Why has Lemmy.ml and feddit.UK defederated from eviltoast, guys seem innocuous

New Users

eviltoast.org is still welcoming to new members. If you're looking to sign up, please feel free to create an account! If you already have an account on another instance or were referred by someone, mentioning that in the application box would be helpful.

What changed

For a few days now, the signup process for new accounts at eviltoast.org now require a small application process.

It's a simple text field, but means there is a manual step to approve new users. New users aren't expected to write an essay or anything rediculous, just prove their human and whether they have a connection with someone already here.

This is a measure to prevent spammers from launching attacks from our instance and being able to easily re-create new accounts to continue attacks from.

Future

If lemmy doesn't improve its mod and admin tools, I may end up making a sort of invite system so that existing members can invite new users instantly. And then the application process would be only for completely new users without an invite.

eviltoast.org is now running Lemmy and Lemmy-ui 0.19.3. It was a relatively minor upgrade, but details are at the bottom of this post.

More importantly, I wanted to share that eviltoast.org has had a sizable upgrade. Specifically the database server is much larger than before and should be able to handle the load with less stress. Overall things should feel snappier.

I have some other ideas for improving the site's responsiveness in the near future, but this should be a good start. Please let me know if you do (or don't!) notice a difference in the meantime.

Thanks!

2024-01-22 - Lemmy Release v0.19.3 - A Few Bugfixes

Major Changes

• Fixed lemmy-ui error page bug by @Sleepless in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2302
• Fix bug with Mastodon undo follow activities by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4364
• Count chars, not bytes for max title length (fixes #4366) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4367
• Mark instance as alive after successful activity send (fixes #4039) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4377
• Dont allow caching captcha response by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4381
• Revert “Dont ignore errors during login (fixes #4319) (#4321)” by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4380
• Removing group from woodpecker, as its deprecated. by @dessalines in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4387
• Add secondary sort by published date for post view (fixes #4383) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4384

Hello all,

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to the latest lemmy and lemmy-ui releases (0.19.2).

We held off on the 0.19.0 and 0.19.1 releases due to some federation issues they had. These appear to be resolved with 0.19.2.

Release notes are below, but please reach out if you run into any issues!

Important note: There were changes to how auth works in lemmy. Some mobile clients (like liftoff) may no longer work. And on the browser, you may have to clear your cookies for eviltoast.org if you aren't able to log in.

Thanks!

2024-01-10 - Lemmy Release v0.19.2 - More Federation Fixes

Major Changes

• Outgoing federation bug fixes.
• Lemmy can now receive reports sent from Mastodon and Kbin.
• Added the ability for admins to view votes, to prevent downvote trolling. Demo. #4088
• Various bug fixes and minor enhancements.

2023-12-20 - Lemmy Release v0.19.1 - Outgoing Federation fix

Major Changes

0.19.0 has a critical bug where sending outgoing activities can stop working. The bug is fixed in this version. It also fixes the “hide read posts” user setting, fixes a problem with invalid comment paths, and another fix for private message reports.

2023-12-15 - Lemmy Release v0.19.0 - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue

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.

I'm new here, and I was wondering if there is a plan to update to Lemmy 19.0 to get all the new features?

Related post: https://eviltoast.org/post/833202

The current plan is to entirely defederate from Meta's Threads.

Does anyone on eviltoast.org (or anyone who uses it for browsing) have any objections to defederating from Threads?

A few of the reasons to defederate:

• Exponentially more users compared to the current lemmyverse
• Expected reduction in quality of content, but dramatic increase in quantity
• Federation Traffic from Threads may overwhelm smaller instances, including ours
• Lemmy still has a lack of good mod tools
• Future possibility of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" whether intentional or not
• Many people view lemmy and other federated platforms as a way to get away from giant coorporations

IMO the biggest reason to defederate is the amount of users and content that will be added to the network, I don't think Lemmy/Mastodon/etc as a whole is prepared for that yet.

Edit 2023-12-22: threads.net is now on the blocked list. Please do leave a comment if you disagree with this decision!

Hello!

Apologies for the lack of updates. I just wanted to put up a quick message about this instance. Over the past month or so, there have been times where the site appeared either slow or altogether unresponsive.

Lemmy itself was always running but external monitoring tools would report brief outages and clients would be unable to connect. Usually only for a few seconds at a time.

This ended up being caused by stale DNS records. The infrastructure eviltoast.org is hosted on has multiple public-facing servers which act as load balancers for eviltoast and several other services. Occasionally the load balancers are moved to other servers and the DNS that points to them should get updated automatically.

At some point in the last month or so, the script that updates the DNS added the new records but never deleted the old ones. So depending on which server was used, the instance could appear unresponsive.

This script is fixed now and I tested a couple updates to make sure the same issue doesn't happen again. I'll work on improving the external monitoring and maybe setting up a public status page as well.

For reference, all of these red lines are brief "outages" and you can see when the issue was fixed.

Due to personal reasons (getting married and going on vacation), I didn't really have time to dig into this until recently, so sorry for the delay in getting it fixed and hopefully it didn't cause too much frustration for anyone.

There's been a lot of talk related to lemmy.world banning certain communities recently. It made me realize there's nothing explicitly saying "don't do anything illegal" here, and spurred a couple updates:

• Guidelines: Added two new items, one basically saying not to do anything illegal and the other a reminder that content is federated and public. Specifically these two new points:
  • Don't spread the illegal jams - Ensure content adheres to the law and doesn't endanger the community.
  • Public Toasting Grounds - Remember, everything you post is as public as a toast popping up! Content is shared with other instances, so once it's out, consider it part of the digital breakfast table forever.
• Disclaimer: We've made some tweaks to the wording on our legal page for clarity around content responsibility and liability. The core message remains the same.

To reiterate, this update doesn't indicate any impending actions to block or defederate with anyone. It's more about being proactive and ensuring we have a framework in place to protect our community.

Rest assured, barring emergencies, evident malicious intent, or harm to our users, we don't intend to defederate from instances without proper notification and dialogue.

Please feel free to message me directly or comment here if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions.

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.4.

Release notes copied below.

Lemmy Release v0.18.4

Changes

Lemmy

• Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
• Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don’t have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
• Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)

Lemmy-UI

• Mark post as read when clicking “Expand here” on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
• Update translation submodule (#2023)
• Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
• Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
• Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
• Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
• ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
• Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
• Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
• Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)

I just wanted to say that I like this instance. It feels calm, cool, and collected. There is no BS happening here. From what I can see, no one has defederated from us and we have not defederated from anyone else. The rules for the Instance look reasonable. Just wanted to say thanks to everyone for keeping it nice here :-).

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.3. For 0.18.1 and 0.18.2 we were using a custom patched build to fix some security issues, but now we are back on the officially released builds.

This release has a few performance improvements too.

Release notes copied below.

lemmy/RELEASES.md at main · LemmyNet/lemmy

Changes

Lemmy

• Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
• remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
• remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
• Revert "Add controversial ranking (#3205)"
• Omit local instance from federated instances list (#3712)
• add trigram index to search (#3719)
• Federation tests replication round1 - demonstrate absent replication of comment deletes (#3657)
• Make resolve_object not require auth #3685 (#3716)
• Sanitize html (#3708)
• Add controversial ranking (#3205)
• Skip fragile API tests (#3723)
• Enable gzip for reqwest (#3696)
• Dont authenticate user after successful password reset #3714 (#3715)
• Bump version of dependency "webmention" (#3711)
• prevent ordering by comment path without post filter (#3717)
• Update Dockerfile to run process as non-privileged user. (#3709)
• Dont show removed comments to unauthenticated users (release branch) (#3689)
• Add dev profile to strip symbols and disable debug info (ref #3610) (#3611)
• Dont publish releases to crates.io (fixes #3272) (#3664)
• Change logic for determining comment default language (fixes #3451) (#3672)
• Post remove delete federation outbound fix0 (#3613)
• disable rustfmt feature on rosetta-build (#3679)
• Make sure comments are sorted by hot_rank, then score. (#3667)
• Ignore errors when fetching community mods (fixes #3460) (#3674)
• Upgrade activitypub library to 0.4.6 (fixes #3222) (#3675)
• Denormalize community_id into post_aggregates for a 1000x speed-up when loading posts (#3653)
• Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort. (#3618)
• Use local_site.default_post_listing_type as the initial default listing type for new users (#3666)
• Don't panic when scheduled tasks can't connect to database (#3634)
• Add http cache for webfingers (#3317)
• Optimize hot rank updates (#3617)
• Split activity table into sent and received parts (fixes #3103) (#3583)
• work around race condition on community fetch (#3414)
• Make lemmy_api_common wasm-compatible (#3587)
• Check for dead federated instances (fixes #2221) (#3427)
• Fix wrong SMTP port when TLS is being used (fixes #3574) (#3607)
• Add infinite scroll user option (#3572)
• Shrink capacity in RateLimitStorage::remove_older_than (#3536)
• Fix #3501 - Fix aggregation counts for elements removed and deleted (#3543)

Lemmy-UI

• Fixing comment report showing dot. (#1989)
• Make sure comment score color matches your vote. (#1988)
• Allow limited set of markdown in title rendering (#1977)
• Allow selecting from all languages in person settings (fixes #1971) (#1985)
• Separate final comment row + add classes (#1982)
• Fix CSP in dev mode (#1918)
• Fix base.output (see #1911) (#1943)
• Add show/hide button to password fields (#1861)
• Fix start_url and scope (#1931)
• Remove lodash.merge dependency (#1911)
• Set person_id to myId in handleLeaveModTeam (#1929)
• Remove invalid default option from language list (#1919)
• Comment border tweak (#1820)
• Add Toast Messages for Bad Logins (#1874)

eviltoast.org is now discovering new communities automatically as long as they meet these criteria:

• At least 15 subscribers
• At least ~~50~~ 20 comments
• At least ~~50~~ 20 posts

This means any remote community that matches the above criteria should show up when searching for communities.

I'm hoping this will help with discovering useful communities without needing 3rd party tools.

Due to the way lemmy works, the above communities are only "discovered" and we will not start getting federated posts/comments/updates for them until at least one account subscribes to the community.

In addition to the above criteria, any remote communities with over ~~500~~ 100 active subscribers in the last month will also automatically be followed by a bot account.

These changes are already in place. After a few days, the above numbers might get changed to start pulling in more communities.

https://lemmyverse.net is the source being used for filtering remote communities.

Update 2023-08-06: Reduced the requirements to 20 comments, 20 posts, and 100 active users.

Update 2024-05-15: Started using https://lemmy-federate.com/ as either a potential replacement or at least to supplement this process.

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.1. Release notes copied below.

Release v0.18.1 Release · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub

What's Changed

• Remove actix_rt & use standard tokio spawn by @cetra3 in #3158
• Add TLS support for diesel-async database connections by @sunaurus in #3189
• after 30 days, replace comment.content and post.body with 'Deleted' by @vijaykramesh in #3208
• Add separate Post check for is_valid_body_field by @Neshura87 in #3263
• feat: allow all admins to purge content by @TKilFree in #3271
• Update DB local_user.theme type to text by @scme0 in #3266
• Allow wildcard imports in schema.rs by @Nutomic in #3293
• Leave no apk cache in Docker image by @PeterDaveHello in #3327
• Fix lemmy UI environment variable in docker-compose.yml by @aman207 in #3299
• Respond with Content-Type: application/activity+json by @perillamint in #3353
• Add Liftoff to README.md by @wiki-me in #3357
• Adjust the config check to be a separate faster to compile binary by @cetra3 in #3313
• Compress API responses by @dullbananas in #3343
• Site Metadata: resolve relative URLs for embedded images/videos by @orottier in #3338
• Item URL should point to post URL by @simmel in #3345
• Remove networks from docker-compose.yml by @Nutomic in #3356
• Fetch community outbox and moderators in parallel by @Nutomic in #3360
• Feature add three six and nine months options backend by @c-andy-candies in #3226
• Hot rank update batching + deadlock avoidance by @sunaurus in #3175
• Fixing the release script. by @dessalines in #3295
• Limit password resets by @sunaurus in #3344
• feat: re-added captcha checks by @TKilFree in #3289
• Add "show_nsfw" to the Community API. by @tgxn in #3363
• Fixes #2900 - Checks slur regex to see if it is too permissive by @ninanator in #3146
• Run cargo update as part of release script by @Nutomic in #3369
• Remove redundant calls to Iterator::collect by @dullbananas in #3365
• docs(api): Add api-common info on generating TypeScript bindings by @Kissaki in #3330
• Fix missing sorting types by @c-andy-candies in #3370
• Fix cargo warnings by @sunaurus in #3397
• Update activitypub-federation crate to 0.4.5 (fixes signature expiration) by @Nutomic in #3379
• Added gitattributes to normalize all files to lf by @njshockey in #3386
• Fixing release script. by @dessalines in #3398
• Automatically manage database when running scripts/test.sh by @dullbananas in #3389
• Fix concatenation of audio captcha wav files by @minorninth in #3350
• Update federated posts to not cache sensitive images if not allow by local site by @lemmus-org in #3253
• Improve errors / debugging by not stripping, log trace if requested by @phiresky in #3425
• Fix: added missing quotes to max-file in docker-compose.yml by @drumlinish in #3442
• Remove PerformApub trait by @Nutomic in #3423
• Mark follow as pending when subscribing to remote community (fixes #3384) by @Nutomic in #3406
• Use serde(skip) instead of skip_serializing, add placeholder values by @Nutomic in #3362
• Add awesome-lemmy to LemmyNet? by @dbeley in #3413
• Fix awesome-lemmy owner by @dbeley in #3469
• Add Open links in new tab setting by @Dogeek in #3318
• Dont compare db string errors (fixes #1393) by @Nutomic in #3424
• Adding rest of community sorts. Fixes #3374 by @dessalines in #3376
• Remove excessive content_type header configuration by @perillamint in #3470
• Do not decrement comment score twice when removing then deleting. by @JPMoresmau in #3196
• 300 comment limit. by @dessalines in #3306
• Remove not needed anymore http-signature-normalization-actix dependency by @pijuszczyk in #3458
• Fixing clippy. by @dessalines in #3471
• Improved validation of display names (Fixes #3436) by @Josephos in #3437
• fix(posts): return error on invalid community name by @Dhawos in #3418
• Add feature for enabling json logging by @lemmus-org in #3462
• Adding a person.admin index, and featured_local/community indexes. by @dessalines in #3479
• Add Prometheus endpoint and metrics by @andybug in #3456
• Cache federation blocklist by @Nutomic in #3486
• improve performance of community followers inbox query by @phiresky in #3482
• upgrade markdown-it to fix panic by @phiresky in #3490
• Use fixed prettier version for CI by @Nutomic in #3507
• Fixes wrong community moderator ordering. by @dessalines in #3495
• Make sure hot rank sorts for post and community filter by positive hot ranks. by @dessalines in #3497
• Allow cross-origin requests by @diamondburned in #3421
• Change security contact mail by @Nutomic in #3506
• Only allow http(s) scheme for urls (ref #3505) by @Nutomic in #3508
• improve admin and mod check to not do seq scans and return unnecessary data by @phiresky in #3483
• Update prettier to 3.0.0 by @dessalines in #3509
• Upgrade crossbeam-channel by @Nutomic in #3512
• Make hot rank not crash on future by @phiresky in #3517
• Revert "Make sure hot rank sorts for post and community filter by positive hot ranks." by @dessalines in #3521

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37906

(I'm creating a starting guide post here. Have patience, it will take some time...)

Disclaimer: I am new to Lemmy like most of you. Still finding my way. If you see something that isn't right, let me know. Also additions, please comment!

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy (on whichever server you're reading this)

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregagtion / discussion. It's being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet

About Federation

What does this federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact.

• You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
• You can create posts in remote communities
• You can respond to remote posts
• You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
• You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use Activitypub (like Mastodon, Calckey etc) (There's currently a known issue with that, see here

Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

A great image describing this, made by @[email protected] : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

About Lemmy.world

Lemmy.world is one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 1st, 2023 by @[email protected] , who is also running https://mastodon.world, https://calckey.world and others.

A list of Lemmy servers and their statistics can be found at FediDB

Quick start guide

Account

You can use your account you created to log in to the server on which you created it. Not on other servers. Content is federated to other servers, users/accounts are not.

Searching

In the top menu, you'll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc.

You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it's link, e.g. [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]). Even if the server hasn't ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays 'No results' meanwhile..) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds.

Creating communities

First, make sure the community doesn't already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy instances that aren't known to Lemmy.world yet.

If you're sure it doesn't exist yet, go to the homepage and click 'Create a Community'.

It will open up the following page:

Here you can fill out:

• Name: should be all lowercase letters. This will be the /c/
• Display name: As to be expected, this will be the displayed name.
• You can upload an icon and banner image. Looks pretty.
• The sidebar should contain things like description, rules, links etc. You can use Markdown (yey!)
• If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark. NSFW is allowed as long as it doesn't break the rules
• If you only want moderators to be able to post, check that checkbox.
• Select any language you want people to be able to post in. Apparently you shouldn't de-select 'Undetermined'. I was told some apps use 'Undetermined' as default language so don't work if you don't have it selected

Reading

I think the reading is obvious. Just click the post and you can read it. SOmetimes when there are many comments, they will partly be collapsed.

Posting

When viewing a community, you can create a new post in it. First of all make sure to check the community's rules, probably stated in the sidebar.

In the Create Post page these are the fields:

• URL: Here you can paste a link which will be shown at the top of the post. Also the thumbnail of the post will link there. Alternatively you can upload an image using the image icon to the right of the field. That image will also be displayed as thumbnail for the post.
• Title: The title of the post.
• Body: Here you can type your post. You can use Markdown if you want.
• Community: select the community where you want this post created, defaults to the community you were in when you clicked 'create post'
• NSFW: Select this if you post any NSFW material, this blurs the thumbnail and displays 'NSFW' behind the post title.
• Language: Specify in which language your post is.

Also see the Lemmy documentation on formatting etc.

Commenting

Moderating / Reporting

Client apps

There are some apps available or in testing. See this post for a list!

Issues

When you find any issue, please report so here: https://lemmy.world/post/15786 if you think it's server related (or not sure).

Report any issues or improvement requests for the Lemmy software itself here: https://github.com/LemmyNet

Known issues

Known issues can be found in the beforementioned post, one of the most annoying ones is the fact that post/reply in a somewhat larger community can take up to 10 seconds. It seems like that's related to the number of subscribers of the community.

I'll be looking into that one, and hope the devs are too.