Dear Lemmy.world Community,

Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I'm reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I'm sure you can probably guess what we've had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I'll add the thing we're talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don't know.

Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.

The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn't apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.

This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it's relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.

We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.

Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.

Thank you for your understanding.

-------

Sincerely,

The Lemmy.world Administration

Legal / ToS

spoiler

CSAM ___

Hello World!

As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

• [email protected],
• [email protected],
• [email protected], and their local counterparts as follow up actions.

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

> =Sincerely, > Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN & Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.

See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711

While we value our users' right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

(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]. 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.

There's some unrest because the Open Collective Foundation is stopping.

Don't worry, we use Open Collective Europe as a donations platform, they're going nowhere.

We've added some donation platforms, so if you would like to support us running our .world servers, you can do so here:

• Ko-Fi‬ (Preferred because of low fees)
• Liberapay
• PayPal
• Patreon
• OpenCollective
• Bunq

And for those wanting to donate crypto:

• Monero address: 83tnuFN4f28jRxTBW9qGDad2U23qNE5nfeW4Pfyd85oWMW7J9gqpXi3S8FDbX5uEeCAKcGnSpS2XT5dGwYiELthg8XuDrxH
• Cardano address: addr1v9qv6xvfwcx9ny56uag4umu6238sw2e7ff2kcxl3qe7p9esayjxgu

Thank you!

[Edit] Some of the links were broken, they should now all work! [Edit 20240314: Added Liberapay]

Currently we have an images issue. Our Wasabi (S3) account was disabled because of some illegal content that was found, we're working with them to get the account re-enabled and the content removed.

[Update 20240308 14:47 UTC] The issue has been fixed.

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)

---

Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal <3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@[email protected]) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I'm sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

| Version | Release Date | | ------- | ------------ | | 0.19.0 | 2023-12-15 | | 0.19.1 | 2023-12-20 | | 0.19.2 | 2024-01-10 | | 0.19.3 | 2024-01-24 |

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

Check the new blog post about the past 3 months for our .worlds

Hello World,

You may have seen the LW holiday themed logos we have used for Halloween and Thanksgiving. LW's users represent many countries around the world and we want to celebrate holidays and other special days that are local to you, but our team is fairly small and we aren't aware of a lot of the local customs out there. So we're asking you what you would like to see represented in a LW themed logo. What are some holidays/special days in your area and how do you celebrate them? And not just major holidays, we would like to celebrate festivals, days of remembrance, and other special days.

Please, comment below your suggestions and ideas on how we could represent them in the LW logo.

EDIT: Mostly looking for events throughout the year. What's left of 2023 is already in work. Thanks!

Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!

You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.

Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗

Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.

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.

Hello World!

Lemmy.World is looking for new engineers to help with our growing community. Volunteers will assist our existing infrastructure team with monitoring, maintenance and automation development tasks. They will report to our head of infrastructure.

We are looking for junior admins for this role. You will learn a modern cloud infra stack, including Terraform, DataDog, CloudFlare and ma

Keep in mind that while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.

Applicants must be okay with providing their CV, LinkedIn profile; along with sitting for a video interview.

We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

To learn more and begin your application process, click here. This is not a paid position.

Hello World,

Due to our pace of growth, our platform ended up with thousands of communities created by you, our dear users. While we are still appreciative of every community effort, we decided we need to be able to better assist and publicize them. To assist with this effort, we now have two community team positions available:

• The Community Engagement Team: This team will work with community moderators and find ways to increase their engagement, provide them with easy access to logo and banner options, and communicate with you better to assure transparency as needed. Team capacity: 6 new members expected
• The Community Management Team: This team will be responsible of making sure communities have active moderators, assuring compliance in Lemmy.World communities, and keeping track of community moderation logs in order to assure they are moderated in good health. Team capacity: 6 new members expected

Both of these teams will be working closely with the admin team, and are expected to become ways for our users to have enhanced control of their instance. Let's build something great together!

How to apply

All applications must include the following information:

• Your Lemmy.World registered username, and your reason to apply
• The position you are interested in
• Your time zone, and average availability level

All applications may be sent to @[email protected] or @[email protected], or e-mailed to [email protected]

Hello World!

The Lemmy.World Terms of Service was recently updated, and we have also published 3 new documents set to be in use, starting from today. These documents are:

• The Privacy Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/
• The Cookie Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/cookie-policy/
• The Fair Use Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/fair-use/

___

they're too long, didn't read

___

Okay.

Here are some simplified explanations to save you from the trouble. This update of our documentation was made to further reassure transparency towards our users, to comply with applicable laws to the best of our abilities, and to make it more convenient for all of us to use Lemmy.World safely.

___

The Changes Made to the Terms of Service

Highlights:

• Section 8 was updated to refer to our new documents.
• Section 5 was updated to further accommodate some of our communities, which were requesting exemptions from the previous version.
• The minimum age was raised from 16 to 18.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

___

The Privacy Policy in Short

We don't collect any real data from you. The only actual data we do collect are your username, password, the e-mail address you provide, and your Internet Protocol(IP) address.

We will never share your data with anyone for any reason, unless you do illegal stuff.

https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/

___

What's the Fair Use Policy?

The Fair Use Policy defines the main user and bot rules, and it is made so that rules of conduct and participation are easier for our users to read and access.

https://legal.lemmy.world/fair-use/

___

The Cookie Policy

Lemmy.World uses cookies like any other website. If you'd like to learn more or disable cookies, then visit the relevant link to our Cookie Policy.

https://legal.lemmy.world/cookie-policy/

___

end of relevant content

___

Upon these bits of info, we are also dying to tell you about why are we even bothering with any of this at all, and much more about our efforts and struggles that we hadn't had the time to tell you yet. But let that be a topic for our next post, haha :) stay safe, and with love!

Lemmy.World

❤️

>

Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the [email protected] community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

• https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite is a beautiful and convenient desktop-first alternate web UI for Lemmy. Official site https://alexandrite.app
• https://p.lemmy.world - Photon A sleek client for Lemmy with powerful mod and admin tools. The only alternative client with feature parity to the official client. Official site https://phtn.app
• https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager was one of the first alternative UI's that became available. Optimized for Mobile. Official site https://vger.app
• https://old.lemmy.world - a familiar desktop experience for lemmy. Official site https://mlmym.org

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks [email protected]).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @[email protected]'s post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @[email protected] laziness for that.

Hello World!

First off, better late than never: Happy Halloween!

Sorry we've been a bit quiet lately. But we love you, promises given! We're just working on a lot of things, and most of us are very busy with their daily lives lately. We'll be back with you to announce some of our projects tomorrow. <3

Lately, and gladly, here's a grand thanks to @[email protected] for giving us an amazing Halloween icon!

!

Hello World!

We've made some changes today, and we'd like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).

The "LAST REVISION DATE:" on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the "Page History" reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.

The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/

___

In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.

The results are in!

We welcome !Lemmy Silver !Trollface !Thonking !Surprised Pikachu !Popcorn !Crying !Lemmy Smash !Facepalm and !duckass to the community.

To use the emoji's simply type :duckass: :silver: :trollface: :thonk: :pikachu: :popcorn: :sad: :smash: or :facepalm:

------------------------------------------

Hello World,

Nothing as exciting as emojis, right? We would like to make it easier for you to express yourselves, so we'll be adding custom emojis to Lemmy.World. The question is, which ones? Let's pick together!

So, we're reaching out to everyone with a Lemmy.World account: Please provide a link to the image you'd like to suggest and upvote the ones you'd like to see! The most upvoted emoji's will, after review, be added to our list of custom emojis.

The emojis can be used by anyone on Lemmy.World in comments and posts.

This will be a quick post. We have received a phishing mail to our [email protected] mail address telling that they are "lemmy.world Security Team", telling that they will "disconnect" your account from our instance. This is ofc, not us. Do not fall for it! The attached image is how the mail looks like.

~Lemmy World Team.

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

Edit : OK so the outage was less brief than expected. The upgrade of the 3GB pictrs database took over 1 hour, and the version 0.4 database is now 14.5 GB... But anyway, it seems to be working alright now!

We will upgrade pictrs today, from 0.3.1 to 0.4.4. This will enable us to switch to S3 storage later on, and is needed for more anti-CSAM tools. Outage should only involve picture uploads, and should be brief.

I've written a short blog about what happened in August, and the finances.

EDIT: The update is done - Lemmy Host now running 0.18.5

This is a short post to inform you that we will be updating Lemmy World to the latest stable release of Lemmy. This is small update that fixes issues with federation of moderation actions performed by admin accounts. There is a bigger update, v0.19.0, just around the corner but the developers wanted to get this federation issue fixed as soon as possible.

The server will be updated at 1700 UTC - if you want to know when that is in your timezone you can click here.

Since this is a small update, it shouldn't take long. Downtime should be minimal. Please feel free to check both https://status.lemmy.world and https://dash.lemmy.world before and during the upgrade.

Join the Adventure on the official Lemmy.world Minecraft Server!

Calling all Minecraft adventurers and builders! We're thrilled to invite you to embark on an incredible journey on the lemmy.world Minecraft Server. Get ready for an immersive experience like no other, where creativity knows no bounds, and the possibilities are endless.

Minecraft Version: 1.20.x Address: minecraft.lemmy.world

You can ask questions, request features, share your stories on the discord, matrix and in the official lemmy community

The Server has some rules

Other info:

Server FAQ: https://lemmy.world/post/5467019

Server Info: https://lemmy.world/post/5468646

Hello everyone,

Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it's up to the instance admins to clean it up.

There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.

We don't want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That's why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.

This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy's.

We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.

We hope you understand and support our decision.

The Lemmy World team

We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It's not perfect as emoji reactions aren't visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.

Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!

We know most of you were thrilled about our Discord server, so we decided to make you even happier with our very own space on matrix!

• There is an announcement room for all the latest and greatest about Lemmy World: https://matrix.to/#/#announcements:lemmy.world

• A General channel where everyone is welcome to join and talk: https://matrix.to/#/#general:lemmy.world

And lastly, this one is more for admins of other instances but we have opened a "LW Defense HQ" room which we want to use in our ongoing fight against spammers: https://matrix.to/#/#defense:lemmy.world

Come join us!

EDIT: Madlad @[email protected] was easily convinced to set up a lemmy.world matrix server. So I edited the links to the new space and rooms. The old ones still work too!

That means you can now also sign up for a Lemmy World matrix account. Instructions in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/3443207

Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.

Part of the problem is the instance's open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.

We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.

Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we're setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!

An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world

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.

Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.

We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.

We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.

We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.

Take care, LW Team

Hey everyone!

So we've been trying our best to listen to members of the community on how we provide updates and information to you fine folks! To that end, we would like to welcome a new secondary, fedi-friendly avenue, Mastodon.

https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld

We will be posting updates here in ADDITION to our normal [email protected] community. As both a supplement to our Discord server and a place for the community to directly interact with us via micro-blogging.

We feel this opens up a few neat doors for sure to keep communication open and transparent.

See you there 😉

• The LW Team

Hey everyone, so as I'm sure everyone is aware Lemmy.World has been experiencing several outages throughout the last few days.

We have been investigating the root cause of these outages but believe that they are related to our current hosting provider (Hetzner) blocking access from ClouldFlare as (we think) they believe that our CDN is a DDoS'er, and is causing these disconnects to our backend server, problematic for sure.

We've opened support tickets with our current provider and are awaiting a response. We have no issue with being as transparent as possible with downtime. Anyone that is curious, can feel free to check out https://status.lemmy.world and https://dash.lemmy.world for up to the minute outage information. We are also looking into other fediverse friendly methods of posting status and outage updates

In the meantime, we are evaluating alternative hosting options and solutions to provide a high level of reliability to you, our users. Really, we want to say thanks to everyone for soldiering through all our technical growing pains.

Cheers

• LW Infra Team

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:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]

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.

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.

Edit: Upgrade finished

We will upgrade lemmy.world to v0.18.4 tomorrow at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone. Expect the site to be down for a few minutes.

Release notes for 0.18.4 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md