- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Today is an exciting day for the Lemmy project.
Almost one year after first enabling federation, we now federate with other projects for the first time! According to some people’s definition, this finally makes us part of the Fediverse.
It took a lot of work to make this possible, so big thanks to NLnet for funding our full time work on Lemmy, and to @lanodan and @asonix for helping to figure out how Pleroma and Mastodon federation works (it’s difficult because they have almost no documentation).
What is Lemmy?
Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to communities you’re interested in, post links and discussions, then vote and comment on them. Lemmy isn’t just a reddit alternative; its a network of interconnected communities ran by different people and organizations, all combining to create a single, personalized front page of your favorite news, articles, and memes.
Major Changes
Federation code rewrite
The rewrite of the federation code started by @nutomic in August is now mostly complete. As a result, the code is much cleaner, and has tests to guarantee no breaking changes between Lemmy versions. As a side effect of this rewrite, it was now relatively easy to enable federation with other projects.
Mastodon and Pleroma users can:
- View Lemmy communities, user profiles, posts and comments
- Follow Lemmy communities to receive new posts and comments
- Replies (mentions) work in both directions, including notifications
In addition, Pleroma users can exchange private messages with Lemmy users.
Note that Pleroma and Mastodon rely on a compatibility mode in Lemmy, which means that they won’t receive events like Deletes or Votes. Other projects whose federation works similar to Pleroma/Mastodon will likely also federate.
Hardcoded slur filter removed
Lemmy finally has essential moderation tools (reporting, user/community blocking), so the hardcoded filter isn’t necessary anymore. If you want to keep using the slur filter, copy these lines to your config file when upgrading, and adjust to your liking.
Upgrade notes
If you installed Lemmy without Ansible, you need to edit the nginx config file to follow this example. Otherwise Mastodon won’t be able to fetch objects or actors from Lemmy. Ansible applies this change automatically.
No other changes are necessary for federation with Mastodon/Pleroma. Just make sure your allowlist/blocklist allows it. Then get started by searching the URL of a Lemmy user or Community in Mastodon.
Note that Mastodon and Pleroma are much, much bigger than Lemmy at this point, with a combined 3 milion users and 4500 instances, compared to 20.000 users and 35 instances for Lemmy (source). The existing mod tools in Lemmy might not be adequate to handle that at the moment.
Be aware that if you have federation enabled in the Lemmy config, Mastodon and Pleroma users can now fetch all posts and comments, to view them and share with their followers. The Lemmy blocklist/allowlist can not prevent this, it only prevents posts/comments from blocked instances to be shown on your own instance. The only solution to this problem is disabling federation, or waiting for signed fetch to be implemented.
If you want to use federation, but review new instances before federating with them, use the allowlist. You can switch from open federation to allowlist federation by pasting the output of the command below into federation.allowed_instances in the Lemmy config.
curl https://your-instance.com/api/v3/site | jq -c .federated_instances.linked
The lemmy.hjson additional_slurs field has changed its name to slur_filter.
Follow the Docker or Ansible upgrade instructions here.
Lemmy-Ansible
We’ve now separated our ansible install method (the preferred way to deploy Lemmy) into its own repo, lemmy-ansible. Let us know if you need help migrating existing installations over to it.
Changes
API
- There is now a
GetUnreadCountin the API to check the count of your unread messages, replies, and mentions. - A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.13.0 -> 0.14.0-rc.1 .
Lemmy Server
- More federation compat (#1894)
- Adding clippy:unwrap to husky. Fixes #1892 (#1893)
- Remove header guard for activitypub routes
- Add federation test cases for Smithereen and Mastodon
- Reduce stack memory usage in apub code
- Remove ActivityFields trait, deserialize into another struct instead
- Check if post or comment are deleted first. Fixes #1864 (#1867)
- Correctly use and document check_is_apub_id_valid() param use_strict_allowlist
- Convert note.content and chat_message.content to html (fixes #1871)
- Upgrade background_jobs to 0.9.1 #1820 (#1875)
- Fix husky fmt hook. (#1868)
- Renaming to slur_filter. Fixes #1773 (#1801)
- Three instance inbox bug (#1866)
- Remove ansible from this repo. (#1829)
- Rewrite collections to use new fetcher (#1861)
- Dont blank out post or community info. Fixes #1813 (#1841)
- Format config/defaults.hjson before committing (#1860)
- Breaking apub changes (#1859)
- Pleroma federation2 (#1855)
- Create a custom pre-commit hook, generates config/defaults.hjson (#1857)
- Add cargo metadata to all crates (#1853)
- Add both (De)Serialize to all models (#1851)
- Adding GetUnreadCount to the API. Fixes #1794 (#1842)
- Federate reports (#1830)
- Fix saved posts and hide read posts issue. Fixes #1839 (#1840)
- Dont allow posts to deleted / removed communities. Fixes #1827 (#1828)
- Dont swallow API errors (fixes #1834) (#1837)
- Fix federation of initial post/comment vote (fixes #1824) (#1835)
- Fix clippy warnings added in nightly (#1833)
- Admins can view all reports. Fixes #1810 (#1825)
- Adding a message_id to emails. Fixes #1807 (#1826)
- Generate config docs from code (#1786)
- Trying a background_jobs fix. #1820 (#1822)
- mark parent as read on reply (#1819)
- Move code to apub library (#1795)
- Adding honeypot to user and post creation. Fixes #1802 (#1803)
- Add database host back into config file (#1805)
Lemmy UI
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Thanks guys. This is trully awesome for the Fediverse : This is somehow filling the feature of “groups” people have been asking for so long now.
I still feel there is some work for integration in the UI to do : Like a “fediverse follow” button asking to log from our instance : Being able to post, comment and vote on an instance with our login from mastodon would be Nice. But that’s “nice to have”.
Thanks again
I am trying to stay calm, but failing miserably. This is simply amazing. Good job!
Absolutely amazing! Thank you @[email protected], @[email protected], and all contributors for this incredible technical feat! This is very promising and I hope to see Lemmy rise to the top :D I’m honored to be involved in this project
What does it mean that it federates with mastodon? Can you give me an example of what I could do if I have a lemmy and mastodon account?
Mastodon and Pleroma users can:
- View Lemmy communities, user profiles, posts and comments
- Follow Lemmy communities to receive new posts and comments
- Replies (mentions) work in both directions, including notifications
Lemmy users can reply to comments made by masto and pleroma users. Also can private message pleroma users.
I was under the impression the slur filter was popular on lemmy? To scare away rightwingers
We still have it turned on for this instance, but its no longer hardcoded.
@dessalines This is pretty cool!
Huge congratulations for all the hard work! <3
Lemmy is going on a very nice path, thank you!I hope to continue working on remmy now that this refactor is done hehe
@dessalines testing commenting from Mastodon 🚀
Got it.
This is my test… a sub-comment.
deleted by creator
Did not work for me just now (though there was an ngnix error too, so maybe there was other work underway). Sent this toot and then re-send again: https://mastodon.social/@humanetech/107293756637133781 based on searching on the post URL in masto UI (which was found).
Worked just now with another comment.
Note that if you boost a toot from masto UI, then in the timeline it says “[lemmy community] boosted”, instead of your own account (example). This was boosted by @[email protected] and appeared in timeline like this:
(this refers to some tests here)
@dessalines absolutely amazing work!
Thank @[email protected], this is pretty much all his work!
Thanks @[email protected] !
You’re welcome :)
Amazing work, kudos on the new release!
Finally!
This is a game-changer.@dessalines Hi,
Thanks for this ! I am late to the party, but it feels like a major step.
I have made some tests from Lemmy / Mastodon, and it seems it is not possible to post a new topic to a community from a mastodon account (by mentioning it).
Do you have plans to implement it ? Is it by choice ?
Anyway, thanks for your work.
There’s an open issue for that, but one of the main things is that masto posts don’t have titles like lemmy’s do. Check on the github bc there’s an issue abt that.
@dessalines Thanks. It makes sense indeed.
I guess you refer to this issue ? It’s about Friendica, but that’s the same issue :
Yep that looks like the one, comment on that issue if you would, so that nutomic can see it too.
good job!!! how do we link to this particular instance groups?
You can simply search the group url from mastodon or elsewhere.
It’s wild seeing a post on here with 100 likes and comments. Cool.
same lol. 😅
@dessalines Fuckin shit. This is unreal. Fedi is ready to take on the world now.
Hell yea
