I'm still getting some federation weirdness, but this issue seems to be to do with general federation rather than particular actions.

This community: https://feddit.uk/c/lemmydirectory@lemmy.dbzer0.com

Refuses to update! Some posts have been edited but the edits don't come through. New posts are added but the only way I can get them to come through to feddit.uk is to search for the full original URL.

Is there an issue here? Or is it just being very slow?

As GA was just breaking things, I was staring at the rather bare bones Bad Gateway error page and thought: we really need custom error pages. My favourite example is IMDb that uses movie quotes, but there are many others, and we could definitely make ours distinctly British. So I am opening the floor to suggestions - perhaps a slice of UK life ("popped down the shop for more beans", we may be able to get a maintenance page in, so something like road works) or some Carry On sauce ("Oo missus, the server has gone down on you, no extra charge") or Pythonesque or... something else. People won't see them often but it should, hopefully, get a smile when it does all go tits up (which sounds like something we could use).

Common errors:

• 400 - Bad Request
• 401 - Unauthorised
• 403 - Forbidden
• 404 - Not Found
• 500 - Internal Server Error
• 502 - Bad Gateway

Or if.you have a good idea for a rare one, or you have a personal favourite error code that's not being catered for, then ask and we can add it to the list.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13627155

We're going to try to make the leap forward today. There will be some downtime while we attempt to do this. Rollback will be around 3pm if things are not working as expected.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13242302

Hello, I'm hoping to take the instance to 19.4 in the near future.
Before doing this, I need to take pictrs up a few versions.
This will take a while, so while 19.4 is in the works, it won't happen for a week or so.

Cheers, GA.

Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It's been an eventful year but, despite fate's best efforts, we're still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)

I felt this might be worth the community discussing.
Happy for people both on and off-instance to weigh in, though it is about this instance's interaction.

It's made doubly fun by the fact that the main owners of the lemmy project are admins on there. (If I understand correctly)

Title was brought over during the cross post.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/16246531

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...

As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.

I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.

This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:

Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?

When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.

Proof:

So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."

The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.

I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.

Hi I was looking though defend.xyz at eviltoast, notices they had few defeds but Lemmy.ml, feddit.de and UK are in the small list, just wondering why?

When GreatAlbatross and I agreed to become Admins our guiding principle was that this couldn't be a project run and funded by an individual and subjects to their waxing and waning interest. Instead, this had to be a social network run by and for the users. That meant that we needed as much as possible to be open and transparent with no single point of failure. This should ensure that feddit.uk would be around as long as people needed it, possibly even outlasting the both of us.

To this end, now the server move has been competed, we move on to the next step in securing the instance's future - ensuring there are enough funds coming in to cover the cost of running the site.

Fortunately, the outgoings are pretty modest (£40/month) and so it will only take a few dozen people contributing a small amount each month to pay for everything.

With the ideas of openness and transparency in mind, and after listening to suggests from you, we have signed up with Open Collective. As we are using a fiscal host it doesn't require any donated money to be held in a personal bank account, all banking and accounts are done by them (in return for a set-up fee and 5%) and the state of the finances can be viewed on the Open Collective website.

As well as a custom option (where you can pay what you like when you like), we have set a few contribution tiers:

• Regular subscription of £1 or £5 a month
• One-off donations of £5 or £10

This should meet the regular costs and, hopefully, build up enough of a surplus to increase storage as needed or upgrade the hosting if there is a sudden influx of Reddit refugees again. GA and I have also been funding things from our own pocket up to this point and, when there is enough of a war chest built up, we will repay those costs.

There will be regular updates (probably around this time every month as the invoice for the server goes out on the 4th and regular contributions are collected on the 1st) where we'll explain the costs and summarise the fundraising efforts so far.

If anyone has any questions feel free to ask below.

Good to see this instance is back up

Last year I asked for assistance with account recovery, I enabled 2fa by mistake, instantly disabled it but alas I was met with the 2fa prompt after attempting to log back in. At the time this instance wasn't being maintain and I didn't get assistance or comment when I originally asked for help so now that this instance is active I am asking again.

If its irretrievably then no worries but if I could regain access then that would be awesome

User: squid.feddit I can give other information to the instance maintainer.

We're currently getting hit by the wave of spam doing the rounds on the Fediverse. If you want a bit of background see this but be warned, it's annoyingly stupid.

At the moment it's only hitting one community on here: !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk

So from time to time while we work on a solution, we'll shut that community to new posts if we don't have anyone on hand to deal with the spam or we need time to clear the backlog or overnight.

It's currently closed at the moment.

If anyone has a news story burning a hole in their pocket that must be posted there then drop it in here and one of the Admins will post it. Comments should be unaffected, so discussion can carry on.

Has anyone else noticed that in the TV advert for 'On The Beach' holidays, Paddy McGuinness appears to say 'Fooking geniuses'?

Now that I've heard it, I can't unhear it.

I won't pin this one, as it should be relatively minor.
A couple of tweaks under the bonnet to apply, and possibly advancing to 0.19.3 if there is time.

Hello from sunny England! How was your morning?

We have a few updates on how things are running, and things coming down the pipe.

How things are running:

Migration to the new server

We are pleased to announce that this is now complete.

• Everything is now a little calmer, and hopefully a little faster too.
• Tom has been able to switch off the old server, and no longer has to pay for it, which I'm sure he's very happy about.
• I still need to knit in a few days worth of missing images. It's a single command, but it deserves a time when I can give it full focus.
• We have more CSAM protection
• Custom interfaces for the site have not been migrated, as we wanted to rebuild them from scratch.
• Due to the storage ballooning, sensible restrictions on images are now in place.
• Email encountered a few hiccups, but should now be delivering password resets and verifications.

As always, if there are any other issues noted, drop us a line.
Either in this community, on the matrix channel, or by messaging myself or Emperor.
I would also like to take this chance to thank flamingos-cant for their hard work behind the scenes!

What's coming next:

Financials and donations

We know people have been keen to support the community for a while, and we're pleased to announce...that we're aiming to announce it later this week.
We did not want to remove Tom's link until he was able to pull the plug on the old server. That is now done.
We'll go into more detail later this week, but we're looking to offer both regular and one-off contributions, and lots of clarity as to how the money is used.

More moderators

We are keen for popular communities to have more than one moderator.
This is absolutely not a requirement.
Mods, if you would like new people, pop a post on the community, or message us for ideas.
Community members, if you think you could help, message the community mods.

Slurs and profanity

The best part of any moderators day: Wading through reported and unreported posts, then trying to work out what is and isn't ok.
Especially since certain words are and aren't acceptable depending on context, or intent of the poster.

We're considering a 3 tier system. Yes, Maybe, No.

Yes: Probably 99% of the English language.
Also includes non-discriminatory expletives.
Things you might say after banging your shin.
The slur filter will not limit these words, and we will not be using autodetection.

Maybe: Words that are maybe OK, depending on context/intent.
The slur filter will not block these words, but use of a word will trigger a flag for review of the post/account.

No: Slur filter will just remove.

We'll discuss this further in the future, if you would like to chat about it here, try to keep it to one thread :)

A few upgrades behind the scenes

We'll be scheduling some downtime in the near future to upgrade the picture serving system, hopefully adding a few extra interfaces (old.feddit.uk, anyone?)

As always, any questions, suggestions, pop them in a reply to this post.

Cheers, GreatAlbatross.

What's happening?

feddit.uk will be down for maintainence between 19:00 and 21:00 UTC (GMT in old money) on Saturday the 27th of January.

We are aiming to move the site between hosts, and restore missing images.

How long do you expect it to take?

The target time is 1 hour. The window is 2 hours. That's enough time for about 1 season of Peep Show, if you're bored.

What is the rollback plan?

If we're not happy with things by 20:30, we will bring the site up in it's previous state, and schedule a longer window in the future. We'll let you know if/when the decision is made.

Where can I see status updates?

We have a public channel on Matrix for people who wish to keep up with the status. It's part of the feddit.uk Matrix space which is there as a fallback in case of any downtime and to provide end-to-end encrypted communication where required.

edit: there is now a WhatsApp channel.

Why are you doing this?

As previously discussed in here, it's been quite the journey but, in summary: Tom, who set up the instance and was the only Admin, went AWOL. GreatAlbatross and I contacted him offering to take over and Tom made us Admins but we didn't have any access to the server, so we were limited in what we could do.

The situation got increasingly problematic and plans were drawn up to take over the whole running of the site or to start a new one from scratch. It took a while but just as we were about to pull the trigger on the new instance Tom gave us access. GA is now in charge of the domain and I have overall responsibility for the new server.

The site has been suffering outages because the size of the image folders ate up all the available space and Tom removed the first image folder (why various graphics are still missing). That made moving the site to a new hosting plan more urgent and we've been working away in the background to get to the point that we were in a position to start the process. Hence the downtime.

We'd like to thank everyone for their patience and enthusiasm - it has helped carry us through what hasn't been a straightforward process.

I have more questions

There will be more information after the move about how we are going to move forward with feddit.uk to ensure it will thrive for as long as people want it. However, if there's anything that is unclear about current events then fire away in the comments below.

When I "delete" a comment, all it does is replace the text with "deleted by creator". It doesn't even hide my username. This is different from previous behaviour where the comment was entirely removed from the public view.

I should be in control of my comment. If I want to delete it then it should be entirely removed - at least from the public view. I don't want to make comments knowing that I'm permenantly etching my username into the stone of the thread forever with no ability to delete it. I'm highly put off from engaging now that I can't reliably delete what I write.

Being able to undo the deletion is fine but the undo really should only last 1h or maybe 24h before the comment is properly deleted.

Is it just me and my Lemmy client (Jerboa) or have a bunch of community icons / logos gone missing? I'm seeing a blank logo for a few communities.

• UK memes
• Ask UK
• British Telly
• And a bunch more

But it's not all of the communities 🤔?

• Feddit UK
• Electric vehicle
• And a bunch more seem to be fine.

Hello everybody,
It's time for a update on feddit.uk.
This time, it's good news, and stability.

I'll keep things concise, then elaborate later in the post for curious people:

• feddit.uk has been stabilised, and we have access to everything we need to move forward with it.
• The new domain name will not be used as the main instance, feddit.uk will remain the domain.
• Emperor and myself are responsible for instance and domain respectively.
• The domain has been transferred to me.
• We will be working with Tom to transfer the instance to new hosting under Emperor.
• The instance is currently running at capacity, which requires manual intervention every so often. This will be permanently resolved once the server is migrated.
• Images may be disabled while the system is prepared for migration, other services should be working

"What went wrong?"
"Why has conflicting information been showing up at times?"

The honest answer is, for the last few months, there have been two paths forward. These plans were constantly being updated, and the needle swung between viability for Plan A, and Plan B, often at the last moment.

At first, when Tom wasn't able to respond:
Plan A, new Admins added, new admins carry on the work.
Plan B, new site made, Emperor and I splitting responsibilities to make sure we had a bus factor >1.

As time went on, we started down the Plan B.
Lots of long discussion over names, discussing with community members, registering domains, and getting back-ends set up.
I was battling ansible setup, when suddenly, we had admin, and swung back to Plan A.

Things calmed down a little, but we were still lacking back-end, and needed to discuss how things would work long term.
Eventually, we started having to make A/B plans again:
Plan A, start doing back-end work, and work out long-term plans.
Plan B, build a new site.

It all came to a bit of a head on Christmas
(when doesn't it? Never agree to do on-call over the holidays, folks)
feddit.uk was down, Emperor and I still didn't have back-end.

So Plan B started again. I put on Bridget Jones Diary, in the hope that my partner wouldn't notice I was about to spend two hours trying to build a new lemmy instance from scratch.
(Don't ever do this. They knew. I still need to make it up to them.)
And it was just about working.
But Emperor was unwell, and I felt it would not be a good idea launching with half the team unavailable.

A few days later, Emperor is back in business.
Great, lets continue with Plan B.
And I recieve a message that we're getting back-end access.
Plan A time. The needle swings again.

So that's where we are now. Plan A. Everything is now in place.
feddit.uk stays up, and we work on it.

Questions that might come up:

"When are you going to a new host?"
Once Emperor and I have had time to run through the process, and schedule a day to make the change over.
When we have set a date, we will communicate it.

"When are we going to 19.2 (or higher)?"
The aim was to perform the upgrade after the site was migrated.
This morning, the site was upgraded, and we are dealing with a few of the impacts of this.
(Tom has been very busy, and we're very thankful!)

"What about email verification?
Email should now be going out correctly. We may go through the list of accounts that have not been validated, and re-send the email verification.

Who is "Teasmade?"
Teasmade is the face of site processes. Validations, password resets.
If you message admins, you may get a response from them.
They may end up with a backstory and personality down the line.

"I like/don't like the name Teasmade"
We'll happily hear alternative suggestions.

"Why didn't you continue with migrating to a new site?"
Because even with full migrations, we would never be able to move everything. Now that we're able to improve feddit.uk, we aim to achieve a lot of the same goals, while keeping existing communities intact.

"Who is running things?"
Currently, it's a combination of Tom, Emperor, and GreatAlbatross (me). Tom may stay on as an admin post-migration.

"What happens if one of you disappears?"
Our overall role definitions are based on responsibility, realistically we could function on just one until new admins could be recruited.

"What is happening on the technical side at the moment? Can I be involved?"
Once the system is on a new host, I will do some writing up, and we will consider people for back-end access.
Until things are more settled, and we have change-control in place, we're keeping configuration simple.
There will definitely be talk about the technical issues encountered, as people may find it interesting.
In the meantime, if there are reasonable features you would like to see, and you're happy to send us documentation, we'll absolutely look into them.

"How can I contact someone outside of the Lemmy instance?"
We have a Matrix channel (run by emperor).
For general queries, you can email teasmade at the domain (just trying to keep spam down a little). And we have general complaince addresses (abuse/trouble).

"I wanted to sign up, but I couldn't/the email didn't arrive"
If you email Teasmade, we can sort it. We do have to do this manually, but we're happy to do so.

Other questions?

Pop a reply in, we'll do our best to reply.

Emperor, Tom, and GreatAlbatross.

Not sure what exactly is causing this but when I browse to !formula1@lemmy.world on feddit.uk there's two pinned posts from a while ago, but they can't be seen when visited from lemmy.world

https://feddit.uk/c/formula1@lemmy.world

https://lemmy.world/c/formula1

I'm unsure where this problem originates, but my guess would be the instance as it's consistent no matter where I try to post (local or external communities).

Whenever I try to attach an image to a post, I'm getting the following error:

{"data":{"msg":"Error in DB","files":null},"state":"success"}

Does anyone more knowledgeable about these sort of things have any clue what that's about?

Is it possible to upgrade feddit.uk to the latest release of Lemmy so that we can make use of this patch to export user account data?

So it’s been five months since @tom@feddit.uk last posted and two months since he contacted @emperor@feddit.uk

It’s seems like nothing much has happened and the plans for a replacement were briefly resurrected then shutdown.

I guess we’ve all moved on.

Was feddit.uk down for a while yesterday

I think I know the answer to this but just wanted to check incase it was something else. I'm trying to subscribe to some new communities and can't.

For example: https://feddit.uk/c/eurovision@feddit.de returns the error message:

The server returned this error: couldnt_find_community.

I think it is to do with the 0.19 Lemmy instance upgrade (and the fact that we haven't upgraded yet) but can't confirm that.

Is that correct or is it something else? 🍻

Edit: Ok this is quite embarrassing. The moment I made this post I was able to access the community and subscribe. I swear this wasn't working a few hours ago and right before I made the post.... honest 😄. I'll leave this post up incase there's a better explanation in the comments.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/4927687

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9347983

What is Lemmy?

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

Major Changes

This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. 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 changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer . The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

• Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

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

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

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.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.