this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Announcements

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Official announcements from the Lemmy project. Subscribe to this community or add it to your RSS reader in order to be notified about new releases and important updates.

You can also find major news on join-lemmy.org

founded 5 years ago
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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

  • 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.

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.

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

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.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I totally respect this being potentially a big ask, but does anyone have a TL;DR of what caused or was the fix for the federation issue(s)? I don't have capacity at this moment to look through Github Issues and PRs, but I'm curious

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago

The federation issues seem to have been fixed by https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4330

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

From the little I saw (and zero Rust, or Tokio (I think they use that) knowledge) ... federation workers weren't persisting correctly whenever it would hit certain errors or problems.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Glad to see the federation bug finally fixed

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Does this mean we are gonna be able to see comments from other instances? I sometimes see post with a certain number of comments (in the hundreds) but when I open the post I only see a fraction of them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Possibly, but this is more likely related to your language settings, not having undetermined selected.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

should "undetermined" be renamed to "show all" or something?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 9 months ago

"Any" I think would be the best way to say it

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That sounds correct for the user settings form, but not for the comment / post creation form. Open up an issue on lemmy-ui's gitbub for this if you would.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yup, for some reason, I had no language selected at all..

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I have a feeling the vote thing will be abused.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Lemmy is one of the few ones platforms that attempts to preserve vote and mod action privacy, to prevent harassment, and encourage ppl to vote honestly. Several other platforms just let any user see who voted, which isn't the best idea since it's been shown that ppl are less likely to be honest if they know that their votes are public.

The main reason I added it for admins, is bc a lot of ppl have been understandably upset by downvote-stalkers, or those who downvote with multiple accounts.

Like anything, there's the possibility for abuse, but at least by limiting it to admins only, we can prevent a lot of potential harassment that other platforms are currently allowing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

Admins had the ability to see the votes if they really wanted to anyway by looking at the database, you just made it a lot easier.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Thank you for the explanation. I admittedly am a bit cautious about this feature. But I can see how it can be a powerful tool to prevent bullying.

Hopefully we can trust our admins. But theoretically a bad actor could make an instance that federates with everyone and then takes this info and posts all the vote counts publicly for every post and every comment. And if we don't know which instance is the one responsible, we wouldn't be able to defederate from them to stop them from getting this info.

Not that this feature is the cause of that. Admins could already do this with a db query. And I don't think there is any way around that without making votes completely uncrackable. Just kind of thinking out loud.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Well, the "not seeing votes" definitely is, on both Lemmy and Reddit. All this does is make that abuse observable.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

DLF is updated if instance admins want to test drive it before deploying.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Great news!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

I am happy to see the voting abuse become more transparent to admins. Voting manipulation is one of the worst ways of anonymous trolling, as people view votes as a measure of seeing if someone's comment is valid, invalid or controversial.

I am a victim of it since almost 2 months now by the GrapheneOS witch hunters, and even my most recent comment 2 days ago has 4-7 downvotes, simply because I keep their Big Tech security (Google/Apple) shilling and trolling away from Lemmy, and hinder all their astroturfing efforts that exist on 4chan and reddit.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Is this just the backend, or is it UI too? Is there an easy way to find this out myself in future?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Releases are always for backend and frontend together, unless mentioned otherwise. You can check the tags in the git repos, or check the available versions on docker hub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

My mod actions are still not being federated. This hasnt worked for me since maybe 0.18.1 or 0.18.2?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I can't speak for others, but I still seem to be experiencing issues with federation. I've got a comment in here that isn't showing up on other instances.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Today I can say I can see the comment on my instance. Quite possibly it took some time for federation to catch up after being broken for a while.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Yeah that's my theory. I think the workers were busy catching up on the whole backlog of all the comments and posts that had built up over the ~3 week period it wasn't working.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Confirmed, I can't see that comment on my instance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I think there may be an issue with your instance, because my comment is now showing up on starktrek.website, lemmy.world, etc.

Shortly after my instance upgraded, things seemed not to be federating correctly, but now, everything seems to be working. I suspect that was because the wokers were going through a big backlog of posts & comments that had accumulated in the lengthy time federation was not working. But now, everything seems to be working as expected between my instance and the other larger instances.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Added the ability for admins to view votes, to prevent downvote trolling.

Please give individual users the ability to use an automated system to request to see these votes. There's times where I'll post something that nobody reasonable should show umbrage to and it will get slammed. I want to find out where they're coming from and clear house.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

For privacy reasons, and so that people will vote honestly, I'd like this to stay admin-only (and possibly in the future, community mods). But if you ping an admin, we can look into it and see if you're being downvote-stalked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Okay that's understandable. I'll be sure to send a DM if any of my comments saying something like "r--e is bad, don't do it" get barraged.