nutomic

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

There is a pull request which adds a new setting show_downvotes with these settings:

• Show (current behaviour)
• Hide (all downvotes hidden in ui)
• ShowForOthers (only downvotes on other user's posts are visible)

Importantly the last option would become the new default, which means that users wont be aware that their post or comment was downvoted unless they manually change the setting. This may be good for mental health, but may also make it harder for users to realize that their content is unpopular. What do you think about it?

Here is the pull request

I am one of the Lemmy maintainers and work on the project fulltime together with Dessalines. Our work is funded by donations, but these are gradually going down and don't even cover a single dev salary now (see join-lemmy.org). That's why we added a new donation dialog in 0.19.11 which is shown once a year to every user:

Many people use Lemmy exclusively through apps, so we would greatly appreciate if you could add such a dialog to your app too. The logic is relatively simple:

• From the /api/v3/site response, check my_user.local_user_view.local_user.last_donation_notification
• If the date is more than one year ago, display a dialog like the one above with buttons Donate, Close
• When Donate is clicked:
  • Open https://join-lemmy.org/donate
  • Close dialog
  • Call POST /api/v3/user/donation_dialog_shown to hide dialog until next year
• When Close is clicked also call the donation_dialog_shown endpoint

To test this functionality with a 0.19.11 instance, run the SQL query update local_user set last_donation_notification = '2024-04-07 09:05:06'; which shows the dialog for all local users. You can reuse the code and strings used in lemmy-ui.

Thanks for your consideration!

This is a follow-up to my previous post asking for design suggestions for the new donation dialog. It gave a lot of valuable feedback which is why I'm making another similar post.

This time it's about the donation page on join-lemmy.org (linked above). What can be done to improve the texts and design? For a start I already changed the text to the same one from the donation dialog. Here more space is available, so a longer text with more details could be written (possibly below the donation buttons).

What do you think about the available donation options? Do they work for you or would you prefer to donate through a different platform? On the other hand it is possible that the number of available options is already too confusing. Would it help to add a short description for each button?

Below are lists of contributors, translators and sponsors. They haven't been updated in two years and no one complained, which indicates that they don't serve as motivation for people to contribute or donate. So I would remove that whole section which will leave a lot of free space. What else can we put there, maybe a list of reasons why people should donate?

By the way I plan to make a recurring series of posts like this. The next ones will likely cover onboarding for new users, the reports page and more. If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below.

Edit: The changes are now deployed, but you are welcome to make further suggestions.

Help Design Lemmy

The next Lemmy version will add a donation dialog, which is shown once a year to every user, in order to increase the amount of donations for Lemmy development. You can see the current text in the screenshot above and in the translations repo. You can also checkout the frontend PR. Is there anything you would change about the text?

Edit: This is how the final design looks like:

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

We Distribute is a community-organized news site which covers the Fediverse. If you like to write about federated social media then you could help to expand their coverage.

See the link above for more details.

We Distribute is a community-organized news site which covers the Fediverse. If you like to write about federated social media then you could help to expand their coverage.

See the link above for more details.

Ibis is a federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. If you want to start a wiki for a TV series, a videogame, or an open source project then Ibis is for you! You can register on an existing instance or install it on your own server. Then you can start editing on the topic of your choice, and connect to other Ibis instances for different topics. Federation ensures that articles get mirrored across many servers, and can be read even if the original instance goes down. Ibis is written in Rust and Webassembly, fully open source to make future enshittification impossible.

This release features a redesigned explore page to browse instances and recently edited articles. Articles now have federated nested comments, as well as more subscription options to get notified about new edits and comments. There are also lots of minor changes and improvements.

Changelog

• New explore page with list of instances which shows the topic, update time and list of recently edited articles
• Implement nested comments for articles
• Users can subscribe to articles, in order to get notified about new edits and comments
• Settings for instance name and topic
• Much better error handling
• Add HTML title tag for all pages
• Icons
• Make diff view readable in dark mode (thanks @Earthgames)
• Basic about page
• Show pending edits which have not federated yet
• Various bug fixes

The next major version 0.3.0 will include federation with Lemmy, Mastodon and other compatible Fediverse platforms. The plan is to treat each Ibis instance as a community, with articles as posts. This way users on Lemmy and compatible platforms can directly browse, read and comment on wiki articles.

To follow Ibis development subscribe to !ibis@lemmy.ml or join the Matrix chat. Contributions to the source code are more than welcome.

Ibis is a federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy. If you want to start a wiki for a TV series, a videogame, or an open source project then Ibis is for you! You can register on an existing instance or install it on your own server. Then you can start editing on the topic of your choice, and connect to other Ibis instances for different topics. Federation ensures that articles get mirrored across many servers, and can be read even if the original instance goes down. Ibis is written in Rust and Webassembly, fully open source to make future enshittification impossible.

This release features a redesigned explore page to browse instances and recently edited articles. Articles now have federated, nested comments, as well as more subscription options to get notified about new edits and comments. There are also lots of minor changes and improvements.

Changelog

• New explore page with list of instances which shows the topic, update time and list of recently edited articles
• Implement nested comments for articles
• Users can subscribe to articles, in order to get notified about new edits and comments
• Settings for instance name and topic
• Much better error handling
• Add HTML title tag for all pages
• Icons
• Make diff view readable in dark mode (thanks @Earthgames)
• Basic about page
• Show pending edits which have not federated yet
• Various bug fixes

The next major version 0.3.0 will include federation with Lemmy, Mastodon and other compatible Fediverse platforms. The plan is to treat each Ibis instance as a community, with articles as posts. This way users on Lemmy and compatible platforms can directly browse, read and comment on wiki articles.

To follow Ibis development subscribe to !ibis@lemmy.ml or join the Matrix chat. Contributions to the source code are more than welcome.