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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

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That’s why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn’t send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can’t access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy’s web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance’s icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy’s web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text “404 error message here”.

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml’s home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy’s database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy’s main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

Upgrade instructions

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
    111·
    1 year ago

    I apologize for the stability issues everyone.

    People found an exploit and are using it to DDOS several lemmy instances.

    • Meldrik@lemmy.wtfEnglish
      35·
      1 year ago

      That’s what happens when you start getting popular. Lemmy will survive it :D

      • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
        55·
        1 year ago

        Not sure, it is a coordinated DDOS attack tho. I welcome them doing these, because it only strengthens lemmy, and helps us find bugs.

        • SubArcticTundra@lemmy.mlEnglish
          25·
          1 year ago

          How is your personal life btw? I was feeling bad for you guys because I imagine dealing with the (welcome) explosion of your project must take all your time… Are you studying?

          • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
            16·
            1 year ago

            Its good, thanks for asking <3 . I do have a high-score of github notifications ( > 1200 ), and hundreds of people all trying to get my attention. I’ve settled into a rhythm now tho where I just work on what I think is important, take lots of breaks, and try to keep a regular schedule.

            • calr0x@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              As in any project the few loud voices can be the most damaging. Please isolate yourself from that and understand the quiet majority greatly appreciates what your doing and recognizes the pressure you probably feel lately!

            • GuyDudeman@lemmy.mlEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              That’s excellent. What do you do for a living, by the way? Because Lemmy can’t be your day job, obviously!

        • meLLy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          224·
          1 year ago

          exploit […] coordinated […] bugs

          Hilariously wrong on all three points. It’s a Python script I wrote in under a minute making identical requests to the same thread fewer than 10 times a second; Lemmy’s complete lack of caching isn’t a “bug”. That this extremely simple vector instantly brought down even the high-spec Lemmy.World instance with a low volume of requests is sad, and it’s tiring to see Lemmy zealots spam my communities advertising this tankie spaghetti code jank as an alleged reddit “alternative” when it topples from this. The multiple attack vectors I’ve tested make it abundantly clear that Lemmy’s team has been incapable of performing even the most basic possible load testing.

          Won’t be responding to or reading any replies, don’t care.
          BTW, ltree is a horrifically bad solution for comment trees, and any of the self-proclaimed “Postgres professionals” in these threads should be able to explain why if they have even the slightest bit of RDBMS knowledge.

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    541·
    1 year ago

    Query speed is Lemmy’s main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

    I have been pleading that Lemmy server operators install pg_stat_statements extension and share metrics from PostgreSQL. https://lemmy.ml/post/1361757 - a restart of PostgreSQL server is required for the extension to be installed. I suggest this be part of 0.18 upgrade. Thank you.

    • monobot@lemmy.mlEnglish
      19·
      1 year ago

      I think this kind of analysis can help a lot, sadly I don’t see anyone interacting on your post.

      Please do keep pushing for it and writing down your discoveries and explanations might help others understand the importance.

      Howto with real world data (like you are doing) is helping and is quite interesting.

      • Xaxetrov@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Not original commenter. No performance impact that I know of but it takes a bit of shared memory (hence the restart).

    • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.mlEnglish
      43·
      1 year ago

      My favorite feature is that upvotes now have a spinner that lets you know they actually got processed by the server. On 0.17 I would click an upvote and it would sometimes flash between on and off state or not be very obvious that it actually went through.

    • FormerGameDev@midwest.socialEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      i think my favorite feature is that errors while posting no longer silently fail. however, since they do show in a small popup box with a short timer, if i’m not paying attention, i’ll still miss them, and it’ll look like it failed silently.

    • deweydecibel@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      This would be my favorite feature if not for the fact that apparently there’s a bug where voting causes all of them to become uncollapsed at once.

  • bathory@lemmy.mlEnglish
    41·
    1 year ago

    Great. I saw that Lemmy.ml been on v.0.18.0 for more than a day. I love the subtle changes they made. Keep up the good work ! It’s becoming to be my favourite site day by day

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      451·
      1 year ago

      Thanks! I’m super excited about all the contributions making this site and its UI better.

      That’s the difference between an open source project like this and privatized software like reddit; we can add features we want directly.

      • peef ಠ_ಠ@lemmy.mlEnglish
        15·
        1 year ago

        Holy fuck man! As someone who wants to be a Web Dev, it’s really exciting to see open source projects where people develop without any financial incentives! It’s mind boggling how much this community is getting together to improve the experience of everyone!

    • KNova@links.dartboard.socialEnglish
      22·
      1 year ago

      There was like 200 comments worth of discussion on this and it seems like it was implemented without much fanfare. What gives? This is one of the biggest gripes I had early on. I’m gonna shout this from the roof tops

      • Zetaphor@zemmy.ccEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        I saw those giant threads where it was being discussed in circles and decided to take a crack at implementing it myself. Turns out it was not that difficult, I think I was just the first developer who found the threads and took action. Everyone else was focused on getting bug fixes into this release.

      • Zetaphor@zemmy.ccEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

        Updated my comment, I forgot to mention it also supports the kbin /m/ format for communities

  • UrbenLegend@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    1 year ago

    Hot diggity, these new changes are amazing! I can definitely see the difference in performance on lemmy.ml. Feed content sorting is also way better without the live updates and bugs with Hot and Active. Great work!

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      Thanks! I’m really glad we could get this out before the end of the month (when reddit kills 3rd party apps).

      Also now we should be able to do a lot more frequent bugfix releases.

  • ADL@lemmy.mlEnglish
    18·
    1 year ago

    Not sure what changed but the UX feels much more responsive than it did a couple days ago. Great work!

  • Lilium@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    1 year ago

    Damn, big update! I see a lot of people are contributing, that’s really the biggest gift from Reddit’s poor decisions (well, presuming contributions did increase, which is a fair assumption).

    That’s why I love open source software, it’s truly a community effort!

  • infamousbelgian@lemmy.mlEnglish
    13·
    1 year ago

    So, the auto update is no longer active for the feeds. That is a good thing! However, I think Lemmy now needs a refresh button.

    When I move away from my defaults (eg to check “new”), it isn’t easy to update the new feed (when I refresh I need to reselect new)

          • interolivary@beehaw.orgEnglish
            10·
            1 year ago

            You’re very much in the minority, then; it’s absolutely terrible from a usability perspective.

            Good that websockets are going. Lemmy sucks up battery like nobody’s business and for ultimately a negative payout

      • Haatveit@beehaw.orgEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        The auto update was awful for usability. Hate my page randomly jumping around when I’m trying to read.

        • The Free Penguin@lemmy.mlEnglish
          110·
          1 year ago

          it was good for usability actually, i wish more sites would implement that (i might just go on GH and fork .16 so that I can turn .16 into a client that never gets new versions)

  • XLRV@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    Great, it seems that there’s way less error message on Jerboa now with this update.

  • gkd@lemmy.mlEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been noticing significantly less errors when using the API. Thanks for all the hard work I know you guys are putting in. Much appreciated to both of you and the other guys contributing to the project.