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)
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
The federation issues seem to have been fixed by https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4330
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.
Glad to see the federation bug finally fixed
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.
Possibly, but this is more likely related to your language settings, not having undetermined selected.
should “undetermined” be renamed to “show all” or something?
“Any” I think would be the best way to say it
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.
Yup, for some reason, I had no language selected at all…
I have a feeling the vote thing will be abused.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the “not seeing votes” definitely is, on both Lemmy and Reddit. All this does is make that abuse observable.
DLF is updated if instance admins want to test drive it before deploying.
Great news!
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.
Is this just the backend, or is it UI too? Is there an easy way to find this out myself in future?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Confirmed, I can’t see that comment on my instance.
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.
My mod actions are still not being federated. This hasnt worked for me since maybe 0.18.1 or 0.18.2?
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.
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.
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.
