Lemmy

I'm sure this is a common topic but the timeline is pretty fast these days.

With bots looking more human than ever i'm wondering what's going to happen once everyone start using them to spam the platform. Lemmy with it's simple username/text layout seem to offer the perfect ground for bots, to verify if someone is real is going to take scrolling through all his comments and read them accurately one by one.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2540874

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.

Wanting to make a wiki for /c/localllama, but not sure if there's a known place that's nice for making free wikis, anyone got suggestions on what's being used widely on lemmy?

Lemmy is surprisingly good for the small amount of people compared to Reddit. And even with all the Images the apps have to load, the consume less data than reddit.

This month (Ce mois-ci) the use of reddit was very limited and a bit of r/place to look at the amazing anti-reddit art. Lemmy : about 3gB Reddit : 2.33gB

Last month (Le mois dernier) it was only reddit use. 12.49gB

Tho there aren't really many videos on Lemmy, which may explain a part of the difference.

And on reddit well there are the ads and the tracking.

I created a few communities here in Lemmy, but I can't find any moderation options in the mobile apps I tried (Jerboa, Connect).

Are there any mobile apps for moderators or is moderation only possible in the web?

[Image description: A screenshot of the lemmy.blahaj.zone front page with a custom userstyle applied. The userstyle features a dark gray background with medium gray text and brightly-colored accents of purple, pink, orange, and cyan. The right sidebar cards are a light shade of gray with lighter gray text, pink buttons, and orange links]

A few weeks ago I decided to try my hand at bringing my favorite theme to Lemmy and this userscript was born. It's still in the early stages so there are some wrinkles to iron out, but I just pushed a big update with better contrast, style fixes, and streamlined code.

I've received several requests to turn it into a native Lemmy theme but have no idea how to do that. If anyone has any tips on theming, interest in collaborating, or a Lemmy instance where I could test a native theme, hit me up! You can find all the code here on Codeberg.

Hello lemmy users!

I've been setting up my own instance and largely everything has been working, bar a few performance issues.

But one thing I'm having issues with is my profile not reflecting on other instances. It doesn't show my avatar, banner or bio. Not sure if I've broken something for this to not work?

Any help greatly appreciated :)

It's come up in the github issues before, but I was wondering if anyone had any positive or negative thoughts about the general idea.

I say microblogging, but it would not need to be micro at all, as many/most fediverse platforms don't bother with the (IMO silly) small character limit default in mastodon.

The feature is probably better described as a "personal feed", where the primary agent is another user not a community.

I've thought about it and come to believe that I would rather like a platform that is lemmy + a microblogging interface/integration.

How it's implement and how viably I don't know. But in terms of design I have the following thoughts:

• It would feel natural to treat users much like communities (with one post author) and the "microblog feed" just like the current lemmy feed but of followed/subscribed users' posts.
• In addition to Subscribed, Local, All, you'd have Personals or Blogs.
• Each user would then have their own "Personal Community", which they could post to like any other. They'd also have moderation controls over it too, which might be a nice addition to the microblogging platform space.
• Unlike mastodon, replies/comments wouldn't appear in the feed, as all replies would be available only once you view a post, which, I think, would be a wonderful way to organise microblogging content.
• A "boost/retweet" behaviour could be treated as a cross-post from one personal community to another, except you'd probably want to enable such a "cross-post" be applicable to a comment, which would be congruent with the more free-form nature of "microblogging".
• You'd want to keep the sorting algorithms, which combined with being able to view only the top-level posts, would again I think be a nice way to handle a "microblogging" feed.
• Being able to create lists or multi-communities, as has been requested ordinary lemmy, would be very useful for microblogs.
• Following a microblogging account would obviously just create+subscribe to a "personal community" representing that account. Following a lemmy user account would involve subscribing to their personal community, which would exist by default.
• You'd probably want to make it as easy as possible in the UI to post links between the microblogging and community "interfaces", so that they could cross-pollinate each other, which, in the case of lemmy users, would be quite nice as any link from one "side" to the other would drop right in a native interface where you can immediately comment/reply or vote etc.

Potential issues I can see:

• Implementation is likely more difficult than I realise
• DB sizes could potentially blow up with a whole bunch of microblog content from mastodon?
• Posting to and engaging with the microblog side might distract many users away from engaging in communities. I suspect that this is a real but minor concern, especially if some improvements come to the communites side of lemmy (eg, multi-communities, the "best" algorithm, making it easier to search through subscribed communities).
• Some thought would probably have to be given to how to deal with mastodon privacy measures like the no-index option and limits on following etc.

Beyond all of that, my impression of such a platform, should it ever come to be, is that it would be awesome, not just because of the fusion of two formats, but because presenting "microblogs" within the lemmy structure and with lemmy features would bring a number of improvements over something like mastodon: longer posts, markdown, post/comment organisation, feed sorting, search, and direct/native interaction between communities and microblogs. I can see it becoming natural to treat your lemmy(+mblog) account as a quick blogging platform (ie, writing longer posts because you can on lemmy), and cross-posting to the appropriate communities while enjoying that your direct followers will also get the post in their feed. Though this does raise an interesting question about whether following a lemmy user, which would entail getting all of their posts to everything, should also be enabled as a separate option from just following their "personal community"?

Thoughts?

Lemmy community account on mastodon boosts both posts and replies

@lemmy

when i follow a lemmy community on mastodon, the "account" of the community boosts both posts and replies - that is not how it is on lemmy itself, and the replies being boosted lead to a lot of out-of-context on my timeline. why is that so, and is it possible to change it so that it boosts only posts?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/2112778

This is a useful feature on reddit. I don't want to unsub or block a community or user, but a don't want to keep seeing a particular post in my feed.

First off, sorry if this is question doesn't fit this community. And please bear with me before shoving something down. Totally aware that lemmy.ml has been experiencing a significant surge in traffic lately.

This is my (sort of) test account, and I wanted to get a new account name that actually represents me. It's been almost 2 days since I signed up, and the process seems to be stuck in limbo. Not sure if that's because the username and email address I attempted to register are too cryptic and come off as a dummy.

What's worse is that I mistakenly used the wrong username during sign-up, and now I'm eager to reclaim my email address.

Yes, while I could have easily created an account on another instance and still interacted here, I have my own personal, complicated, and admittedly silly reasons for wanting to have my main under this domain.

All I wanted to know is whether lemmy.ml will open up again in the future. I don't mind waiting if it will. And not sure how can I reclaim my email address.

Hi,

As my regular instance was experiencing downtime, I decided it might be a good idea to have a backup account on a different instance. So I created a new account on feddit.uk, configured 2FA and all was well. Although…

When I later tried to log on using Voyager, it kept returning a connection error. I tried logging on to the instance directly using the browser: no error, but just lands back on the login page.

Seems like the issue was caused because of the password length (originally 65 characters). Resetting my password and bringing it down to 45 characters resolved the issue. However, directly after the password reset, I was logged in, and my 2FA code wasn't asked?!

For a minute I thought it might be due to cached credentials, but retrying the same scenario in a private window confirmed it. This means that if your e-mail account is compromised, 2FA will no longer protect you.

Another possible issue (just to be clear, in this scenario, your e-mail account is not compromised): if someone is able to access your account (maybe you forgot to log out), they can modify your e-mail address without you being notified, nor do they need to know your password. A verification e-mail will be sent to the new address, and they can reset your password using the approach described above. The new e-mail address does not need to be verified to do so (a verification e-mail is sent, but resetting the password works even if you don't verify), and the old e-mail address is not given a heads up of the change (I know, the old address might no longer work, but still).

Not only can your password be reset this way, after gaining entry, 2FA can be disabled without issue.

Am I wrong in thinking the scenarios described above are security issues? Thanks for your feedback!

Is there any list capability on Lemmy like on Mastodon etc.? It would be great to use them like what Multireddits was on Reddit

What's up with that?

What am I missing?

So, I am working on building a couple of Lemmy sites with the intent of them being sort of community specific. Now, when I was reading setup it felt like establishing multiple lemmy sites in the same code base was possible.

Is this a configuration that is supported?

I'm running a small instance just for myself and a friend. We basically use it to access the Lemmy fediverse.

I was under the impression that our instance would not download imagery that was not hosted on it but the pict-rs "files" directory ended up with 45 gig of data which ultimately filled up the VPS storage space.

Is there a command that I can automate to prune this regularly or does anyone have a solution?

I'm on lemmy.ml, and I want to subscribe to https://lemmy.world/c/songaweek. There it says to put !songaweek@lemmy.world into search on my instance to subscribe, but it doesn't turn up anything. Anyone know why this might be, and/or how to work around it?

Due to the federated nature of Lemmy there's one small problem: if you link to a community (let's say https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits) the link takes people out of their instance.

On Lemmy it can be solved easily - use !wwdits@lemmings.world and the community opens on their own instance.

But the problem still exists outside Lemmy, let's say you write a blog post and link to some community - people who already use Lemmy will again be taken out of their instance.

And to solve this I created this project, available on https://lemmyverse.link and https://threadiverse.link (both are the exact same app).

Instead of https://lemmings.world/c/wwdits you link to https://lemmyverse.link/c/wwdits@lemmings.world and you're greeted with this:

You can either continue directly if you don't care, or you can set your home instance and afterwards every link at https://lemmyverse.link will automatically be redirected to your preferred instance (with a small countdown allowing you to change your instance):

If enough people start linking using this service, it will greatly improve the experience for Lemmy users!

Let me know what you think!

Edit: Source code is here: https://github.com/RikudouSage/lemmyverse.link

I created an account on lemmy.world and it's all working fine through the webpage. However, when I try to login through any of the apps (connect, thunder, etc) it says "incorrect login".

If you're running an instance and have direct access to the database, you can run some of these SQL queries on your database:

select p.name,
       p.display_name,
       (select count(id)
        from comment c
        where c.creator_id = p.id) as comments_count
from person p
where local = true
order by comments_count desc
;

select p.name,
       p.display_name,
       (select count(id)
        from post p2
        where p2.creator_id = p.id) as posts_count
from person p
where local = true
order by posts_count desc
;

select p.actor_id
from person p
         inner join comment_like cl on cl.person_id = p.id
where cl.comment_id = ?
  and cl.score = -1;

select p.actor_id
from person p
         inner join post_like pl on p.id = pl.person_id
where pl.post_id = ?
  and pl.score = -1;

select p.ap_id, p.id, count(pl.id) as dislikes
from post p
         inner join post_like pl on pl.post_id = p.id
where pl.score = -1
  and p.creator_id = (select id from person where name = ?)
group by p.ap_id, p.id
order by dislikes desc
;

select c.ap_id, c.id, count(cl.id) as dislikes
from comment c
         inner join comment_like cl on cl.comment_id = c.id
where cl.score = -1
  and c.creator_id = (select id from person where name = ?)
group by c.ap_id, c.id
order by dislikes desc
;

select c.actor_id
from community c
         inner join community_block cb on c.id = cb.community_id
where cb.person_id = (select id from person where name = ?)
;

select p.actor_id
from person p
         inner join person_block pb on p.id = pb.target_id
where pb.person_id = (select id from person where name = ?)
;

select c.ap_id, c.id
from comment c
         inner join comment_like cl on cl.comment_id = c.id
         inner join person p on p.id = cl.person_id
where cl.score = -1
  and c.creator_id = (select id from person where name = :yourUsername)
  and p.name = :dislikerUsername;

select c.ap_id,
       c.id,
       count(case cl.score when -1 then 1 end) as dislikes,
       count(case cl.score when 1 then 1 end)  as likes,
       sum(cl.score)                           as score
from comment_like cl
         inner join person p on cl.person_id = p.id
         inner join comment c on cl.comment_id = c.id
where p.local = true
  and cl.comment_id = ?
group by c.ap_id, c.id
;

select p.ap_id,
       p.id,
       count(case pl.score when -1 then 1 end) as dislikes,
       count(case pl.score when 1 then 1 end)  as likes,
       sum(pl.score)                           as score
from post_like pl
         inner join person pe on pl.person_id = pe.id
         inner join post p on pl.post_id = p.id
where pe.local = true
  and pl.post_id = ?
group by p.ap_id, p.id
;

Let me know if you want any other SQL queries and I might take a look into it!

Edit: Added more queries, I'll probably add more without announcing I did an edit from now on.

This morning I was forced to ban about 18 users for being obvious spambots. That deleted their content on my instance. Are they now banned on other instances, too? I'm just trying to figure out what the best process is for eliminating these spambots for good before they flood all of our feeds.

Hi I found out that it is possible to create a thread on a lemmy community using a mastodon account by mentioning the community handle. but the process is quite undocumented and unknown to many of us.

How Can I make a thread with a separate title and post body from an app like tusky?

how to make the community @ mention not appear on the title ?

Are there any propagation problems to be aware of ?

sometimes the post doesn't show on the community feed, or takes too long to show, or shows from another instance quicker than the one I have posted in. the post might have the correct creation timestamp but fails to show up on the lemmy community promptly.