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.

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

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 a few minor fixes and improvements. Merry Christmas Everyone!

Lemmy

• Fix post thumbnails by properly determining file type
• Provide health endpoint for pictrs at /pictrs/healthz
• Allow bypassing image proxy for specific domains (can be configured via config value pictrs.proxy_bypass_domains, and i.imgur.net is bypassed by default)
• API returns content of removed comments for admins

Lemmy-UI

• 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

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread