Lemmy

We're adding the ability to customize this in the upcoming release, but I'm wondering what people think would be a good default.

The 4 pieces of showable/hideable info are: Upvotes, Downvotes, Score, and Upvote %.

In Jerboa, I had a temporary default (until the next lemmy release), of Score + Upvote %, but people seem to dislike this a lot.

I'll check back on this in a few days to see the result.

When printing conversations in #Lemmy, we obtain a clean readable result, unlike in #Mastodon or #Pleroma where it's crappy.

I'd suggest they talk to eachother to share best practices. :ablobcatwink:

cc @lemmy @MastodonEngineering @Gargron

Cheers

[Edit: 9 sept. 2024 14:09 CET to clarify what we need as a result.]

For admins and moderators, keeping the comment counts including bot comments visible (especially in a moderators' own communities) may be valuable, but not sure if it's all that valuable for ordinary users.

Would it be possible to make it so bot comments don't add to the counts for regular users, or at least for those that have disabled the display of bot posts/comments? As-is seeing an indication of a comment for a post only for it to turn out to be a bot is slightly disappointing at best, and mildly confusing at worst when their display has been disabled.

It's a great feature while browsing All/Subscribed/Local, but some people (including me) seem to think this can be confusing/annoying while browsing a specific community directly.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2104

Any thoughts on this?

I first became aware of this about 4 months ago.

GitHub issue is 3069:

> It would be awesome if we could follow a post to be alerted of new comments added.

> As we are at it, why stop with posts? I'd suggest also having such alerts with comment sub-trees would be nice.

I was in a thread in !fediverse@lemmy.world earlier today, and it seems like there is still interest in this feature.

Last I heard, it seemed like progress on this feature is dependent on fixing an SQL Paging and filtering issue.

Any progress on this? Anything we can do to expedite the development of this feature?

We're testing some beta's for the upcoming release, and it had some performance issues, so I had to downgrade and restore from a backup.

We do this testing here so other instances don't have to, and so we can find any bugs before a release. Again, this is my bad, I apologize.

Watch out for that sub. The mods over there don't seem to be in good faith and remove any content they don't like which isn't direct and blatant hate toward religion. If you want to engage in any serious atheist or religious discussion i suggest you to avoid it.

I've got 500+ posts and don't wanna sift through em. Is there a way for me to search for keywords in my profile only. Or filter communities?

On android.

This should be a pretty basic feature, just not having a private message be there anymore. But for some reason that does not work here?

I tried searching for this. I found a year old open issue on GitHub and some reddit users complaining about this very issue.

Talking with some people in the comments here, it seems like some people don't understand that one might not want a message to be in their face. Or the idea that just because something could be recovered doesn't mean we should treat it as an absolute

Probably a hot take for everybody who just wants a drop-in replacement for Reddit, but I think a new platform needs to take the opportunity to improve over what's gone before.

So what I'm proposing is a more granular approach to curating one's feed on an individual user level, much like both Mastodon and apps for that platform offer (I'm going to use Tusky as an example because I've used that for a while and know its features fairly well).

Imagine a filter list where you could block specific terms, source URLs or other. No more irrelevant mentions of whatever annoys the hell out of you when you open /all. Along with your individual block list, limited as that is, it would help you as a user to home in on what matters to you.

Might this create filter bubbles? Yes, but if it's implemented on a per user level it won't affect other users' feeds. The "bubble" is a one-person act. In my experience /all on both Reddit and Lemmy suffers from people trying to curate it to their personal liking with downvotes, which just creates a monoculture.

Personally, I think free text filters would help solve that problem, and might aid users in engaging with their preferred communities. Suggestions, ideas?

So you could subscribe communities to hashtags and have it displays toots and pictures from that hashtag in the Lemmy UI

I looked around and struggled to find out what it does?

My guess would be that it notifies you of when new posts are made to communities you subscribe to. But that sounds like a lot, so I'm really not sure.

Otherwise, is it me or does the wording here not speak for itself?

Generally, the lens I've come to criticise any/all fediverse projects is how well they foster community building. One reason why I like and "advocate" for the lemmy/threadiverse side of things is precisely because of this and how the centrality of the community/sub/group is a good way of organising social media (IMO).

Also, because of that, I recently came to be skeptical of the effects that the "All" feed can have. I didn't even realise that people relied mostly on the All feed until recently.

I think I've reached the point now of being against it (at least tentatively). I know, it's a staple and there's no way it's going away. And I know it's useful.

But thinking about the feature set, through the community building lens, I think it'd be fair to say that things are out of balance: they don't promote community building enough while also providing the All feed which dissolves community building.

Not really a criticism of the developers ... AFAIU, the All feed is easier to implement than any other community building feature ... and it's expected from reddit (though it isn't normal on forums AFAICT, which is maybe worth considering for anyone happy to reassess what about reddit is retained and what isn't).

But still, I can imagine a platform that is more focused on communities:

• Community explorer tool built in.
  • Could even be a substitute for an All feed ... where you can browse through various communities you don't know about and see what they've posted recently
• Multi-communities (long time coming by now for many I'd say)
  • Could even be part of the community explorer tool where you can create on-the-fly multi-communities to see their posts in a temporary feed
• Private and local only communities (already here on lemmy and coming for private communities)
• Post visibility options for Public communities (IE, posts that opt-in private)
• More flexible notifications for various things/events that happen within a community
• Wikis
• Chat interface
  • I'm thinking this is pretty viable given that Lemmy used to use a web-socket auto-updating design ... add that to the flat chat view and you've got a chat room. There are resource issues, so limiting them to one per community or 6hrs per week per community or something would probably be necessary.

A possibly interesting and frustrating aspect of all of these suggestions/ideas above is I can see their federation being problematic or difficult ... which raises the issue of whether there's serious tension between platform design and protocol capabilities.

I guess I'm not the only one that happens to this, I follow communities with the same theme in different instances, it's not unusual then to see the same link sent by the same person in both, not a crosspost, the same link sent separately. ¿Is there any, let's say, correct protocol on how to interact with this? You know, do I vote for both? One positive and the other I ignore? What if I want to comment? Do I make the same comment on both?

instead of

image: postgres:16-alpine

use

image: pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:16-alpine

Then all the upgrade instructions of backup->update->import backups go away and all you need to do is restart the docker container. (still keep backups though!)

Reference: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4892/files

Since that pull request was merged, this will simplify future updates like 0.19.6 or 0.20.0

If you are using https://github.com/wereii/lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner please stop and disable it as soon as possible.

We have found a security issue that allows any user to make LTC delete any locally hosted image.

I will be posting more details soon and editing this to include the information.

E: More information here https://github.com/wereii/lemmy-thumbnail-cleaner/issues/10

Is it maybe planned to be able to set a custom tag for a community instead of one pulled from the url? I reckon there are many communities where this would make more sense.

Like the community i am moderating is c/bicycle_touring, but i think #biketouring and #bikepacking are the hashtags that are being used on mastodon for this stuff.

EDIT: Looked a little deeper/better on GitHub and found this issue, #4865 which is likely the most related issue, and it seems the devs are aware.

It also seems to be a recent v19.5 -ish issue too from some of the comments there

---

I seem to be encountering what may be a bug with pinning/featuring posts ... interested if anyone's got similar/counter experiences

The issue is that the pinning of a post doesn't get federated correctly.

The conditions, AFAICT are:

• Post originates from a "federated instance" (IE, an instance other than the community's home instance)
• The mod action of pinning is also done by a moderator on a "federated instance"
• Lemmy versions 19.4 or greater (much more tentative, but from a brief perusal, it seems true)

The effect seems to be:

• The pinning works fine on the "home instance" of the community
• But federation breaks in two slightly different ways:
  • No pinning occurs
  • If a mod on a "federated instance" tries to pin, after an initially failed federation of "pinning", it will succeed on the federated instance only temporarily

The last dynamic is hopefully a clue to what could be happening (sounds like some queued tasks colliding in an incorrect way)

I input my password.

It refuses to log me in. Says 'Passwords must be between 10 and 60 characters'

I delete the last few characters. Now it lets me log in.

no bueno

So yesterday I was posting up a storm, posts that would've gone down as the best posts of all time! But randomly my home instance reset and the posts and replies I made in the ten minutes before, all got orphaned. They're still there, but replies to them don't get sent to me. Anyway, it's one of those edge cases that no one would likely ever face again, but thought I'd share.

is there a particular third party app that's useful? or should it all be handled from a desktop website

Reposted from: https://lemmings.world/post/10530999

> Please what are the easiest and fastest steps in order to find backup of a currently unavailable post thanks to no longer running Lemmy instance? > > Lets say it is this post we are reading, that become offline. I am not asking for the links to instances that hosts it, but for the way on how to discover all the instances myself.

> So far I have found only this way: > 1. open largest instances list: https://lemmyverse.net/?order=posts&open=true > 2. open one after another and under magnifier button, search for the same post ID (number) as your dead link has

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)

This seems to be the case from what I've seen and from a quick check just now.

Is this intentionally so? Is it likely to remain so?

Not that I have any problems with it. I'm just thinking about trying to run a poll through lemmy's current features (where native polls are in the roadmap anyway). And I figure, for simple polls, a bunch of comments for each option in a locked thread where people can only up vote would roughly do the trick (except that a voter would know the results ahead of time).

Is it possible to make upvotes/downvotes on my own posts (and comments on my posts) visible, while making everyone else's invisible on the Lemmy website? I like making upvotes & downvotes invisible, because it makes it harder for me to be biased on what I upvote or downvote, based on the amount of upvotes/downvotes posts/comments already have from others. But on the other hand, I would still like to see how many upvotes & downvotes my own posts have, and how many upvotes & downvotes the comments below my post have. Thanks.

something that didn't get mentioned in the announcement but I think is nice, the Chat view has been fixed!

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1639#issuecomment-2172090390

I believe it was fixed here https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2480

it even allows sorting in either direction, you can do Chat view with New or Old sort!

In my profile it says my cake day is today (June 13), but it was displaying a cake icon on my comments all day yesterday (June 12).

The icon was a black and white outline so I thought maybe it was showing it the day before on purpose so other people would see ahead of time, and that it would turn colorful on the actual day. But then midnight hit and it disappeared, so it must be a bug instead.

Original comment thread.

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)

I'm sure this will get clarified in the release notes for 19.4, and I'm probably annoyingly jumping the gun ... I'm just curious.

Otherwise, I find it cool to see this feature come out!

I host my own Lemmy instance and have a user account on it that I use everywhere (I don't host local communities, I just use it as a home for my Lemmy user account). I needed to re-home my Lemmy server, and though it's a docker installation, copying the /var/lib/docker/volumes/lemmy_* directories to the new installation didn't work. So I created a new Lemmy server.

How can I move my old account to the new server, so I can keep all my subscriptions and post/comment history?

always wondered this, but kept forgetting to post it

eg users would be on @grant@toast.ooo and a community would be on @canvas@group.toast.ooo or something like that

then it would still follow the AP spec but still allow for identical identifiers (like a user account being @sc07@toast.ooo and a community also being !sc07@toast.ooo)

Did I miss something? The site is pretty much broken, I can't post, and I can't view my profile, etc. I guess the site was shutdown but can't find any info

This is just to followup from my prior post on latencies increasing with increasing uptime (see here).

There was a recent update to lemmy.ml (to 0.19.4-rc.2) ... and everything is so much snappier. AFAICT, there isn't any obvious reason for this in the update itself(?) ... so it'd be a good bet that there's some memory leak or something that slows down some of the actions over time.

Also ... interesting update ... I didn't pick up that there'd be some web-UI additions and they seem nice!

Today I deleted my Reddit account.

I think the platform is now just a playground for AIs and has integrated lots of ways to make money (prenium subscription, NFT, way too many ads for my taste).

What really made me take the plunge was Reddit's interface. Seriously, go to the website, what's with the attrocity? It's like Fandom but as a social network?

Now why am I on Lemmy? Because in my opinion, it's the first step towards a mainstream Fedivers! Mastodon, Peertube and Pixelfed aren't very widespread, but when you see the number of people active in Lemmy communities, it's really impressive! It's also free and Open Source which is always great, but also as open as possible, I mean, Reddit killed Apollo on iOS, I can now have lots of apps on my iPhone with Lemmy!

Now what do I expect from Lemmy. For this universe of instances to grow, but also to add a bit of personality to the platform! Do a bit of Reddit and add customization options for each community, like on the Minecraft Subreddit of old Reddit that I've always smiled at.

!

In short, I'm happy to be on Lemmy.

Just a general observation I've made in my time on lemmy.ml, which I figure is attributable to lemmy the software, that may or may not be useful.

I'm talking about writing comments to posts (or replies to other comments, not sure if I've seen a difference).

And, just anecdotally, it seems that the longer the instance has been up without a restart or update (AFAICT of course), the longer the time between me clicking the Reply button and the time that the request is completed.

Usually, the first sign in my experience that the instance has been restarted is that this latency speeds right up to being almost instantaneous.

Anyone else notice the same or on other instances? It might be a clue to performance issues??

EDIT: applies to posts too (including this one incidentally)

I saw that the community i moderate is available on blahaj.zone, and it has pulled some old comments, but new ones did not federate. There is also an old stickied post still stickied.

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/bicycle_touring@lemmy.world

I assume somone from that instance had the c subscribed at some point, but then unsubscribed, so new comments and actions did not federate. If now somebody on that instance would subscribe again - will the obsolete sticky post just stay there forever? Because i am not sending the mod activity again to unsticky it?

Sometimes you post on Lemmy and it gets a level of traction that you were unprepared for. Right now, that just ends up filling your inbox. It would be nice if we could mute posts and then no responses would be sent to the inbox and everyone else can continue their discussions.

It recently struck me recently that a number of users mostly scroll the All feed. This came up in a conversation where people were discussing how their main usage of lemmy was to scroll All and then rely entirely on blocking to refine their feed.

Now whether that's a pathological instance of Hyrum's law of all possible uses being relied on or an intended or fair use of a lemmy/reddit system, it does strike me that a substantial portion of the user base doing this likely has an effect on what happens within communities and the ability for communities to define themselves.

Thoughts and speculations (and perhaps paranoia/exaggeration):

• I don't know what happened on reddit in this regard, but I wouldn't be surprised if a relatively high proportion of users rely on All as described above compared to reddit in order to "fill out" their feeds more due to the smaller user base here.
• A higher amount of All-feeders means fewer people willing to invest, contribute to or even care about specific communities.
• This likely means community migrations away from toxic mods, or, starting new communities can run into more friction or less engagement.
• Which, arguably, becomes a problematic feedback cycle in which All becomes a "better" feed than curating a set of subscriptions.
• Perhaps a clear mechanism for this to manifest is that anyone can up/down vote anything, which means All-feeders can influence what appears in Subscription-feeders' feeds by imposing their tastes/preferences on posts' scores. In fact, if All-feeders are substantial in number and activity relative to Sub-feeders, this could be a sizeable influence on post ordering across lemmy/threadiverse.

---

Now I don't know if any of this is really a problem at all, I'm just thinking out loud here (as, to make my bias clear, someone who doesn't get using the All).

As far as Lemmy design decisions go:

• Should non-subscribers be allowed or disallowed to vote on posts/comments in communities they're not subscribed to? My intuition on this is obviously not (ie, disallowed) and that the All feed is just for browsing not participating. For me, it's about enabling communities to form their own identity and sub-culture that doesn't get pushed around by others.
  • How this could be enforced? No voting from the All and/or Local feed. Seems easy and straight forward.
  • You could limit voting to those who have a subscription to the community, but then anyone could just easily subscribe and then vote while sticking to All. And that'd be harder to implement too I'd imagine.
• Maybe communities should be able to control this behaviour. Private and local-only communities are apparently on the road map. Excluding non-subscribers from voting seems like a reasonable continuation of such options.
  • To get even more annoyingly complex, I could imagine communities having the option to exclude down votes or exclude down votes for non-subscribers. I'm sure that'd raise issues for some people's feeds as non-down-voting communities might unreasonably rise to the top or something. But if multi-communities come along, and voting in All is off or not guaranteed, this feels like a non-issue to me.