• https://pixelfed.org/

When people are told about Lemmy and look for it in a search engine, join-lemmy.org is one of the first pages that comes up. Here they should be able to find out what Lemmy is, and be able to register an account to start posting.

At the moment this still seems too complicated, so I'm looking for your suggestions to improve it:

• On the main page, is the text relevant and up to date or should anything be changed?
• How about the instance selection wizard (click "join a server" on the homepage), which lets you select topics and languages to select instances. Do the current options make sense?
• The instance list itself, is there any information missing, or potential design improvements?
• And the list of apps, what can be done here? For one thing the data is rarely updated, so we would appreciate pull requests.
• Any other suggestions you may have.

Since yesterday I already made a couple of improvements:

• Use biased random for instance list, so large instances are always near the top
• Rename Join to Sign Up in instance list
• Fix icon overflows by using inline-flex (by @dessalines)
• Add button to visit random instance (not merged yet)

Edit: Here is a draft for some changes to the frontpage: https://github.com/LemmyNet/joinlemmy-site/pull/524