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 <jwt>. 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.
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I'm doing my part! Cool to see my little change finally released, I hope people like it
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2073
Thanks for merging in some of my changes <3
Code block support should be great for posts coming from programming.dev and the active user change should help communities feel a bit more alive and be more accurate to actual activity
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It's always a treat to see the wheels of open source & community funding meshing together to bring about a better internet. You and @nutomic@lemmy.ml have already done the honors of thanking the open source contributors, so I think it's now my turn as an ordinary user to thank you both for your continued hard work and leadership -- I have my quibbles, but these do not preclude the giving of a well-deserved and hearty thanks: Thank you! It continues to please me greatly to have the privilege (in both senses of the word) to contribute to the financial sustainability of the project as one of its many small recurring donators.
And, while I'm at it... since the opportunity doesn't come up often: I also want to specifically express gratitude to dessalines for their (unrelated) work on the thumb-key project. As a long-time user of MessagEase (10+ years!), I've become a happy convert to your more well-maintained and open source replacement. So, thanks for that too! Please continue to suffer my past & future criticisms with the knowledge that it always originates from a place of equal parts respect & gratitude.
No probs, and thx for your support! I'm glad when anyone finds the things I work on useful.
We still have far to go privacy-wise, but finally there's FOSS alternatives for nearly every major app and comms platform. IMO the next big one that still needs to be tackled is youtube, and lemmy could have a part to play there.
Re thumb-key do you have recommended tutorials for getting comfortable with it? I found trying to do touch typing tutorials didn't really help, both because they are generally made for desktop environments and they are geared towards qwerty layout (e.g., get comfortable with home row first etc). I tried forcing myself to use it for a full 24 hours as the concept makes a ton of sense to me, but got very frustrated with myself and then dug into the world of which layout to choose, got overwhelmed, and switched back to whatever this qwerty layout that samsung one ui provides on galaxys.
Just what's on the readme guide. If you're in english, I'd just recommend using the default layout and settings for ~3 days, that seems to be the time to get used to it. Or practice on monkeytype.com
Thx! Ya its sad that torrents have effectively solved the static data distribution problem, but we still don't have user-friendly ways to access them via browsers. We've got tons of pictures, video, music, and other large files still being mainly hosted on centralized platforms like youtube and spotify, fully under their control. Its a sad state of affairs.
Have you considered surveying stakeholders (primarily the userbase) about features and strategy?
We sometimes use the github
Sort by thumbs upto find the most-wanted issues, and bug fixing is always necessary... but part of being open-source means that it should be fun, and its nice to be able to pick issues we feel motivated to work on. If we didn't have that, we'd get burnt out pretty fast.
Hooray! There's some really good stuff in this update. Can't wait until my instance upgrades and hopefully it won't break my current apps too much.
Thanks to everyone involved for another big release. There are many great features, but I'm particularly curious about User data export/import.
If someone can import a backup and get access to his data back, does this also mean that some hacker/impersonator can manually craft a backup file and import it to take control of our account ? Interested to know how this works.
It really just exports user-settings related data to a new account, so things like bio, followed communities, saved posts, etc. It can't be used to impersonate you.
Excellent! Hopefully it doesn't break 3rd party apps 🙃
Good thing I have plenty huh?
I think federation is still broken. I can't see my post on other instances.
Any plans to implement "multireddits"? it's currently the issue with the most "thumbs up" on github.
I would like to have "multifeeds" for topics i find more "important", cs career advice and information, open source, etc.
This is especially useful because activity seemed to be spread out among a lot of instances and communities.
once again UTC showing its superiority to timezones good work lemmy team!
These are great features, thanks for all the work and congratulations on the release.
I will say though - in general, it would probably be easier and safer to do more incremental releases. It has been a long time since 0.18.5.
Have you considered adopting a release train model, similar to what Rust does? The Bevy game engine project has adopted such a model as well and it has worked well as far as I gather. The idea is basically to release on a fixed time interval, forever. No more surprises about when things release and there's a convenient regular opportunity to encourage people to donate :)
