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 version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

This upgrade takes ~5 minutes for the database migrations to complete.

You may need to run sudo chown 1000:1000 lemmy.hjson if you have any permissions errors.

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

  • wiki_me@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    49
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Update on lemmy finances (not including cryptocurrencies)

    patreon: $1,591/month

    liberapay: $374.22 per week (about 1609 per month)

    open collective: $2082 (29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023)

    Assuming 63K active users , the per user monetization of 0.08 dollar per user (Reddit’s revenue per monthly user is roughly $1.19).

    Estimated developer salary for the two main developers is about 2600$, estimated median salary for developer in the US is about 10K a month.

    For comparison firefish made about 1424$ ((29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023) with an active users count of 11868 (or 8146 if you don’t count calckey, which i think is important because they added a pop up asking for donation, but i don’t know if that is after the name change) so that gives a per user monetization of 0.11 dollar per user ( or 0.17 not counting calckey).

    Corrections are welcomed.

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Heads-up that a new issue on GitHub reporting this problem upgrading from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3:

    thread 'main' panicked at 'Couldn't run DB Migrations: Failed to run 2023-07-08-101154_fix_soft_delete_aggregates with: syntax error at or near "trigger"', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:221:25 note: run with 'RUST_BACKTRACE=1' environment variable to display a backtrace

    https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3756

    If you use “Lemmy from scratch” install,

    you may be on an older PostgreSQL that Ubuntu distro provides, not the same as the Docker install method.

  • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s been amazing to watch Lemmy evolve over the years, the project has come such a long way. Kudos on the amazing work!

  • Eugenia@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for the continuing work! Just one bug report: when I click to load lemmy (either .world or .ml) from my homepage of various links, I’m logged out. If I refresh the page though, I’m logged in!

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      You might have to clear your browser cache, we saw that issue a few times with lemmy-ui 0.18.0

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 year ago

          The only thing else I can think of, is that a browser plugin might be affecting it. Try a different browser and see if it’s still a problem.

    • adroit balloon@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      yeah, the comment thread navigation is broken. the same is true for following “More Reply” links deeper into a thread

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    Sunday, lemmy.ml is performing better than I have seen it in 60 days. I did get errors on Saturday and significant lag. Not sure if activity is just today or what, but it’s really been fast in routine browsing.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    1 year ago

    Amazing thank you! Would love to see “awards” implemented similar to reddit, would be a great fundraising tool for instances.

    • AverageLinuxEnjoyer@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      Normally, I’d be against the concept of awards. However, considering this is a completely free reddit-like app without ads, I’d be completely fine with awards so the creators can get at least some amount of money out of it.

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I am sorry to all the never-joined, never-stayed users of Lemmy in May, June, July 2023 “Tweet is X”, “Reddit is $API” ------ because I could not draw enough attention and developers to Github Issue #2910 avoidance. I failed entirely in my social effort I tried to do for 60+ days. I really failed, brain damaged fuck-up I am. The worst failure in my life, and it’s the end of the line.

        • RoundSparrow@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          7
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          Who are you? I am published author Stephen Alfred Gutknecht, an expert in messaging systems and operating systms. Do you have evidene and facts? (I do have brain damage)

          Can you identify who you are?

          Can you answer details about GitHub issue 2910 on Lemmy project and the date?