Announcements

There is some Japanese spam that we are being affected with. Some of you might have noticed.

I have set up automated removal for it. Please report if you see a spam post that is 2 minutes old or more.

We are not sure what the point of this spam is but if it is anything like the last time it is probably an outcome of a fight somewhere in the Japanese fediverse. Not sure over what though.

https://toots.matapacos.dog/@hexbear/112750621904076718

We're now on the newest version of lemmy, 0.19.4 . Be sure to open up any bugs / issues on either https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy or https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui .

Much thanks to @[email protected] for helping with this upgrade.

(pic unrelated)

Sorry for the trouble.

In an effort to encourage our users to read theory instead of dabbling in memes, we will be taking down the image service.

Just kidding. This is a part of server maintenance. While we perform this maintenance, the image service will be unavailable. This means that users won't be able to:

• view images previously uploaded to Lemmygrad
• upload images to Lemmygrad

Also, we cannot give a precise timeline for how long this will take because of some unknown variables. I am guessing it can take anywhere between 1 to 4 hours but it's just a guess. We will probably take the image service down in half an hour.

Don't like doing this because the site looks effectively broken but don't have much choice here. So sorry about this. :)

But DO NOT PANIC. We will be reunited with our memes soon enough.

Follow-up for: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4630949

I had given two separate deadlines for community purging based on whether the community was created in 2024 or not. But I ended up purging all the unclaimed communities today anyway because I don't think the owners are going to respond. Sorry about that but it makes my work a bit easier. Also I like big purges and I can't lie.

The following communities have been purged and the corresponding moderators notified via a DM:

We will work on removing more inactive communities soon.

Context

At Lemmygrad, we love doing purges.

This post regarding "controlling the creation of minuscule communities and cleaning up abandoned ones" garnered a lot of agreement so it's time we began cleaning up dead communities. The communities page should be more useful after this.

What we would like to do is clean up such communities in phases, loosening the criteria as we proceed with each phase. We will run each phase through the community to gather feedback before pulling the trigger.

In doing so, we hope to experiment and determine what a good criteria is for finding community candidates for removal. Once we have settled on a reasonable criteria, we can do this periodically. Maybe every six months. We can thus allow community creation freely when clean up at intervals to control the mess.

This is the first phase of this process.

Phase 1

For this, we want to catch the communities that have been dead since arrival. The exact criteria is:

• Communities that are at least one month old
• Communities that have not seen any post or comment for their entire existence

This criteria is pretty strict in the sense that it will only catch communities that we won't mind being gone (I think).

There are 36 communities that match this criteria. They are listed in tabular format at the end of the post hidden under the spoiler tag. The removal process is going to proceed as follows:

• Communities created in 2023 and earlier will be removed after two days at 2024-05-26 06:30:00 UTC.
• Communities created in 2024 will be removed after a week at 2024-05-31 06:30:00 UTC.
• If you would like any of the listed communities to not be deleted for some reason, you can comment here or message the admins. Maybe you want to adopt the community or whatever.

Communities Selected for Removal

Lemmygrad is happy to welcome you while hexbear is down.

Please remember, however, that we work a bit differently from hexbear. Downvotes are enabled on our instance, and that's probably the biggest thing you'll notice.

Likewise, our rules differ a bit: we are a bit more serious than hexbear and less shitposty, especially outside the dedicated communities (such as memes, genzedong, shitXsay).

Finally, and this is probably the biggest difference, we don't have the same rules about left unity and its discourse - lemmygrad is not 100% ML but leans that way heavily.

We also don't have a rule about disengaging because we promote good faith and responsibility, but of course if someone is being a dick or harassing you you should report them.

In terms of federation we're federated with about the same instances you are, and in terms of emoji we have very few compared to you.

Otherwise I hope you enjoy your time on lemmygrad while Hexbear gets fixed.

I'm sure many of you have noticed the spam wave hitting [email protected]. You may have also seen similar posts getting spammed in [email protected] and [email protected].

I was recently shared a link to this post by someone who learned more about what was going on. It turns out it's a false flag by a cybercriminal group trying to make it look like the person who DDoSed a very lucrative discord bot they run is spamming various fediverse communities. Oddly enough, both the cybercriminal group and the person being implicated in the false flag are all children.

Release notes are here

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/8090844

Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.

@Neshura87 submitted the first ever RFC for Lemmy! It describes how post tags can be implemented.

0.19.0 is getting closer and closer to release, but we are still busy squashing bugs and getting lemmy-ui ready. For now there is another release candidate deployed on voyager.lemmy.ml for testing. Here is the full list of changes since the last release candidate for Lemmy and [lemmy-ui](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/compare/0.19.0-rc.4...0.19.0-rc.5

@nutomic fixed a bug with following local communities in the release candidate. He added a first integration test for image uploads.

@dessalines has been busy updating lemmy-ui to account for Lemmy API changes, and squashing various bugs like an issue with timezone db migrations, adding a creator_is_admin field to Post and Comment views.

@SleeplessOne1917 has implemented support for settings import/export in lemmy-ui, as well as some bug fixes.

Support development

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

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/7291022

Some months have passed on since the Reddit blackout this June. It led to an explosive growth in Lemmy users, and lots of urgent work in scaling, bug fixes, user onboarding and more. Since then things have calmed down significantly, giving us breathing room and time to get more long-term work done.

As of Nov. 2023, Lemmy is at ~36k active daily users 🥳 (those who have posted or commented within the last month). While user counts are not an explicit goal of ours, this is still a tremendous achievement, and one which we can all be proud to be a part of. It shows that people truly do want alternatives to US tech companies, and will use them if they exist.

Join-Lemmy Redesign

Most recently we've been working on a redesign of join-lemmy.org to provide a better onboarding experience and cater towards new users. This includes:

• A helpful new instance picker to reduce choice overload.
• The instances page is now filterable, based a set of topics and languages, as well as sortable based on activity. The default sort is Random, to encourage people to join smaller servers.
• The apps page now has sections for Android, iOS, and web apps, as well as libraries. Feel free to do a pull request to add any apps that are missing.
• The donate page now shows the total amount of monthly donations across all platforms. More details below.
• The technology used is Typescript with tailwind and daisyUI CSS frameworks.

For server admins: If your instance isn't listed already, you must explicitly add your server topics and languages by doing a pull request to this file.

As you may have noticed, texts on the website are unchanged, and images on the main page are still generic placeholders. We are hoping for your contributions to improve them. For the texts, edit this file. Translations are managed via weblate. Images are located in this folder. If you are good with AI tools, consider replacing main_federation.webp and similar with more colorful images. More main_screen_x.webp images with custom themes or alternative frontends would be nice too. In general feel free to open issues or pull requests for improvements to the site.

Funding Drive

Before the Reddit migration, our income was almost exclusively made up of generous donations from the NLnet foundation. This funding was based on getting paid for implementing new features, specified in advance.

We've known that this funding could not last indefinitely, and that after several years of funding, NLnet's resources are better spent getting other projects up and running. Additionally, much of our time is spent on other equally important work: reviewing changes from community contributors, fixing bugs, doing support, and various organizational tasks.

That is why we are launching our first annual funding drive. The goal is to increase monthly, recurring donations from currently €4.000 to at least €12.000. With this amount @dessalines and @nutomic can each receive a yearly salary of €50.000 which is in line with median developer salaries. It will also allow one additional developer to work fulltime on Lemmy and speed up development.

Recurring donations from Lemmy users are the most sustainable solution for the future. It also means that we need to worry less about funding, and can focus more on improving Lemmy. And instead of being accountable to an external organization, we work directly for Lemmy's users. While one-time donations are also welcome, they are too unpredictable for long-term planning.

You can find available donation options on the donate page. This page was also updated during the redesign to display current donations and funding goals. If each active Lemmy user donated ~€0.33 per month it would be enough for 3 full-time developers. So please consider donating if you use Lemmy every day. Our preferred donation platform is Liberapay because it doesn't have any payment fees or delays, and is itself open source.

Besides Lemmy's developers, please consider donating to those who develop open-source apps or software for the Lemmy ecosystem, as well as server admins and moderation teams who are the backbone of the Lemmyverse. We would be happy to add donation links for the above to join-lemmy.org as well!

If you have any suggestions in regards to the topics mentioned in this post, please let us know. We also want to use this opportunity to thank the countless contributors who are working on Lemmy now.

With the recent departure of an admin from the team (though they are still active on Lemmygrad, just didn't have time to also admin) and my own upcoming lack of time to commit, we collectively decided to add new admins to the team.

GrainEater is the first one to join, and DankZedong confirmed their willingness to join shortly after.

Both were picked due to their generally good quality contributions and activity on Lemmygrad, as well as their history, both having been on Lemmygrad for some time.

https://mundoglobal.blog/2023/10/14/geopolitica-4-israel-palestina-un-problema-creado-por-europa/

As always when interest pops up in Lemmygrad and an exodus happens, we become slightly more lenient with account requests. This doesn't mean we let in centrists or all curious onlookers, but people who are reasonably left and pass vetting are allowed in. This has always been our policy.

This is because we prone an open policy and are always happy to help educate. If people want to hear the anti-imperialist camp's opinions, then we should be proud that they come to us for such views.

For this reason, if you're a long-time Lemmygrad user, you may see people who don't necessarily act like you would expect us to act, coming from our community. They are likely coming from this exodus and I ask that each of us be patient with them as necessary.

If you are considering requesting an account on Lemmygrad however, please note this first:

• We ask that you answer all vetting questions. No exceptions will be made. It's fine if you're not necessarily a marxist but detail your political leanings in the first question.
• You may have a better experience making an account on another instance such as lemmy.ml that federates with us, then using federation.
• You may not need an account if all you want to do is browse, you can also freely lurk.

Fuck you reddit 2.0, took you long enough. Thanks though, we'll stop seeing your crap posters pollute our comment section from now on.

90% of people we ban come from world. Very funny that they said they saw a rise of hate speech from our instance though considering the worlders we ban are fucking genocidal maniacs and fascists. You can check the modlog (it's unfortunately federated), we are one of the tamest instances when it comes to banning people and deleting comments/posts.

For any worlder that was based and liked interacting with lemmygrad (you will notice we did not ban good faith participants), I recommend you make an account on a third-party instance that federates with us, like ml or ee until they also defederate from us because we have principles 🙃

Fuck israel, Palestine will be free a month from now mark my words 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

On top of that, for the worlders finally breathing free again now that the scary tankies are away, you think the USSR wasn't communist or whatever. You base that on whatever you've been taught in school. We've read things. We've actually gone beyond whatever our high school teachers said and looked into the USSR for ourselves. If you're not cowards you will debate us about communism and "totalitarian" regimes, we'll wipe the floor with you. Bet you don't even know where the world totalitarian comes from or who coined it without looking it up.

And we retain our perfect track record of not blocking real instances while you further isolate yourselves from anything that might cause you some amount of discomfort. Really good democracy you got going there where wannabe tech bros instance admins decide for you what you're allowed to see, must be those liberal values I hear so much about.

We get reports, and that's great. But sometimes we also get reports for people who have already been banned, it's just that their comments weren't removed.

You can differentiate someone who was banned by the lack of a profile picture next to their name. All users since a few lemmy versions have a default pfp of the Lemmy mascot. If there's no pfp there, it means they were banned on the instance you're looking at the comment from.

We’re finally federating! 🎉

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2671212

Boosting the dev AMA.

This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they'd like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Following the news that Lemmy world has decided to defederate from hexbear without consulting their community and before hexbear even federated with anyone, I'd like to make this announcement to settle things once and for all about us "scary tankies" who apparently don't tolerate free expression or whatever.

Lemmygrad has been around since the very beginning of Lemmy as a project, we are one of the oldest instance with lemmy.ml.

In that time, we have never defederated from anyone except in three cases:

• troll instances (usually inactive and unmoderated, with free account requests, that trolls used back in the day to bypass their bans). We usually refederate if they start being moderated again.
• outright fascist instances such as exploding heads or powerballs or whatever before the admin deleted it (which you're welcome, it's because there's communists on Lemmy that there's so few fascists)
• and, the fringe case, the couple specifically NSFW instances that we instantly defederated from because we don't want to host porn on our database and our rule 5 prohibits porn anywhere on Lemmygrad.

Otherwise, we have no reason to defederate from anyone. Holier-than-thou liberals can be difficult and irritating, I'm not denying that or implying we're somehow above it all, but to defederate would imply we are scared of what they have to say. We're not, because what they have to say is stuff we've all seen for ourselves and used to believe too.

You can see our blocklist here for yourself: https://lemmygrad.ml/instances, we only block around 40 instances, which might seem like a lot, but then compare to lemmy world which blocks 141 instances, or beehaw which blocks 765 instances.

Nobody is born a communist. Nobody is born a liberal either, but we become one through the self-reproduction of culture. From our earliest age we're exposed to liberalism (the ideology of capitalism) to the point that we integrate it. Did you have a model UN in school and vote for class presidents?

So really we can't be scared of anti-communist arguments because we've heard them all before. It's especially weird when people say we "buy into old propaganda" around Stalin or whatever, when anywhere you look, Soviet historiography in academia amounts to little more than "Stalin was paranoid and acted like the Tsar but called himself a communist". Like we went to public school too lol, we had a unit on the USSR lol.

Anyway, all defederations that happened on Lemmygrad come from other instances themselves, most of them pre-emptively defederating us before they even saw a single post from us. If beehaw, or shitjustworks, or lemmy dot whatever wanted to refederate, they could do it instantly and we'd be federated again.

And on that topic, let's talk about bans. We don't ban people who ask questions in good faith. But we will instantly ban anyone who comes to Lemmygrad solely to troll, as all online forums have done since time immemorial.

Likewise on blocklist issues, we poll our community very often for their input and allow them to propose changes. You can look at our [email protected] to see some things we've included the community on. We try to practice democratic centralism where applicable.

It goes even further; we allow communities and posts that some both on Lemmygrad or outside might disagree with, on the principle that we see ourselves as a more generalistic ML instance. We allow users to have their own community and moderate it however they want (respecting sitewide rules), and generally the removal of a community goes through an admin chat and might even go to a community feedback session. We have meme communities, we have religious communities, we have shitposting communities, and we also have serious discussion communities. And a plethora of personal communities for users who want to post in their own space like a blog.

We also have exactly 6 rules and no lengthy code of conduct or other documents one needs to read to participate here. This is helped by the fact that as we're all communists and more specifically mainly marxist-leninists, most of us already behave the expected way around comrades and don't need to be told how to conduct themselves.

So let me ask this; who is really censoring who here?

For those that don't know, Hexbear has been back on lemmy for a few months now and can therefore federate with all of Lemmy again.

For those who don't know Hexbear, they're an instance based around left unity and more shitposty than us but you know, I still like to browse there because they're very, very active and funny.

Hexbear will federate by the end of the month with Lemmygrad, which means you'll be able to visit and interact with them from the "All" tab, and they can do likewise.

We expect that federation will be going smoothly and our two cultures won't clash too much, but we also expect some friction at least in the beginning.

As a reminder, we apply Lemmygrad rules on Lemmygrad, and Hexbear will, I imagine, apply their rules on their instance. Likewise we won't be moderating stuff that happens on Hexbear if it only concerns Hexbear. If it involves a Lemmygradian we might moderate (see PS below for more info on how that works).

For Hexbearians that visit Lemmygrad (I assume they'll make the same post on their end so I won't explain how Hexbear works), we're principally Marxist-Leninist but allow non-marxists piecemeal as long as liberalism doesn't come out of their mouths. It's all by the principle of good faith; we do talk to people if they come here in good faith, which I have no doubt will be the case from Hexbear.

With that said we'll also be more lenient towards Hexbear since with them, we form essentially the only left presence on Lemmy and we like them very much. We also urge everyone to be lenient with Hexbearians even if they're not marxists.

Anyway, while Hexbear is more left unity, in all my time browsing there I've never really had to ask "is this person a marxist?" so their system seems to work well. However, I also expect that since their registrations are open, we might see wreckers and infiltrators make hexbear accounts to troll Lemmygrad. Likewise on their end, it's possible someone requests an account on Lemmygrad to try and troll them. In which case we'll deal with the offender on an individual basis.

If you have any questions about federation with Hexbear ask them below.

PS: the way comment/post reports work is that if you report a comment on Hexbear with your Lemmygrad account, we'll see it. So please only report stuff you see on Hexbear if it's something we should actually take a look at, or it's something that breaks Hexbear's rules cause your reports help them too.

Image upload (and also download) were not working for the last few hours. This has been a recurring problem but I think I have finally found the real cause so it should not happen again. Sorry for the inconvenience.