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

Last month saw more cleanup and bug fixes for the development version. We also setup nightly builds which are automatically deployed to voyager.lemmy.ml, as detailled in the 0.19.15 announcement post.

This upcoming month we'll be working on the existing lemmy-ui 1.0 milestone and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues. Our work should be reflected nightly on voyager.lemmy.ml, so we'd much appreciate anyone helping to find bugs and issues

Here are the major changes from December:

• Enable source maps for lemmy-ui to simplify debugging
• Refactor and simplify cursor pagination logic
• Let admins ban deleted accounts

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

• Backend
• Frontend
• 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

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

We messed up the previous release and did not include the full list of changes. In fact there were a handful of other bug fixes, and notably a maximum page limit of 10 to prevent a DDoS attack. Some users were also hitting this limit, so with this version the limit is increased to 100. We apologize for these mistakes.

Here is the full changelog since 0.19.13:

• Don't allow accessing page numbers greater than 10 by @dessalines #6017
• Update deps based on cargo audit by @Nutomic in #6258
• Increase page limit to 100 by @Nutomic in #6252
• Ban federation for deleted users by @Nutomic in #6207
• Federate mod actions on deleted users by @Nutomic in #6199
• Allow admins to view deleted user profiles by @Nutomic in #6194
• Adding creator and community indexes for post_aggregates. by @dessalines in #6025
• Ignore apub person banners which cannot be parsed by @Nutomic in #6015u

Now for the good news, the development version of Lemmy 1.0 is available for testing on voyager.lemmy.ml with lots of new features. Registration is open, you're welcome to create an account. Feel free to post spam and try everything out. Here is only a short overview:

• Multi-communities: Combine different communities together into a custom feed.
• Post scheduling: Specify when your post should be published.
• Keyword filter: Automatically hide posts about certain topics.
• Private communities: Only followers can view the content, and need to be approved manually by mods. Other community visibilities are also available (unlisted, local only).
• New notification system: Including notifications for mod actions, and subscribing to communities and posts to be notified about new comments.
• OAuth: Login to Lemmy with existing account from another website. Use this link to signup with your Github account (the UI still needs to be improved).
• Post Tags: Categorize posts within a community (UI part not implemented yet).
• User vote totals: You can see the total number of upvotes and downvotes given to each user.
• User notes: You can keep notes on other users.
• Combined Feeds: View your saved, liked posts and comments together in a single list.
• Comment Locking: Mods can now lock comments recursively.
• GDPR style data exporting: You can now export your full posting history as a JSON file.
• Plugins: Can be written in JS, Python, Rust, and any other language that targets Webassembly. The test server has a plugin for automatic language tagging of posts.
• Cursor pagination: Don't lose your place in the feed when switching pages.
• API v3 compat: Lemmy 1.0 can be used by existing apps with no changes (but most new features are only available via the new API v4).
• More: Countless smaller features, bug fixes and improvements, too much to list here.

All the above mentioned features are already implemented and fully working, but may need some polishing. If you encounter any problems, please open an issue (backend, frontend). voyager.lemmy.ml is automatically updated to the latest development version every night, so that changes can immediately be tested.

Keep in mind that Lemmy 1.0 is still in alpha state. There may be breaking changes and critical bugs, so do not attempt to upgrade your own instances yet. We intend to publish the first beta version in January, along with API docs and upgrade instructions for test servers.

We hope that you are as excited about these new features as we are. With all this said, happy testing and Merry Christmas!

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, donating and reporting bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

What is Lemmy?

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

Changes

Recently some malicious users started to use an exploit where they would post rule violating content and then delete the account. This would prevent admins and mods from viewing the user profile to find other posts, and would also prevent federation of ban actions.

The new release fixes these problems. Thanks to @flamingos-cant for contributing to solve this.

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

We're still working hard on the 1.0 release, needing a few more major additions to lemmy-ui, and some less critical items for lemmy.

Then it will be a period of performance and bug testing, as well as giving time to allow app devs to update to the API changes.

The major changes during November were:

• Upgrade to latest Rust version 1.91 (after being stuck with 1.81 for over a year)
• Backwards compatibility with API v3
• Multi-community UI
• Adding an estimated time till approval to the signup page
• Merged modlog tables

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

• Backend
• Frontend
• 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

During the past month, we've been working rapidly on adding features to lemmy-ui. We also finished up the last major backend changes. This means we can soon go to the beta phase for 1.0, which will focus on testing, bug fixing and helping Lemmy clients to start updating for the new API. After that will be the release candidate phase when version 1.0 will be live tested on lemmy.ml.

You can see the changes in action on the test server voyager.lemmy.ml (which was recently wiped). Registration is open, you are welcome to try things out. To stay up to date with our progress look at the lemmy-ui 1.0 and lemmy 1.0 milestone issues.

The major changes during October were:

• Speeding up migrations for 1.0 and reducing database size
• Notify users about moderation actions
• Default data for new instances (welcome post and popular communities)
• Card views for post listing
• Showing community sidebar on create post page
• Blurhash for images

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

• Backend
• Frontend
• 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

It's been a busy month, with a lot of work to add new features to lemmy-ui which were already added to the Lemmy backend before. There were also a lot of bug fixes for the development version. We are gradually getting closer to a 1.0 release.

While the API changes for 1.0 are mostly finalized, we still have many more lemmy-ui 1.0 tasks to complete.

Some of the major additions:

• Simplified lemmy-ui development.
• Audio file support in lemmy-ui.
• Added comment locking (which also locks children). Thanks to @flamingos-cant)
• Post time filtering, with a smart dropdown.
• Added ability to block all users from an instance (separate from blocking all communities)
• Added ability to make a note for a person, and view the vote totals you've given to them.
• Fixed remote RSS feeds.
• Added ability to do actions on report items, from the reports page.

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

• Backend
• Frontend
• 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

What is Lemmy?

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

Changes

This version fixes a handful of bugs. Most importantly it prevents a background task from blocking the Lemmy server entirely. Edit marks on comments are now hidden if it was edited within 5 minutes of creation. Also the browser cache usage is significantly reduced. Additionally ARM builds are fixed by using the default memory allocator on that platform.

Backend

• Fixing active counts slow queries. by @dessalines in #5907
• Only use mimalloc on x86 and purge images in background task by @Nutomic in #5893
• Add missing comment depth check by @Nutomic in #5842
• Dont sanitize RSS content manually (fixes #5850) by @Nutomic in #5852
• Reduce false positives in URL blocklist to reduce scunthorpe problem by @Nothing4You in #5807

Frontend

• Don't show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes by @jfaustino #3197
• Increase bio max length to 1000 chars by @nutomic #3249
• Change link from element.io to matrix.org by @nutomic #3250
• Remove all caches (fixes #3195) by @Nutomic in #3248
• Fixed ordering for search results by @Nutomic in #3219
• Add search field to community sidebar by @Nutomic in #3217
• Add checkbox for title only search by @Nutomic in #3220

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

Many of us are currently on summer vacation, but there are a few important additions this last month:

• Thanks to monumental efforts by @matc-pub and @sleeplessone1917, lemmy-ui is now updated to work with the new lemmy 1.0 API, and all that's needed is to support the new features, and work out a few more bugs. Special thanks to both of them for their work.
• MV-GH added video support to jerboa, and has been doing a lot of bug-fixes there.
• @dullbananas has a PR which optimizes some migrations significantly and reduces DB size, which will likely be merged after some code reviews soon.
• We added 1.0 milestones for both lemmy-ui and jerboa, to make sure every new feature gets added to the front ends.

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

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

Work on the backend changes for 1.0 is mostly finished now. What's missing is optimizing the migrations as they currently take about 9 hours for lemmy.ml. Now we are starting to work on updating lemmy-ui for the API changes and new features.

In the last days we did a big cleanup of the lemmy-ui issue tracker, closing 450 mostly outdated issues. Many of these were over a year old describing problems that have long been fixed. From 570 issues only 120 remain. Most of these are very minor, changing a single UI element here or there. It should be possible to implement 90% of them within a month or two.

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

• Add ability to block all users of an instance (#5784)
• Notifications rewrite, users can be notified about new posts or comments (#5604)
• Post tags (#5869)
• Site and user setting for items per page (#5887)
• Don't show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes (#3197)
• Speedup of 1.0 migrations (#5873)

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

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

This was a busy month, with ~80 pull requests merged, as we're trying to get all the breaking changes we can added before the 1.0 release.

The release is still several months away, as even after finishing up the rest of the 1.0 milestone issues, we still have to add this new functionality to Lemmy-UI and Jerboa, and do extensive testing.

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

• Added multi-communities (One of the most requested features).
• Added a new rate limiting library.
• Refactored the API structs and library for better usage in Rust projects.
• Improved the migration diff checker.
• Using an external library for checking invisible characters.
• Votes are now removed when banning + removing data.
• Added a GDPR style data export.
• Storing upvote / downvote totals you gave to each user, and a setting to display that history next to their name.
• Added ability to make a note for a user.
• Added an RSS feed for modlogs.
• Added an API action to get liked / disliked content.

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

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

What is Lemmy?

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

Changes

This release includes various minor improvements and bug fixes.

Backend

• Fix Peertube federation by @flamingos-cant in #5652
• Show NSFW content by default if content_warning exists by @xaegit in #5655
• Register users in a transaction by @Nothing4You in #5608
• Fix email notifications for denied applications by @Nutomic in #5641
• Dont run scheduled tasks at startup by @Nutomic in #5732
• Only use HTTP/1 for federation by @flamingos-cant in #5744
• Update user count from local_user table instead of person table, and only count users with accepted application by @dullbananas in #5495
• Decrement fail_count instead of reset to 0 by @Nutomic in #5737
• Fix opentelemetry by @MrKaplan-lw in #5702
• Fix post listing in nsfw communities by @Nutomic in #5698
• Add missing post_read / hide / saved post_id indexes by @dessalines in #5689
• Improve media deletion logic by @Nothing4You in #5677
• Include published in VoteView order by for more consistent pagination by @MrKaplan-lw in #5676
• Mark posts in NSFW communities as NSFW by @Nothing4You in #5646
• Use version from git to indicate unreleased changes by @MrKaplan-lw in #5622

Frontend

• Add Rblind theme by @travis-jeans in #3159
• Remove browser cache by @SleeplessOne1917 in #3150
• Show registration denial reason on login by @dessalines in #3175
• Always escape HTML attributes in emoji autocomplete and custom emoji markdown renderer by @Nothing4You in #3169
• Fix missing user badge for deleted users by @MrKaplan-lw in #3162
• Add hungarian language by @dessalines in #3158
• Fixing cache-control header. by @dessalines in #3148
• Disable blur for NSFW images by default if content_warning exists by @xaegit in #3128
• Add Vary: Cookie Header (fixes #3117) by @xaegit in #3119
• Use alert-info for donation dialog by @dessalines in #3115
• Optimize Dockerfile by @Nothing4You in #3090
• Add support for using Lemmy UI with an external Lemmy instance by @SolninjaA in #3041
• Only show View registration button to admins on profiles of local users by @Nothing4You in #3072

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

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

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

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

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

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

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

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

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

There were numerous other contributions:

• Leoseg added a new keyword filter.
• SolninjaA added support for using separate subdomains for federation and web interface.
• travis-jean@rblind.com made various accessibility improvements to the UI.
• @xaegit@lemmynsfw.com added some NSFW-related fixes.
• Nutomic and Flamingo-cant@feddit.uk fixed different federation bugs and got Peertube federation working again.
• Nothing4You and Matc-pub also contributed different bug fixes, speedups, and picture fixes.
• MrKaplan@lemmy.world helped with some release-related tasks, and backported some existing mainline bug-fixes.

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

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

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

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

You can see the full list of changes for April at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

What is Lemmy?

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

Changes

This release fixes a security vulnerability which allows an attacker to delete images uploaded by other users. You can read the details in the security advisory. Thanks to @Nothing4You for discovering and fixing it.

A new donation dialog is shown to users once per year, to help fund Lemmy development.

There are also various backports from the development branch. Importantly the "Private instance" setting can now be used with federation enabled. This way only logged-in users can browse posts and comments, which stops AI crawlers from overloading the server. Also moderators can now view votes in the post/comment options.

Backend

• Remove unnecessary pictrs purge calls (#5566)
• Donation dialog (#5559)
• Send out email after registration denied, email confirmed (#5553)
• Change private instance setting to allow federation (#5530)
• Proxy post.url if it is an image (#5545)
• When creating community copy allowed languages from creator profile (#5490)
• Include image alt text in post search (#5449)
• Add config option to enable json logging (#5471, #5557)
• Embed images in RSS feeds (#5488)
• Fix federation of sticky posts (#5593)
• Deleted user shouldnt break federation outbox (#5443, #5573)
• Fix some image embeds by escaping alt text (#5506)
• Properly federate distinguish comment (#5586)
• Increase default registration rate limit to 10 per hour (#5600)
• Remove debug ratelimit being used in production (#5551)

Frontend

• Implement donation dialog (#3034)
• Hide images in private message reports (#3053)
• Dont render images in private message (#3043)
• Changed checkbox text "Only moderators can post to this community" from legend to label on the Create Community page (#3046)
• Trigger toast error on community request failure (#3045)
• Add local link next to fedilink on posts (#3033)
• Add banned badges to post and comment listings (#3030)
• Linkify user @ mentions (#3029)
• Adding ability for mods to view votes. (#3027)
• Upvote, downvote, view source, and favorite icons become larger when pressed to improve visibility on grayscale screens (#2960)
• Improve colour contrast of the mini-overlay in the top right corner of link or image post thumbnails (#2961)
• Improve screenreader accessibility by adding a main element to more pages (issue #2891) (#2944)
• Using input group for allowed and block instance buttons. (#2905)
• Moving totp and delete account settings into their own cards. (#2907)
• Hide NSFW field for create post form, for NSFW communities. (#2887)
• Modify the logic for appending the URL after uploading an image, placing the image URL after the cursor. (#2804)

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

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

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We are able to develop Lemmy as an open source platform free of tracking and ads thanks to the generosity of our users. Once a year we ask you to consider donating to support our work. Financial security allows us to continue maintaining and improving the platform. If you’d like to make a one-time or recurring donation simply use the links below. Thank you for using Lemmy.

Nutomic and Dessalines, Lemmy Developers

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

We'd also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What's something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?

Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We'd like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.

We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:

• @flamingos
• @dullbananas
• @phiresky
• @sleeplessone

Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.

• August 2023
• January 2024

What is Lemmy?

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

Developer AMA

Next week we are going to hold an "Ask me Anything" where users can ask the Lemmy developers all sorts of questions. They will be answered by @dessalines and @nutomic who have been working on Lemmy since the beginning in 2019. Other maintainers may also chime in. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.

The AMA thread will be opened next Tuesday, March 25 in !announcements@lemmy.ml. We will start responding one day later. Until then you can let other people know about the AMA, think of good questions and read our previous AMAs:

• August 2023
• January 2024

Changes

• Fix Youtube thumbnails by increasing the metadata fetch limit to 1 MB #5266
• Also remove private messages when banning user with "remove content" (goodbye Nicole) #5414
• Ignore accept-language header if no site languages are specified, to avoid that users have English disabled and can't see most posts #5485
• Enable english for users on instances with all languages enabled, to resolve the above problem #5489 #5493
• Only list local banned users under /admin #5364
• Add crawl-delay to robots.txt #3009
• Optimize migrations which were included in 0.19.6 #5301

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

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

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

DraconicNEO

• Include image alt text in post search

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add HTML classes to mentions
• Add new setting to block NSFW content

travis-jeans

• Add Verdana and Arimo fonts to Litely and Darkly variables file before Helvetica (Issue 1537)
• Improve colour contrast of the mini-overlay in the top right corner of link or image post thumbnails
• Upvote, downvote, view source, and favorite icons become larger when pressed to improve visibility on grayscale screens
• Improve screenreader accessibility by adding a main element to more pages (issue #2891)

dessalines

• Been working on getting lemmy-ui up to date for 1.0.0 .
• Extracting pagination cursor utils into a trait.

Nutomic

• Removing aggregates tables (fixes #4869)
• Enable english for all users to fix language issues
• Ignore accept-language header if not site languages are specified
• Add more options for image uploads
• Use connection url to configure email (fixes #5472)
• Use version from git to indicate unreleased changes
• Add config option to enable json logging
• Also search url field by default
• Fix federation of unban action (fixes #5454)
• Get rid of Option<Vec<_>> in api structs (fixes #2820)

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

travis-jeans

• colorList includes CSS variables so theme developers can change the comment left border color (issue 2890)

dessalines

• Fix matrix id import. #5063
• Add ability to view your own sent reports.
• Use rust:1.81 for CI.
• Adding ability to resend verification email.
• Show comments for hidden communities.
• When verifying email, add note about waiting for approval.
• Adding a can_mod field to CommentView, PostView, and CommunityView.
• Adding a variable time_range_limit, rather than having many post sorts like TopSixHours
• Adding blurhash to image_details.
• Adding listing_type filter for modlog.
• Fix corepack bug.

Nutomic

• Show posts/comments from followed communities despite instance block
• Simplify slur regex
• Deleted user shouldnt break federation outbox (fixes #5441)
• Reduce usage of async_trait
• Rate limit changes (fixes #5287)
• Allow sending report only to admins (fixes #2414)
• Also remove private messages when banning user with "remove content"
• Ignore follow requests from kbin, mbin for private communities
• Fix hash check for pictrs binary
• Enable emails in Chinese
• Cors policy should allow any origin by default (fixes #5405)
• Merge functions for formatting local urls

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Lemmy v0.19.9 Release

What is Lemmy?

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

Changes

This version fixes a potential security problem, by preventing Lemmy from accessing localhost URLs. There is also a fix for a crash during markdown parsing. Lemmy now uses mimalloc instead of the system allocator (usually glibc), which should improve performance and prevent unlimited memory growth over time.

Lemmy

• Error handling for thumbnail generation
• Use mimalloc as memory allocator
• Additional security checks for URLs (details) . Security Advisory
• Fix crash while rewriting markdown
• Fix peertube federation
• Append attachments to comments (@flamingo-cant-draw)
• Enable site languages for new user

Lemmy-UI

• Enforce required validation on signup answers (@anhcuky)
• copy thumbnail URL during crossposting (@anhcuky)
• Adding a bottom-margin to spoiler details tag.
• Fixing login password limits.
• Adding zh-CN as default for zh lang.
• Updated translations

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

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

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

andrewmoise

• Use different counts for denominator in scaled rank for posts

timothyhay256

• Improve email notification text

dessalines

• Removing upx.
• Converting joins, filters, and selects to common functions for DB views.
• Using different corepack install method to fix corepack bug.
• Adding listing_type.ModeratorView for list communities.
• Only print migration output when running migrate command
• Search combined
• Adding post_id and type_ filters to combined reports.
• Adding zh-CN as default for zh lang.

Nutomic

• Fix crash while rewriting markdown (fixes #5380)
• Rename actor_id columns to ap_id
• Include saved date in api responses (fixes #5184)
• Fix peertube federation (ref #3837)
• Use mimalloc as memory allocator
• Federate "resolve report" action
• Deny invalid config fields
• Remove instrument macros
• Only list local banned users (fixes #2961)
• Add some url validation
• Allow setting multiple values for cors_origin (fixes #5198)

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

SleeplessOne1917

• RFC for REST-based API redesign
• lemmy-client-rs Release v1.0.4

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add media filter setting

dullbananas

• Prevent incorrectly using delete instead of uplete
• Clean up LemmyError::status_code
• Optimize migrations
• Changes to get_random_community_id: add filters for nsfw and private, use algorthm that doesn't scan the entire table
• Correctly paginate PostView when read_only is enabled
• Add community reports (only the database part)

dessalines

• Adding a slim comment_view variant, without post or community.
• Adding combined inbox
• Adding Combined modlog
• Fixing person_content_combined migration uniques.
• Using input group for allowed and block instance buttons.
• Moving totp and delete account settings into their own cards.
• Adding fedilink translation for link titles.
• Fixing login password limits.

Nutomic

• Change println! to debug!
• Move middleware code into api_routes for faster compilation
• Send federated reports to all community mods
• Change federation community restricted check to apply only locally
• Skip api test for community follower count (fixes #5179)
• Implement request idempotency (fixes #4735)
• Return correct status code for rate limit error (ref #5332)
• Add support for donation dialog (fixes #4856)
• Pictrs delete token
• Image api rework

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

There have been lots of changes since the last dev update. Contributors have been more active than usual during the Christmas holidays, and also the last dev update was already a whole month ago.

phiresky

• Community post tags (part 1)

leoseg

• New parameter read_only for /api/v3/post/list

flamingo-cant-draw

• Add markdown-it-footnotes

Nothing4You

• Reduce false positives in URL blocklist to reduce scunthorpe problem …

Integral-Tech

• refactor: avoid using format! when String creation is unnecessary
• refactor: replace static with const for global constants

anhcuky

• reset_password API to always return success
• Add Thumbnail URL When Crossposting
• Enforce required validation on signup Answers

dullbananas

• Fix incorrectly using delete instead of uplete in update_banned_when_expired
• Add custom migration runner, forbid some diesel migration commands, fix old migrations
• Fix incorrect comment in report_combined_view test
• Shorten "options" variable name

dessalines

• Combine comment and post reports
• Automatically marking posts created in an NSFW community as NSFW.
• Adding combined person content and person saved tables.
• Don't send out new user email verifies to admins, if already verified.
• Applying some clippy fixes.
• Hide NSFW field for create post form, for NSFW communities.
• Using video tag for embed video urls that are videos.
• Adding a bottom-margin to spoiler details tag.

Nutomic

• Change default image_mode to proxy, remove deprecated option
• Remove unused apub audience field (fixes #5278)
• Correct HTTP status for NotFound error (fixes #5309)
• Remove unused params on CreateSite/EditSite
• Error handling for thumbnail generation (ref #5196)
• Fix startup errors, add unit test for scheduled task errors (fixes #5209)
• Reorganize api endpoints (fixes #2022)
• Increase metadata fetch limit to 1 MB (fixes #5208)
• Allow admins to view deleted users (fixes #5249)
• Consider remote instance as dead if it returns any status 4xx or 5xx
• Only accept database connection by uri

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency