lemmy/RELEASES.md
2021-11-17 12:01:07 -05:00

52 KiB

Lemmy Release 0.14.0: Federation with Mastodon and Pleroma (2021-11-17)

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).

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

Federation with Pleroma/Mastodon works automatically, you don't need to change anything, assuming that your allowlist/blocklist configuration permits it.

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 GetUnreadCount in 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

  • Updating translations.
  • Fixing unload (#487)
  • Fix setup password. Fixes #478 (#484)
  • Adding post comment scrolling hack. Fixes #480 #486
  • Navbar links (#476)
  • Try fixing crypto node bug. Fixes #473 (#474)
  • Use community title and user display name for dropdown.
  • Mahanstreamer userpage (#471)
  • Using i18next compatibility v3 (#465)
  • Show original created time tooltip (#462)
  • Revert version of i18next to fix plurals. Fixes #451 (#460)
  • Fixing cross-posts showing on initial load. Fixes #457 (#464)
  • Show bot account info. Fixes #458 (#463)
  • Very weak password check (#461)
  • Simplifying getunreadcount. (#455)
  • ui changes for marking comment as read on reply (#454)
  • hide mod actions appropriately fix #441 (#447)
  • Add honeypot for user and form creation. Fixes #433 (#435)

Lemmy v0.13.3 Release (2021-10-13)

  • Dont swallow API errors (fixes #1834) (#1837)
  • Fix clippy warnings added in nightly (#1833)
  • Fix federation of initial post/comment vote (fixes #1824) (#1835)
  • Trying a background_jobs fix. #1820

Lemmy v0.13.0 Release (2021-09-30)

Since our last release earlier this month, we've had ~30 commits to Lemmy.

Major Changes

  • Added comment and post reporting in the front end, and cleaned up the reporting API.
    • Note: these are local-only currently, reports are not yet federated.
  • The JWT secret is now auto-generated by the database.
    • Note: this will log out all users, so users will have to log in again.
  • Lots of smaller UI fixes listed below.

Upgrade notes

Servers

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.13.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Changes

Lemmy Server

General

  • Adding a user agent. Fixes #1769
  • Ansible changes (#1781)
  • Clean up reporting (#1776)
  • Implement webmention support (fixes #1395)
  • Move jwt secret from config to database (fixes #1728)
  • Set a 10 char minimum password length.
  • Dont pass accept-encoding header to pictrs (ref #1734) (#1738)

API

  • There are no breaking API changes, only the addition of reporting endpoints.
  • A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.12.0 -> 0.13.0 .

Federation

  • Rewrite fetcher (#1792)

Lemmy UI

  • Adding bn, ml, and cs langs
  • Reporting (#434)
  • Splitting login and signup pages. Fixes #386 (#431)
  • Fixing image in newtab. Fixes #382 (#430)
  • Navigate away from login page if already logged in. (#429)
  • Add username validation message. Fixes #387 (#428)
  • Password strength meter (#427)
  • Fix community display name overflow. Fixes #390 (#425)
  • Fix logout bug. Fixes #391 (#424)
  • Fix up post, profile and community forms. Fixes #409 (#423)
  • Adding markdown audio and video embeds. Fixes #420 (#421)
  • Adding Si simplifier (#418)
  • Fix profile paging. Fixes #416 (#417)
  • Use my fork of inferno-i18next. Fixes #413 (#415)
  • Add version to package.json . Fixes #411

Lemmy v0.12.2 Release (2021-09-06)

  • Fixing ARM64 builds.
  • Fixing missing Arabic language in UI.
  • Fixing wrongly shown subscribed communities on other user's profiles. #402
  • Adding a robots.txt, thanks to @mahanstreamer. #401

Lemmy v0.12.1 Release (2021-09-04)

Fixed several critical websocket bugs.

  • Wasn't correctly getting comment parent user for mark as read. Fixes #1767
  • Was using all recipients for simple comment return. Fixes #1766
  • Fix comment scrolling bug. Fixes #394

Lemmy v0.12.0 Release (2021-09-03)

Changes

Since our last release in April, we've had ~80 commits to Lemmy.

Lemmy Server

Major Changes

Note: Issue links are below.

  • @nutomic did a major rewrite of the federation code. It is much simpler now, and reduced from 8000 lines of code to 6400. Functionality is mostly the same, but future changes will be much easier.
  • You can now block users and communities, and their posts / comments won't show up in your feed.
  • Removed IFramely: Lemmy can now fetch site metadata on its own.
  • New API docs at: https://join-lemmy.org/api

General

  • Fix prod deploy script and clippy (#1724)
  • Fix image uploads. Fixes #1725 (#1734)
  • Adding more site setup vars. Fixes #678 (#1718)
  • Dont append ? to url when cleaning it (#1716)
  • User / community blocking. Fixes #426 (#1604)
  • Swap out iframely (#1706)
  • Adding ModTransferCommunity to modlog in API. Fixes #1437
  • Make sure bots aren't included in aggregate counts (#1705)
  • Don't allow deleted users to do actions. Fixes #1656 (#1704)
  • When banning a user, remove communities they've created (#1700)
  • Distribute Lemmy via crates.io
  • Simplify config using macros (#1686)
  • Simplify lemmy_context() function (dont return errors)
  • Blank out extra info for deleted or removed content. Fixes #1679 (#1680)
  • Add show_new_posts_notifs setting. Fixes #1664 (#1665)
  • Adding shortname fetching for users and communities. Fixes #1662 (#1663)
  • Upgrading deps, running clippy fix on nightly 1.55.0 (#1638)
  • Running clippy --fix (#1647)
  • Make captcha case-insensitive
  • Remove tracking params from post url (fixes #768)
  • Fix IPv6 port setup for Nginx (#1636)
  • Fix --cert-name for certbot. (#1631)
  • Change join.lemmy.ml to join-lemmy.org (#1628)
  • Upgrade pictrs. Fixes #1599 (#1600)
  • Invalidate current logins on account deletion. Fixes #1602 (#1603)
  • Upgrading api test deps (#1608)
  • Fix nsfw posts showing for non-logged in users. Fixes #1614 (#1615)
  • Add additional slurs configuration option. Closes #1464. (#1612)
  • Updating to rust 1.51.0 (#1598)
  • Remove brotli, zstd dependencies for faster compilation

API

Federation

  • Move resolving of activitypub objects to separate api endpoint (fixes #1584)
  • Rewrite remaining activities (#1712)
  • Migrate comment inReplyTo field to single value (ref #1454)
  • Fix issue with protocol string in actor id generation (#1668)

Lemmy UI

  • Integrating resolve_user into search. (#377)
  • Add lazy loading of images. Fixes #329 (#379)
  • Adding vi, sk, mnc, and cy languages. (#378)
  • Feature/user community block (#362)
  • Swapping out iframely. (#374)
  • Adding mod transfer community (#373)
  • Remove content more (#372)
  • Scroll to comments on post's x comments button (#312)
  • Remove websocket connection messages. Fixes #355
  • Center spinner, make smaller. Fixes #203
  • Fix font issues. Fixes #354
  • Have setting to disable notifs for new posts. Fixes #132 (#345)
  • Remove max length constraints on actors. Fixes #350 (#351)
  • Fix captcha replay bug. Fixes #348 (#349)
  • Removing community and user routes in favor of shortnames. Fixes #317 (#343)
  • Don't use default subscribed for communities page.
  • Adding Listing type to communities page, default local. #190 (#342)
  • Fix language bug on mobile browsers
  • Collapse sidebar on mobile. Fixes #335 (#340)
  • Re-organized components folder. (#339)
  • Fixing too many large spinners (#337)
  • Moving comment link to top bar. Fixes #307 (#336)
  • Fix/ws error messages (#334)
  • Make spinner bigger. Fixes #203
  • Fix preview description html. Fixes #110
  • Always show previous paginator, extract paginator component.
  • Use better comment collapse icon, and add text. Fixes #318
  • Fix symbols issue. Fixes #319
  • Don't restore scroll position on page refresh. Fixes #186
  • Insert triple backticks for 'code' button when multiple lines are selected. (#311)
  • Change join.lemmy-ui.ml to join-lemmy-ui.org
  • Adding a comment here placeholder. Fixes #301
  • Fix non-local community and person links. Fixes #290
  • Fix navbar bug. Fixes #289
  • Hide names of mods / admins without priveleges. Fixes #285
  • Adding URL search type. Fixes #286
  • Add a link to joinlemmy-ui on lemmy-ui.ml signup. Fixes #235
  • Fix duped site description. Fixes #281

Upgrade notes

Servers

You may need to add this to your lemmy.hjson:

pictrs_url: "http://pictrs:8080"

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.12.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Clients / Apps

Lemmy v0.11.3 Release (2021-07-30)

Changes

Since our last release, we've had ~30 commits to Lemmy, and ~60 to Lemmy UI.

Lemmy Server

  • Blank out extra info for deleted or removed content. Fixes #1679
  • Add show_new_posts_notifs setting. Fixes #1664
  • Fix issue with protocol string in actor id generation #1668
  • Adding shortname fetching for users and communities. Fixes #1662
  • Make captcha case-insensitive.
  • Remove tracking params from post url (fixes #768)
  • Upgrade pictrs. Fixes #1599
  • Invalidate current logins on account deletion. Fixes #1602
  • Fix nsfw posts showing for non-logged in users. Fixes #1614
  • Add additional slurs configuration option. Closes #1464.
  • Updating to rust 1.51.0

Lemmy UI

  • Have setting to disable notifs for new posts. Fixes #132
  • Remove max length constraints on actors. Fixes #350
  • Fix captcha replay bug. Fixes #348
  • Removing community and user routes in favor of shortnames. Fixes #317
  • Add front end helpers 1 (#346)
  • Don't use default subscribed for communities page.
  • Adding Listing type to communities page, default local. #190
  • Fix language bug on mobile browsers.
  • Collapse sidebar on mobile. Fixes #335
  • Re-organized components folder. (#339)
  • Moving comment link to top bar. Fixes #307
  • Make spinner bigger. Fixes #203
  • Fix preview description html. Fixes #110
  • Update darkly, make danger darker. Fixes #16
  • Always show previous paginator, extract paginator component.
  • Use better comment collapse icon, and add text. Fixes #318
  • Fix symbols issue. Fixes #319
  • Don't restore scroll position on page refresh. Fixes #186
  • Insert triple backticks for 'code' button when multiple lines are selected. (#311)
  • Adding a comment here placeholder. Fixes #301
  • Fix non-local community and person links. Fixes #290
  • Fix navbar bug. Fixes #289
  • Hide names of mods / admins without priveleges. Fixes #285
  • Adding URL search type. Fixes #286
  • Add a link to joinlemmy on lemmy.ml signup. Fixes #235
  • Fix duped site description. Fixes #281

API

  • Added show_new_posts_notifs boolean to SaveUserSettings, and LocalUserSettings.
  • A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.11.0 -> 0.11.3 .

Federation

  • No changes in this release, but there will be many soon.

Upgrade notes

To upgrade your instance to 0.11.3, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Lemmy v0.11.0 Release (2021-04-27)

Changes

Since our last release this month, we've had ~60 commits to Lemmy.

Lemmy Server

Major Changes

  • Add option to disable strict allowlist ( #1486) documentation
  • Add option to limit community creation to admins only (#1587)
  • Many search improvements:
    • Don't search for communities or users when the id is included.
    • Add creator id to search.

General

  • Adding a user setting to show / hide scores. Fixes #1503
  • Add option to hide read posts. Fixes #1561
  • Mark accounts as bot, and hide bot posts/comments
  • Adding a short site description, to be used for joinlemmy instance list
  • Adding matrix id validation. Fixes #1520
  • Adding users active monthly for community sort. Fixes #1527
  • Don't allow zero-space char in display name. Fixes #1317
  • Adding more rust captcha features. Fixes #1248
  • Fixing slur filter regex. Fixes #1593

API

  • Added ChangePassword as a separate endpoint from SaveUserSettings
  • No other breaking changes, but many fields that were previously required are now optional.
  • A full list of the API changes can be seen on this diff of lemmy-js-client: 0.10.0 -> 0.11.0 .

Federation

  • Implement federated bans fixes #1298
  • Remote mods can update/delete/undelete communities.

Lemmy UI

  • Updating translations.
  • Add UI version to UI via docker. Fixes #263
  • Add Korean language
  • Add check for unused languages in update_translations.sh
  • Validate matrix id on the front end. Fixes #245
  • Communities page sorts by monthly active users. Fixes #244
  • Correctly render HTML in popup notifications
  • Fix html notif bug. Fixes #254
  • Fixing issue with debounce. Fixes #236

Upgrade notes

Servers

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.10.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Clients / Apps

Lemmy v0.10.3 Release (2021-04-07)

  • Fixing instances page.
  • Fixed unban not working.
  • Fixed post title fetching and cross-post search.
  • Fixed navigating to a user page.

Lemmy v0.10.2 Release (2021-04-05)

  • Forcing a crash if config.hjson fails to load. Should show errors easier.

Lemmy v0.10.0 Release (2021-04-05)

Changes

Since our last release in February, we've had ~150 commits to Lemmy. The biggest changes, as we'll outline below, are a split of Lemmy's user tables into federated and local tables, necessitating a v3 of Lemmy's API, federated moderation, i18n support in join-lemmy.org, and lots of back-end cleanup.

Lemmy Server

General

  • Rewrote config implementation, finally allowing us to use newer Rust versions.
  • Removed categories.
  • Various refactors.

API

Federation

  • It is now possible to add users from other instances as community mods.
  • Federating Matrix ID.
  • Many changes for better compatibility with ActivityPub standard.

Database

  • Split the user_ into person and local_user tables.
  • Strictly typed commonly used ID columns, to prevent DB errors using i32 as ids.
  • Strictly typed URL fields, thanks to ajyoon.
  • Created default DB forms, now used in all the unit tests.

Lemmy UI

  • Now using utf-8 emojis.
  • Support for all the above changes to Lemmy.
  • Typescript-safe i18n strings, thanks to @shilangyu.
  • Added expandable post text (click on open book icon).
  • Prettier cross-posting, which does smart quoting.
  • Bugfixes for restoring scroll position on post page, custom site favicons, and autocomplete for login fields.

Lemmy Docs

join-lemmy.org

  • Rewrote in inferno isomorphic, added i18n support via weblate.
  • Added a section on the support page thanking contributors.
  • Changed some page urls / titles

Upgrade notes

Important: there are multiple breaking changes:

  • Configuration via environment variables is not supported anymore, you must have all your config in the lemmy.hjson file ( except for LEMMY_CONFIG_LOCATION ).
  • The config format for allowed_instances and blocked_instances has changed, and you need to adjust your config file manually:
    • before: allowed_instances: ds9.lemmy.ml,enterprise.lemmy.ml
    • now: allowed_instances: ["ds9.lemmy.ml", "enterprise.lemmy.ml"] , and only one of the allowed_instances or blocked_instances blocks can be set.
  • The API has been upgraded from v2 to v3, so all clients need to be updated: lemmy-js-client: 0.9.9 -> 0.10.0 .

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

To upgrade your instance to v0.10.0, simply follow the instructions in the documentation:

Compilation time

v0.9.0 (Rust 1.47) v0.10.0 (Rust 1.47) v0.10.0 (Rust 1.51)
Clean 140s 146s 119s
Incremental 28s 22s 19s

Despite ongoing efforts to speed up compilation, it has actually gotten slower when comparing with the same Rust version. Only thanks to improvements in newer Rust versions has our build process gotten faster. This could be simply because we added more code, while Lemmy v0.9.0 had 22.4k lines of Rust, v0.10.0 has 23.8k (an increase of 6%).

v0.9.0 build graph:

v0.10.0 build graph:

We extracted the crates lemmy_api_crud and lemmy_apub_receive from lemmy_api and lemmy_apub, respectively, and renamed lemmy_structs to lemmy_api_common. In the second graph you can see how parts of the api and apub crates are now built nicely in parallel, speeding up builds on multi-core systems.

On the other hand, some crates have gotten much slower to compile, in particular lemmy_db_queries (6.5s slower), lemmy_apub (6.5s slower if we include lemmy_apub_receive). And lemmy_db_views is quite slow, just as before.

Lemmy v0.9.9 Release (2021-02-19)

Changes

Lemmy backend

  • Added an federated activity query sorting order.
  • Explicitly marking posts and comments as public.
  • Added a NewComment / forum sort for posts.
  • Fixed an issue with not setting correct published time for fetched posts.
  • Fixed an issue with an open docker port on lemmy-ui.
  • Using lemmy post link for RSS link.
  • Fixed reason and display name lengths to use char counts instead.

Lemmy-ui

  • Updated translations.
  • Made websocket host configurable.
  • Added some accessibility features.
  • Always showing password reset link.

Lemmy v0.9.7 Release (2021-02-08)

Changes

  • Posts and comments are no longer live-sorted (meaning most content should stay in place).
  • Fixed an issue with the create post title field not expanding when copied from iframely suggestion.
  • Fixed broken federated community paging / sorting.
  • Added aria attributes for accessibility, thx to @Mitch Lillie.
  • Updated translations and added croatian.
  • No changes to lemmy back-end.

Lemmy v0.9.6 Release (2021-02-05)

Changes

  • Fixed inbox_urls not being correctly set, which broke federation in v0.9.5. Added some logging to catch these.
  • Fixing community search not using auth.
  • Moved docs to https://join-lemmy.org
  • Fixed an issue w/ lemmy-ui with forms being cleared out.

Lemmy v0.9.4 Pre-Release (2021-02-02)

Changes

Lemmy

  • Fixed a critical bug with votes and comment unlike responses not being 0 for your user.
  • Fixed a critical bug with comment creation not checking if its parent comment is in the post.
  • Serving proper activities for community outbox.
  • Added some active user counts, including users_active_day, users_active_week, users_active_month, users_active_half_year to SiteAggregates and CommunityAggregates. (Also added to lemmy-ui)
  • Made sure banned users can't follow.
  • Added FederatedInstances to SiteResponse, to show allowed and blocked instances. (Also added to lemmy-ui)
  • Added a MostComments sort for posts. (Also added to lemmy-ui)

Lemmy-UI

  • Added a scroll position restore to lemmy-ui.
  • Reworked the combined inbox so incoming comments don't wipe out your current form.
  • Fixed an updated bug on the user page.
  • Fixed cross-post titles and body getting clipped.
  • Fixing the post creation title height.
  • Squashed some other smaller bugs.

Lemmy v0.9.0 Release (2021-01-25)

Changes

Since our last release in October of last year, and we've had ~450 commits.

The biggest changes, as we'll outline below, are a re-work of Lemmy's database structure, a v2 of Lemmy's API, and activitypub compliance fixes. The new re-worked DB is much faster, easier to maintain, and now supports hierarchical rather than flat objects in the new API.

We've also seen the first release of Lemmur, an android / iOS (soon) / windows / linux client, as well as Lemmer, a native iOS client. Much thanks to @krawieck, @shilangyu, and @uuttff8 for making these great clients. If you can, please contribute to their patreon to help fund lemmur development.

LemmyNet projects

Lemmy Server

  • Moved views from SQL to Diesel. This was a spinal replacement for much of lemmy.
    • Removed all the old fast_tables and triggers, and created new aggregates tables.
  • Added a v2 of the API to support the hierarchical objects created from the above changes.
  • Moved continuous integration to drone, now includes formatting, clippy, and cargo build checks, unit testing, and federation testing. Drone also deploys both amd64 and arm64 images to dockerhub.
  • Split out documentation into git submodule.
  • Shortened slur filter to avoid false positives.
  • Added query performance testing and comparisons. Added indexes to make sure every query is < 30 ms.
  • Added compilation time testing.

Federation

This release includes some bug fixes for federation, and some changes to get us closer to compliance with the ActivityPub standard.

None of these are breaking changes, so federation between 0.9.0 and 0.8.11 will work without problems.

Lemmy javascript / typescript client

  • Updated the lemmy-js-client to use the new v2 API. Our API docs now reference this project's files, to show what the http / websocket forms and responses should look like.
  • Drone now handles publishing its npm packages.

Lemmy-UI

  • Updated it to use the v2 API via lemmy-js-client, required changing nearly every component.
  • Added a live comment count.
  • Added drone deploying, and builds for ARM.
  • Fixed community link wrapping.
  • Various other bug fixes.

Lemmy Docs

  • We moved documentation into a separate git repository, and support translation for the docs now!
  • Moved our code of conduct into the documentation.

Upgrading

If you'd like to make a DB backup before upgrading, follow this guide.

Lemmy v0.8.0 Release (2020-10-16)

Changes

We've been working at warp speed since our v0.7.0 release in June, adding over 870 commits since then. 😓

Here are some of the bigger changes:

LemmyNet projects

Lemmy Server

Federation

  • The first federation public beta release, woohoo 🎆
  • All Lemmy functionality now works over ActivityPub (except turning remote users into mods/admins)
  • Instance allowlist and blocklist
  • Documentation for admins and devs on how federation works
  • Upgraded to newest versions of @asonix activitypub libraries
  • Full local federation setup for manual testing
  • Automated testing for nearly every federation action
  • Many additional security checks
  • Lots and lots of refactoring
  • Asynchronous sending of outgoing activities

User Interface

  • Separated the UI from the server code, in lemmy-ui.
  • The UI can now read with javascript disabled!
  • It's now a fully isomorphic application using inferno-isomorphic. This means that page loads are now much faster, as the server does the work.
  • The UI now also supports open-graph and twitter cards! Linking to lemmy posts (from whatever platform you use) looks pretty now:
  • Improved the search page ( more features incoming ).
  • The default view is now Local, instead of All, since all would show all federated posts.
  • User settings are now shared across browsers ( a page refresh will pick up changes ).
  • A much leaner mobile view.

Backend

  • Re-organized the rust codebase into separate workspaces for backend and frontend.
  • Removed materialized views, making the database a lot faster.
  • New post sorts Active (previously called hot), and Hot. Active shows posts with recent comments, hot shows highly ranked posts.
  • New sort for Local ( meaning from local communities).
  • Customizeable site, user, and community icons and banners.
  • Added user preferred names / display names, bios, and cakedays.
  • Visual / Audio captchas through the lemmy API.
  • Lots of API field verifications.
  • Upgraded to pictrs-v2 ( thanks to @asonix )
  • Wayyy too many bugfixes to count.

Contributors

We'd also like to thank both the NLnet foundation for their support in allowing us to work full-time on Lemmy ( as well as their support for other important open-source projects ), those who sponsor us, and those who help translate Lemmy. Every little bit does help. We remain committed to never allowing advertisements, monetizing, or venture-capital in Lemmy; software should be communal, and should benefit humanity, not a small group of company owners.

Upgrading

Testing Federation

Federation is finally ready in Lemmy, pending possible bugs or other issues. So for now we suggest to enable federation only on test servers, or try it on our own test servers ( enterprise, ds9, voyager ).

If everything goes well, after a few weeks we will enable federation on lemmy.ml, at first with a limited number of trusted instances. We will also likely change the domain to https://lemmy.ml . Keep in mind that changing domains after turning on federation will break things.

To enable on your instance, edit your lemmy.hjson federation section to enabled: true, and restart.

Connecting to another server

The server https://ds9.lemmy.ml has open federation, so after either adding it to the allowed_instances list in your config.hjson, or if you have open federation, you don't need to add it explicitly.

To federate / connect with a server, type in !community_name@server.tld, in your server's search box like so.

To connect with the main community on ds9, the search is !main@ds9.lemmy.ml.

You can then click the community, and you will see a local version of the community, which you can subscribe to. New posts and comments from !main@ds9.lemmy.ml will now show up on your front page, or /c/All

Lemmy v0.7.40 Pre-Release (2020-08-05)

We've added a lot in this pre-release:

  • New post sorts Active (previously called hot), and Hot. Active shows posts with recent comments, hot shows highly ranked posts.
  • Customizeable site icon and banner, user icon and banner, and community icon and banner.
  • Added user preferred names / display names, bios, and cakedays.
  • User settings are now shared across browsers (a page refresh will pick up changes).
  • Visual / Audio captchas through the lemmy API.
  • Lots of UI prettiness.
  • Lots of bug fixes.
  • Lots of additional translations.
  • Lots of federation prepping / additions / refactors.

This release removes the need for you to have a pictrs nginx route (the requests are now routed through lemmy directly). Follow the upgrade instructions below to replace your nginx with the new one.

Upgrading

With Ansible:

# run these commands locally
git pull
cd ansible
ansible-playbook lemmy.yml

With manual Docker installation:

# run these commands on your server
cd /lemmy
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/ansible/templates/nginx.conf
# Replace the {{ vars }}
sudo mv nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/lemmy.conf
sudo nginx -s reload
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml
sudo docker-compose up -d

Lemmy v0.7.0 Release (2020-06-23)

This release replaces pictshare with pict-rs, which improves performance and security.

Overall, since our last major release in January (v0.6.0), we have closed over 100 issues!

  • Site-wide list of recent comments
  • Reconnecting websockets
  • Many more themes, including a default light one.
  • Expandable embeds for post links (and thumbnails), from iframely
  • Better icons
  • Emoji autocomplete to post and message bodies, and an Emoji Picker
  • Post body now searchable
  • Community title and description is now searchable
  • Simplified cross-posts
  • Better documentation
  • LOTS more languages
  • Lots of bugs squashed
  • And more ...

Upgrading

Before starting the upgrade, make sure that you have a working backup of your database and image files. See our documentation for backup instructions.

With Ansible:

# deploy with ansible from your local lemmy git repo
git pull
cd ansible
ansible-playbook lemmy.yml
# connect via ssh to run the migration script
ssh your-server
cd /lemmy/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/docker/prod/migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash
chmod +x migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash
sudo ./migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash

With manual Docker installation:

# run these commands on your server
cd /lemmy
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/ansible/templates/nginx.conf
# Replace the {{ vars }}
sudo mv nginx.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/lemmy.conf
sudo nginx -s reload
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/docker/prod/docker-compose.yml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/master/docker/prod/migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash
chmod +x migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash
sudo bash migrate-pictshare-to-pictrs.bash

Note: After upgrading, all users need to reload the page, then logout and login again, so that images are loaded correctly.

Lemmy v0.6.0 Release (2020-01-16)

v0.6.0 is here, and we've closed 41 issues!

This is the biggest release by far:

  • Avatars!
  • Optional Email notifications for username mentions, post and comment replies.
  • Ability to change your password and email address.
  • Can set a custom language.
  • Lemmy-wide settings to disable downvotes, and close registration.
  • A better documentation system, hosted in lemmy itself.
  • Huge DB performance gains (everthing down to < 30ms) by using materialized views.
  • Fixed major issue with similar post URL and title searching.
  • Upgraded to Actix 2.0
  • Faster comment / post voting.
  • Better small screen support.
  • Lots of bug fixes, refactoring of back end code.

Another major announcement is that Lemmy now has another lead developer besides me, @felix@radical.town. Theyve created a better documentation system, implemented RSS feeds, simplified docker and project configs, upgraded actix, working on federation, a whole lot else.

https://lemmy.ml