milan

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/22274306

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Changes

This release took a long time to complete due to a major performance problem which brought lemmy.ml to a crawl every time we tried to deploy the new version. It took a lot of testing (in production) to narrow it down to a single commit, and finally fix the problem.

The release itself contains numerous bug fixes and minor improvements:

Lemmy

Enhancements

• Parallel federation sending by @phiresky in #4623
• Reduce CPU usage for generating link previews by @phiresky in #4957
• Switch from OpenSSL to rustls by @kwaa in #4901
• Increase max post url length to 2000 characters by @dessalines in #4960
• Increase max length of user bio to 1000 charactes by @dessalines #5014
• Reduce maximum comment depth to 50 by @nutomic #5009
• Resize post thumbnails by @nutomic #5107/files
• Add category to RSS feeds by @nutomic #5030
• Allow users to view their own removed/deleted communities by @dessalines in #4912
• Add backend check to enforce hierarchy of admins and mods by @dessalines in #4860
• Do pictrs transformations for proxied image urls by @dessalines in #4895
• Enable more build optimizations by @nutomic in #5168
• Calculate "controversial" ranking with exponent instead of multiply (just like Reddit) by @dullbananas in #4872
• Automatically remove tracking parameters from URLs by @dessalines #5018
• Relax timeout for sending activities by @Nothing4You in #4864

Bug Fixes

• Fix admin notification for new user registration (fixes #4916) by @Nutomic in #4925
• Allow community settings changes by remote mods @flamingo-cant-draw in #4937
• Fix problem with connecting to Postgres with TLS @FenrirUnbound in #4910
• Fix bug when commenting in local-only community by @dessalines in #4854 and @abdel-m in #4920
• Fix scheduled task to delete users with denied applications by @Nothing4You in #4907

API

• Return image dimensions and content type in API responses by @dessalines in #4704
• Adding a show_read override to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4846
• Add show_nsfw override filter to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4889
• Require authentication for site metadata fetch endpoint by @dessalines in #4968
• Add the ability to fetch a registration application by person_id by @dessalines in #4913
• Order community posts by published data, not id by @dullbananas in #4859
• Throw error when non-mod posts to mod-only comm or when URL is blocked by @flamingo-cant-draw in #4966
• Add option to search exclusively by post title by Carlos-Cabello #5015

Database

• Approve applications in transaction by @Nothing4You in #4970
• Use trigger to generate apub URL in insert instead of update, and fix query planner options not being set when TLS is disabled by @dullbananas in #4797

Lemmy-UI

• Fix full-size post images. by @dessalines in #2797
• Fix modlog ID filtering. by @dessalines in #2795
• Allow Arabic and Cyrillic characters when signing up or creating community by @SleeplessOne1917
• UX - Swap "Select Language" and "Cancel/Preview/Reply" button locations around in commentsReverse order of buttons in Reply TextArea
• Fix jump to content by @SleeplessOne1917
• Fixing peertube and ordinary video embeds. by @dessalines in #2676
• Changing sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax. by @dessalines in #2677
• Remove show new post notifs setting. by @dessalines in #2675
• Fix memory leak around emojis on server render by @makotech222 in #2674
• Enable spellcheck for markdown text area by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2669
• Pre release dep bump by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2661
• Add ability to fill magnet link title on post creation. by @dessalines in #2654
• Registration application view by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2651
• Add torrent help by @dessalines in #2650
• More moderation history by @dessalines in #2649
• Fix tribute related bug by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2647
• Remove min and max length from password input when using login form by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2643
• Remove trending communities card from home. by @dessalines in #2639
• Set data-bs-theme based on the presence of "dark" in theme name by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2638
• Fixing modlog filtering to allow admins and mods to filter by mod. by @dessalines in #2629
• Fix issue from logo bugfix by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2620
• Make more post params cross-postable by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2621
• Fix wonky comment action icon button alignment by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2622
• Prevent broken logo from crashing site by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2619
• Add rate limit info message. by @dessalines in #2563
• Fix getQueryString by @matc-pub in #2558

New Contributors

• @abdel-m made their first contribution in #4920
• @johnspurlock made their first contribution in #4917
• @FenrirUnbound made their first contribution in #4910
• @kwaa made their first contribution in #4901
• @Daniel15 made their first contribution in #4892

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

Upgrade instructions

This upgrade could take as long as ~30 minutes for larger servers, due to needing to recalculate controversy ranks for all historical posts.

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Thanks to everyone

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

Special shout out to @SleeplessOne1917, @phiresky, @dullbananas, @mv-gh, @Nothing4u, @asonix, @sunaurus, @flamingo-cant-draw, and @Freakazoid182 for their many code contributions and helpful insights.

Support development

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

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

Hi there! As of today's early morning (cest), the tchncs server H5 started to become unstable and restarted itself every 10-30mins.

I couldn't find apparent causes and the system logs would just cut off, while not showing helpful indicators of the problem. After some tests, including some initial memory testing, I've created a ticket with the hoster and they offered a replacement while keeping the NVMe's.

We are now on the new server (supposedly, it's very much equal, making it hard to confirm^^) – let's see if this helped. Fingers crossed.

Update 21:00 CEST: all services that had their home on this host have been moved and launched.

Update 20:30 CEST: the linux container was launched on the new host. It is possible that some of you still cache the old IP address. Please be patient.

tl;dr Surprise maintenance! It looks like it is once again time for some fresh hardware. Within the next hours (perhaps also tomorrow, depending on time among other things), you might experience a downtime of up to one to two hours due to Lemmy being moved to a new machine.

This is needed for more future proofing as well as making sure the current hardware is not about to die and forcing us to apply a backup.

This post will be updated as soon as there are any updates.

Old specs (about € 37.72 /month):

• i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz
• 2x512 GB KXG50ZNV512G TOSHIBA Gen 3 in Software Raid
• 4x RAM 16384 MB DDR4
• 🇫🇮

Expected new specs (€ 76,16 € /month):

• Ryzen 7 7700
• 2x1 TB SAMSUNG MZVL21T0HCLR-00B00 (not that i was given a choice) Gen 4 in Software Raid
• 64 GB RAM
• 🇩🇪 (they would be few eur cheaper in helsinki but AX52 are out of stock)

Additional costs are involved – if in your budget and if you want to support this instance, feel welcome to donate at https://tchncs.de/donate :)

Right now. both of the servers drives report 255% used. I have already received this machine in the unluckly state of equally (and much) used NVMe's... and there is some promising iowait going on, making me worry.

It's not just the very unfortunate and (as i had to learn by actually losing drives upon reboot) dangerous state of the drives, but also the fact that the i7-7700 seems a bit overwhelmed with the load from Lemmy and Firefish.

Another thing I am not (yet) sure about is whether the 64G memory are actually sufficient...

Total virtual memory: 61.74% - 38.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
RAM: 61.74% - 38.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
Committed: 65.29% - 40.9 GiB of 62.6 GiB virtual memory
Commit Limit: 50.00% - 31.3 GiB of 62.6 GiB virtual memory
Shared memory: 17.05% - 10.7 GiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
Page tables: 3.15% - 1.97 GiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
Disk Writeback: <0.01% - 2.42 MiB of 62.6 GiB RAM
RAM available: 20.10% free - 12.6 GiB of 62.6 GiB
Hardware Corrupted: 0% - 0 B of 62.6 GiB RAM

This is fine'ish but not sure for how long. Maybe for now I wait with upgrading the memory... – on the other hand... why not give some room for even more database tweaking perhaps?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17053861

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Changes

This is a smaller bugfix release, with the following changes:

Lemmy

• Don't change encoding style in clean_url_params.
• Fix for federation last_successful_id.
• Fixing featured_local trigger.
• Fix postres TLS connection.

Lemmy-UI

• Fix for fetch page title.
• Fix create post focus resets.
• Make media uploads viewable only on your own profile.
• Fixing an auto-download bug.
• Regenerating lemmy-ui themes.

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

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, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Well hello there, I hope you are having a good time and that apart from the shaky recent update, discuss.tchncs.de serves you well! 🚀

tl;dr

tchncs is doing wonderfully in terms of donations, but I have reason to worry about an ongoing decline. Please don't feel pressured but if some of you would help looking out that it doesn't fall below a certain threshold, that'd be amazing. :)

Many of you are already using tchncs services elsewhere, but for those of you who are new, I'd like to briefly mention that this service is powered by donations of its users. By donating a small monthly fee, you ensure that I will be able to keep paying for the infrastructure and its upgrades, as well as investing my time, trying to keep the thing rolling.

Donating is 100% voluntary and not each and every one of you need to do it – also for now, there is no critical need for new donors.

If that's the case, why am I even pointing this out?

For a couple of months, our dear Elon (and later /u/spez) gave us not only waves of new users, but also motivated them / existing users to boost donations quite a bit. In fact, it is kinda unreal how much you kind people have donated to tchncs over the time.

The server-costs have increased and unlikely will go down soon again. Even tho it happened before, the past month was quite weak compared to the previous trend. Of course it is still much more than ~~many~~ most fediverse admins sadly have to deal with(!), but also this month started weaker than usual and I worry that this time it might become a new trend.

At tchncs.de/donate, I give you (maybe too) deep insights about the tchncs funding situation. Here you have what I just wrote as a screenshot:

🖼 very bright for darktheme screenshot of the previous months in donations 🖼

Screenshot from july 12, 2024

There is also tracked workhours on the site and together they even form dynamic goals with some hacky bash scripts. 😁

So what do I ask for?!

If, and only if you can afford it and if you really want to, please consider checking from time to time as to whether tchncs currently achieves goal #1 and ideally goal #2 (hw upgrades). It is important to keep a buffer for new hardware. And if not needed for new hardware, you are helping your fellow admin (me) with day to day expenses and ideally, savings for bad times.

...so that's all, this got longer than anticipated, sorry for that. Please do not feel pressured, as of now it's all fine. Just trying to make sure it stays this way. ✌

This time no crosspost of the original statement in [email protected] because somehow the content is lost as I select the community 😅
I hope that this is just a small bug and that otherwise everything is healthy. Image proxying is not in place yet. I will have a closer look at the now possible setup changes soon™.

Enjoy! 🍺

Normally I do not shut down services in order to perform updates, but the new Lemmy release requires a newer version of the PostgreSQL database server, which in turn requires a migration of the very cluster. If nothing special is hindering it (this happened with the Synapse Matrix server recently), this will be done quite quickly by just linking to the newer Postgres version (this is a feature of Postgres itself), otherwise it might take an hour or two.

This will also affect the Firefish microblogging instance under https://procial.tchncs.de

Adjustments and updates are planned to the pict-rs instance (this is the software Lemmy uses in the background for handling media). I will need to stop it for a few minutes. Lemmy itself is expected to run without any interruption – without the media tho. 😉

Don't worry, if everything goes to plan, it will be done very swiftly. 🚀

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/10890345

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10890295

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

• 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

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.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/10364369

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10364367

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.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Crossgeposted von: https://lemmy.ml/post/9559891

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9559890

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

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.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

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.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

Crossgeposted von: https://lemmy.ml/post/9347983

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

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.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

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.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.