1
-83
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Removal of piracy communities

Hello world!

Some of you will already have noticed that we have removed some piracy related communities from Lemmy.World during the last day.

Lack of communication

First off, we want to address the lack of communication.

Not everyone in our current admin team has been with us long enough to be aware of the previous issues and discussions related to these communities and the impact this has on our community.

We should absolutely have published this announcement when or before we removed the communities, not hours later. After realizing this mistake, we would have liked to write this a lot earlier already, but we were all busy with irl things, that we just didn’t have time for it.

Lemmy.World is run by volunteers on their personal time, nobody here gets paid for what we do.

Removed communities

Next, we want to explain how we got to the decision to remove these communities.

[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])

A lot of the recent content posted to this community included images instructing users to visit a specific website to obtain a copy of the release that the post is about. These instructions were in the form of Type in Google: visit-this.domain. The domain referenced in these posts is entirely focused on video game piracy and providing people with access to copyright infringing material.

While there may be legal differences between whether one is linking to specific content on a domain or just linking to the domain itself, such as linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy compared to linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/, we do not consider this to be clear enough in laws and previous lawsuits that linking to just the domain is acceptable, if that domain is primarily about distributing copyright infringing material. We therefore do not allow linking to such domains. Additionally, we do not see a significant difference between posting a link directly to a website and embedding said link in an image, so we treat them equally.

[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])

This community is, for the most part, just about discussing various topics related to piracy. We do not at all mind discussion about this topic, and if it had been limited to that, this community would be fine.

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is willing to accept this content on their instance, as well as the potential legal risk coming from this, which they’re free to do.

We do not plan to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @[email protected], the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com, is a great person, and we have no problems with him as a person. This is just a matter of different risk tolerance.

[[email protected]](/c/[email protected])

Same as [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]).

Why have the piracy communities been restored previously? What changed?

Currently, based on the memories of team members involved in the decision back then, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the community moderators and Lemmy.World admins in how the community will be moderated going forward, as well as which types of content are allowed.

Lemmy.World expected/assumed that links to websites primarily focused on facilitating distribution of pirated content would be disallowed in these communities.

The community moderators however do tolerate references to such websites, as long as people are not linking to individual content directly.

We suspect that this may have been missed during our original review when restoring the communities, which lead us to previously restoring these communities.

Why now?

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

Terms of Service clarification

Last, as we’ve reviewed our Terms of Service, we have updated our wording here to make it more clear what is and what isn’t allowed when it comes to piracy. This was already covered by "Do not post illegal content of any type. Do not engage in any activity that may […] facilitate or provide access to illegal transactions" in section 4, but we have now added section 4.1 to better explain this.

We apologize for the delays in communication.

2
26
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We've upgraded the instance to 0.18.1-rc.1

(to be completed)

3
-768
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world's users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.

This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

4
1639
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hello World,

Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.

Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.

At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.

As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one's stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.

Thank you,

The Lemmy.World Team

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3262
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

While I was asleep, apparently the site was hacked. Luckily, (big) part of the lemmy.world team is in US, and some early birds in EU also helped mitigate this.

As I am told, this was the issue:

  • There is an vulnerability which was exploited
  • Several people had their JWT cookies leaked, including at least one admin
  • Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

Our mitigations:

  • We removed the vulnerability
  • Deleted all comments and private messages that contained the exploit
  • Rotated JWT secret which invalidated all existing cookies

The vulnerability will be fixed by the Lemmy devs.

Details of the vulnerability are here

Many thanks for all that helped, and sorry for any inconvenience caused!

Update While we believe the admins accounts were what they were after, it could be that other users accounts were compromised. Your cookie could have been 'stolen' and the hacker could have had access to your account, creating posts and comments under your name, and accessing/changing your settings (which shows your e-mail).

For this, you would have had to be using lemmy.world at that time, and load a page that had the vulnerability in it.

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1740
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won't help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @[email protected] the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn't his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what's next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It's been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn't the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

————-

Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

  • “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
  • “The West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
  • “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

Overall community comments:

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

ou might have seen that we've been defederated from beehaw.org. I think there's some necessary context to understand what this means to the users on this instance.

How federation works

The way federation works is that the community on beehaw.org is an organization of posts, and you're subscribed to it despite your account being on lemmy.world. Now someone posts on that community (created on beehaw.org), on which server is that post hosted?

It's hosted on both! It's hosted on any instance that has a subscriber. It's also hosted on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, etc. Every instance that has a subscriber is going to have a copy of this post. That's why if you host your own instance, you'll often get a ton of text data just in your own server.

And the copies all stay in sync with each other using ActivityPub. So you're reading the post that's host on lemmy.world, and someone with an account on beehaw.org is reading the same post on beehaw.org, and the posts are kept in sync via ActivityPub. Whenever someone posts to that community or comments on a post, that data is shared to all the versions across the fediverse, and these versions are kept in sync. So up until 5 hours ago, they were the same post!

"True"-ness

A key concept that will matter in the next section is the idea of a "true" version. Effectively, one version of these posts is the "true" version, that every other community reflects. The "true" version is the one hosted on the instance that hosts the community. So the "true" version of a beehaw.org community post is the one actually hosted on beehaw.org. We have a copy, but ours is only a copy. If you post to our copy, it updates the "true" version on beehaw.org, and then all the other instances look to the "true" version on beehaw to update themselves.

The same goes for communities hosted on lemmy.world or lemmy.ml. Defederation affects how information is shared between instances. If you keep track of where the "true" version is hosted, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is going on.

How defederation works

Now take that example post from earlier, the one on beehaw.org. The "true" version of the post is on beehaw.org but the post is still hosted on both instances (again, it has a copy hosted on all instances). Let's say someone with an account on beehaw.org comments on that post. That comment is going to be sent to every version of that post via ActivityPub, as the "true" version has been updated. That is, every version EXCEPT lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. So users on lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works won't get that comment, because we've been defederated from beehaw.org. If we write a comment, it will only be visible from accounts on lemmy.world, because we posted to a copy, but our copy is now out of sync with the "true" version. So we can appear to interact with the post, but those interactions are ONLY visible by other lemmy.world accounts, since our comments aren't send to other versions. As the "true" version is hosted on beehaw, and we no longer get beehaw updates due to defederation, we will not see comments from ANY other community on those posts (including from other defederated instances like sh.itjust.works).

The same goes for posting to beehaw communities. We can still do that. However, the "true" version of those communities are the ones on beehaw, so our posts will not be shared to other instances via ActivityPub. And all of this is true for Beehaw users with our communities. Beehaw users can continue to see and interact with Lemmy.world communities, but those interactions are only visible to other Beehaw users, since the "true" versions of the Lemmy.world communities (the ones sent to/synced with every other instance) is the Lemmy.world one.

Communities on other instances, for example lemmy.ml, are unaffected by this. Lemmy.world and beehaw.org users will still be able to interact with those communities, but posts/comments from lemmy.world users won't be visible to beehaw.org users, as defederation prevents our posts/comments from being sent to the version of these posts hosted on beehaw.org. However, as the "true" version is the one on the third instance, we can still see everything from beehaw.org users. So we see a more filled in version than the beehaw users.

Why can I still see posts/comments from beehaw users?

Until they defederated us, posts/comments were being sent to lemmy.world, so we can see everything from before defederation. After defederation, we are no longer receiving or sending updates. So there are now multiple versions of those posts.

Why can I still interact with beehaw communities?

This won't ever stop. You'll notice that all posts after defederation are only from lemmy.world users. You won't see posts/comments from ANY other instance (including instances that ) on beehaw.org communities.

Those communities will quickly suck for us, as we're only talking to other lemmy.world users. Your posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. I highly recommend just unsubscribing from those communities, since they're pretty pointless for us to be in right now.

Why do I still see comments from beehaw users on lemmy.world communities?

Again, comments from before defederation were still sent to us. After defederation, it will no longer be possible for beehaw users to interact with the "true" version of lemmy.world communities. Their posts/comments are not being sent to any other lemmy. They also aren't getting updates from any other lemmy, as the "true" version of those communities is on our instance.

Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?

That's because the "true" version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn't defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.

The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.

This seems like it's worse for beehaw users than for us?

Yes. In my opinion, this is an extraordinarily dumb act by the beehaw instance owners. It's worse for beehaw users than for us, and will likely result in many beehaw users leaving that instance. They said in their post that this is a nuke, but I don't think they fully assessed the blast area. Based on their post, I don't think they fully understand what defederation does.

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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I'm going to miss AITA. Even if someone makes it a community, it will take a long time to populate.

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3720
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Looks like it works.

Edit still see some performance issues. Needs more troubleshooting

Update: Registrations re-opened We encountered a bug where people could not log in, see https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3422#issuecomment-1616112264 . As a workaround we opened registrations.

Thanks

First of all, I would like to thank the Lemmy.world team and the 2 admins of other servers @[email protected] and @[email protected] for their help! We did some thorough troubleshooting to get this working!

The upgrade

The upgrade itself isn't too hard. Create a backup, and then change the image names in the docker-compose.yml and restart.

But, like the first 2 tries, after a few minutes the site started getting slow until it stopped responding. Then the troubleshooting started.

The solutions

What I had noticed previously, is that the lemmy container could reach around 1500% CPU usage, above that the site got slow. Which is weird, because the server has 64 threads, so 6400% should be the max. So we tried what @[email protected] had suggested before: we created extra lemmy containers to spread the load. (And extra lemmy-ui containers). And used nginx to load balance between them.

Et voilà. That seems to work.

Also, as suggested by him, we start the lemmy containers with the scheduler disabled, and have 1 extra lemmy running with the scheduler enabled, unused for other stuff.

There will be room for improvement, and probably new bugs, but we're very happy lemmy.world is now at 0.18.1-rc. This fixes a lot of bugs.

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3641
Lemmy World outages (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hello there!

It has been a while since our last update, but it's about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.

So let's go over some of these misconceptions together.

"Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse".

While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network

The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don't like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.

And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members. 

"Lemmy.World should close down registrations"

Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what's what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn't even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.

Which brings us to the third point:

"Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that's why the server is down all the time"

This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.

The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they'll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very 'expensive' sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.

So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That's one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.  

"Why do they need another sysop who works for free"

Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.

We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.

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2192
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

lemmy.world IS NOT a general discussion area. find another community.

my bad....

-manitcor

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2653
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

As requested by some users: 'old' style now accessible via https://old.lemmy.world

Code can be found here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym , created by Ryan (Is he here?) (Yes he appears to be! @[email protected] ! Thanks for this awesome front-end!)

14
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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

We can make this a great interesting place and more people will join

15
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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
16
2316
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Most of these 'attacks' are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.

For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.

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3370
submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Another day, another update.

More troubleshooting was done today. What did we do:

  • Yesterday evening @phiresky@[email protected] did some SQL troubleshooting with some of the lemmy.world admins. After that, phiresky submitted some PRs to github.
  • @[email protected] created a docker image containing 3PR's: Disable retry queue, Get follower Inbox Fix, Admin Index Fix
  • We started using this image, and saw a big drop in CPU usage and disk load.
  • We saw thousands of errors per minute in the nginx log for old clients trying to access the websockets (which were removed in 0.18), so we added a return 404 in nginx conf for /api/v3/ws.
  • We updated lemmy-ui from RC7 to RC10 which fixed a lot, among which the issue with replying to DMs
  • We found that the many 502-errors were caused by an issue in Lemmy/markdown-it.actix or whatever, causing nginx to temporarily mark an upstream to be dead. As a workaround we can either 1.) Only use 1 container or 2.) set ~~proxy_next_upstream timeout;~~ max_fails=5 in nginx.

Currently we're running with 1 lemmy container, so the 502-errors are completely gone so far, and because of the fixes in the Lemmy code everything seems to be running smooth. If needed we could spin up a second lemmy container using the ~~proxy_next_upstream timeout;~~ max_fails=5 workaround but for now it seems to hold with 1.

Thanks to @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected], @[email protected] , @[email protected] , @[email protected] for their help!

And not to forget, thanks to @[email protected] and @[email protected] for their continuing hard work on Lemmy!

And thank you all for your patience, we'll keep working on it!

Oh, and as bonus, an image (thanks Phiresky!) of the change in bandwidth after implementing the new Lemmy docker image with the PRs.

Edit So as soon as the US folks wake up (hi!) we seem to need the second Lemmy container for performance. So that's now started, and I noticed the proxy_next_upstream timeout setting didn't work (or I didn't set it properly) so I used max_fails=5 for each upstream, that does actually work.

18
268
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

I honestly do not mind it one but. I quite like the interface. It’s minimal but there are some bugs to it which is to be expected. I really do like the overall design of it though. There isn’t too much going on. It’s like old Reddit which I am a big fan of

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1173
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Wow. Front page of huffpost.com right now. Interesting...

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submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Status update July 4th

Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.

Issues

As you might have noticed, things still won't work as desired.. we see several issues:

Performance

  • Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
  • We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
  • System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)

Bugs

  • Replying to a DM doesn't seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
  • 2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn't always work as expected.

Troubleshooting

We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @[email protected] is also helping with current issues.

So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we'll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There's a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we've seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don't want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we'll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

Edit to include source: https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/13/reddit-ceo-blackouts-no-revenue-impact/

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Good read, gives me a lot of hope for this project.

I look forward to an exciting future with all of you.

(Also- hopefully this wasn't posted already)

https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout

This was written by the Lemmy devs.

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

(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.

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submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Yeah, sorry about the run-on sentence title, but I hope you get what I'm saying

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submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

In this post I will list the known issues or possible improvements for Lemmy.world.

Please comment with any issue or area for improvement you see and I will add it here.

Remember: this instance was only started June 1st so a lot of troubleshooting and tweaking to be done.

Issues can be:

  • Local (lemmy.world) (also performance issues)
  • Lemmy software issues
  • Other software related (apps/Fediverse platforms etc)
  • Remote server related
  • (User error? ...)

Known issues

Websockets issues

There are some issues with the Websockets implementation used in Lemmy, which handles the streaming. Websockets will be removed in version 0.18 so let's hope these issues will be all gone then!

  • Top posts page gets a stream of new posts ? Websockets issue
  • You're suddenly in another post than you were before > Websockets issue
  • Your profile will briefly display another name/avatar in the top right corner

Spinning wheel issues

Error handling is not one of Lemmy's strongpoints. Sometimes something goes wrong, but instead of getting an error, the button will have a 'spinning wheel' that lasts until eternity. These are some of the known cases:

  • You want to create an account but the username is already taken
  • You want to create an account but the username is too long (>20 characters)
  • You want to create an account but the password is too long
  • You want to create a community but the name is already taken
  • You want to create a community but the name is not in all lowercase letters
  • You want to create a post over 2000 characters
  • You want to post something in a language that isn't allowed in the community

Other issues

  • Federation not always working; Apparently not everything gets synced all the time. This needs troubleshooting.
  • “404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site” This sometimes happens when the Lemmy app container is very busy. Needs troubleshooting

Enhancement requests

  • Can themes be added? > To be checked if this can be done without changing code.

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

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This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to [email protected] e-mail.

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