lwadmin

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/post/237378

Hello World!

We've recently added PieFed.World to the Fedihosting Foundation portfolio.

PieFed.World is still in its early stages, and we still need to port some of our automations we already have in place on Lemmy.World. This includes functionality to inform people about moderation actions taken against them, as well as some other moderation tooling. Administration is currently done by the same team responsible for Lemmy.World, and the same rules that apply to Lemmy.World also apply to PieFed.World.

What is PieFed?

PieFed is a Fediverse/Threadiverse platform similar to Lemmy or Mbin/kbin. You can find a description and feature comparison with Lemmy on their website.

While PieFed has a range of features currently not present in Lemmy, it also is a a lot younger and isn't quite as robust as Lemmy currently is. There are still many bugs and missing features that you will likely run across compared to Lemmy, which will take time to be addressed. PieFed has fairly active development and is seeing a lot of issues addressed fairly quickly, which is especially important recently, as the number of active PieFed instances and PieFed users increased significantly with a range of Lemmy instances opening up PieFed instances as well. PieFed currently does not have proper "stable" releases and no test suite, so it's not unlikely for things to break from time to time. Although 1.0.0 has already been released a while back, there are still too many issues addressed in more recent commits to stay on that version.

As PieFed is part of the same federated network as Lemmy and Mbin, all PieFed communities can be accessed from Lemmy and Mbin, as well as other Fediverse platforms. Likewise, PieFed can access communities from Lemmy, Mbin and other Fediverse platforms. Whether you use a PieFed instance, a Lemmy instance, or an Mbin instance, it does not matter what type of instance the community is on. The software affects your own user experience, but the content is available regardless.

Creation of communities

Creation of communities will be limited to admins for the first week of the public launch. We will reserve this time to allow community moderators of established communities to claim the name on PieFed.World before we open community creation to the public. We will limit this to communities with the same name and at least 2k monthly active users. In case of multiple qualifying communities with the same name on different instances expressing interest, Lemmy.World communities will be given preference, afterwards the number of monthly active users. Please reach out if you'd like to discuss an exception. Requests can be posted in [email protected]. After the first week, community creation will be available to anyone.

Migration of communities

PieFed has a feature to migrate communities to a local instance. We will not be offering PieFed's community migration feature initially.

We still need to research the details of how this works and the impacts this has on federation before we will make a decision on whether will support this in the future. If requested, we may reserve some names for potential future community migrations until we have made a decision to allow community migrations.

This does not prevent you from moving communities in the classic way, by opening up a new community and posting in the old community that people should move over.

Private voting

We had previously disabled private voting for PieFed.World before opening the instance to the public, as the original implementation has a range of drawbacks when it comes to federation, and our team overwhelmingly believed that the individual benefits of private voting did not outweigh the impact this has on the Fediverse beyond the user's instance. Additionally, due to the implementation of that feature, it was also trivial to identify the original voter, which significantly limited the promises of this bringing actual voting privacy.

Since then, the implementation of private voting has been changed to provide the option of federating or not federating votes. While this is more likely to result in vote differences across instances, it does not feed bad information to other instances, which could make it a lot harder for other instances to identify manipulation.

Non-federated voting is available for all PieFed.World users.

Topics

Topics are a kind of "starter packs" or collections grouping multiple communities that people can follow, curated by the admin team. We don't have a clear vision for the structure of these yet.

You can see an example structure on piefed.social.

Feel free to let us know your thoughts on this.

Feeds

PieFed supports feeds, which are user-created groups of communities, similar to topics. These are currently in a global namespace and all users can create public feeds in the same shared namespace.

Reputation and vote weight

PieFed has options for admins to treat certain types of content differently for "reputation" calculation, as well as options for weighing votes of specific instances differently compared to others. We currently have all options for treating certain content, communities or instances differently disabled.

How does PieFed compare to Lemmy?

PieFed has various features not present in Lemmy, check out their website!

There is also various functionality that Lemmy has, which you may be missing currently with PieFed for now:

Limited API support

In Lemmy, the default web interface relies entirely on the Lemmy API. This has the major benefit of all functionality available in the default web interface also being available to all third party clients. PieFed currently uses separate code paths and implementations for the default web interface and its API. To make it possible to access functionality in third party apps, dedicated API endpoints have to be created, even if this functionality is already available in the default web interface. This also includes alternative web-based UIs.

Multiple developers of alternative UIs and mobile clients are already working on PieFed support, some already released experimental versions.

Limited availability of Markdown previews

Markdown previews are currently only available in posts. There are many other places that accept markdown, but you can't preview the rendered comment before submitting it. This is tracked in #532.

Image uploads only on post creation

Images can't be uploaded to comments currently. You'll have to host them externally for now. This is tracked in #768.

Autocompletion of users/communities

Usernames and communities can't be autocompleted when typing their names currently. This is tracked in #799.

Limited availability of modlog

Modlog is currently very limited. While there is an instance modlog, there are currently no filters available, so it's not possible for users to see actions taken against a specific user or within a specific community. Community modlog exists, but it is currently only available to community moderators and admins. Filtering modlog is tracked in #846.

Moderator hierarchy

Lemmy has a moderator hierarchy based on the time a moderator was appointed, relative to other moderators in the community. This allows moderators to add other moderators, but they can only remove moderators that were added later than they were. There are a few other actions that check moderator hierarchy as well, including deletion only being possible by the top mod. In PieFed, communities have one or more owners, who can add and remove moderators, while all other moderators are currently on equal level. Community owners currently cannot be changed without editing this directly in the database, if you'd like to change owners in your community please reach out in [email protected].

Donations

Similar to Lemmy, PieFed development is supported by donations. You can donate to PieFed development through Patreon.

Additionally, we would appreciate donations towards the Fedihosting Foundation, the non-profit organization operating PieFed.World, Lemmy.World, and a range of other Fediverse platforms.

Problems and questions

Please report any issues and questions about PieFed.World in [email protected].

For topics about the software PieFed, please visit [email protected].

Bugs can be reported on Codeberg.

TLDR: New platform with similar functionality available, Lemmy.World will continue to exist.

edit: reordered sections and minor wording changes

edit 2: updated community owner information

Hello World,

we will be performing an update to Lemmy 0.19.12 in just over an hour.

We are planning for around 15 minutes of downtime today at 20:00-20:15 UTC.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-06-17T20%3A00%3A00.000Z

Most of the changes for 0.19.12 were already backported by us when we deployed 0.19.11.

This update will bring us the remaining changes listed in the release notes.

We were mostly just missing some technical changes:

• building with Rust 1.81 instead of 1.80
• updating various dependencies
• a small logic change to count local users more accurately for statistics
• database index additions, which should improve performance of some less frequently used queries

There is one more notable change: Lemmy now ships with the RBlind theme

Update 20:35 UTC: The update has been completed successfully and services were back up at 20:20 UTC, 5 minutes later than planned due to a stuck DB query blocking migrations.

Update: we've finally been in contact with Jonah and the material we originally flagged has been taken down. The link ban has been lifted.

We will be posting another announcement soon to provide more information and our future plans relating to federation.

Hello world,

following our previous decision to defederate lemmy.one due to their lack of responsiveness to abuse reports about CSAM hosted on their instance we have decided to also defederate from all other platforms operated by the same entity.

Lemmy.one is operated by Fediverse Communications LLC, which is ran by Jonah Aragon. Fediverse Communications LLC operates various Fediverse instances listed here:

• mstdn.party
• mstdn.plus
• lemmy.one
• mastodon.neat.computer
• pxlfd.plus

Jonah is also the project director of privacyguides.org and discuss.privacyguides.net is the community platform belonging to privacyguides.org.

Additionally, Jonah is also the director of Triplebit, the ISP used to host Fediverse Communications LLC infrastructure and also Privacy Guides infrastructure.

Our abuse reports to both Fediverse Communications LLC and Triplebit about CSAM hosted on lemmy.one have gone nowhere and this material is still up, almost 3 months since the original report. This has since also been reported to NCMEC (via Cloudflare) and other US law enforcement directly by us, but so far this hasn't resulted in anything being taken down.

Although we do not believe that it is likely to find CSAM on privacyguides.org or privacyguides.net, going forward we will remove all posts and comments referencing privacyguides.org, privacyguides.net, or any of the domains of services operated by Fediverse Communications LLC. We will not ban any user for mentioning or linking them, only remove these posts and comments.

Privacy Guides has come to our attention as they are just now testing federation of their discourse forum, which is also coincidentally posted by Jonah.

We will be lifting this link ban once the offending material has been taken down, but we will not consider refederation with any instance that is operated by Fediverse Communications LLC until they can somehow convince us that they'll be taking responsibility for their infrastructure in the future.

If the Privacy Guides team is willing and able to cut ties with Jonah we will also be more than happy to remove the ban of their domains and also refederate with their discourse forum even without the original issue with lemmy.one being addressed. Federation between discourse and Lemmy appears to currently still be quite limited or not be working at all, so for the time being the federation aspect may not have much relevance here.

It's unfortunate that things had to this far; we generally try addressing issues like this in a friendly manner and reporting it privately to affected instances, as most people are more than willing to take down CSAM hosted on their infrastructure. In this case however, Jonah appears to be operating way beyond what he is able to manage. Being not only an instance operator but also an ISP puts a lot of responsibility in your hands, and at the very least you should respond to abuse reports. We have exhausted non-law-enforcement escalation steps a while back already; we went to their ISP, which they are conveniently themselves. We don't know the actual server IP hosting this content, as it's behind Cloudflare, so only law enforcement would be able to obtain this information.

Hello world,

as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won't start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.

All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We're currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it's certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.

We're looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.

You can find the original announcement by @[email protected] below:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

edit, as this was frequently brought up:

Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?

It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.

lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.

[source]

For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it's not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.

Hello world,

we will be performing an update to Lemmy 0.19.11 in an hour.

We are planning for around 15 minutes of downtime today at 21:30-21:45 UTC.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-05-03T21%3A30%3A00.000Z

As mentioned in our April update, we had already backported most of the Lemmy-UI changes for 0.19.11, but we were still missing most of the backend changes.

This update will bring us the remaining changes listed in the release notes, as well as some additional changes not yet released:

• user registrations are now processed in a DB transaction, which prevents some errors we've occasionally seen in the past where registrations rarely resulted in an inconsistent user creation state (#5480)
• new posts in NSFW communities are now always marked NSFW (#5310)
• another round of peertube federation fixes (#5652)
• fixed email notifications for denied applications (#5641)
  this was already supposed to be part of 0.19.11 but it did not work there. we are migrating our previous external email notification implementation to let Lemmy handle sending emails now.
• various fixes for opentelemetry that are not present in upstream Lemmy
  As Lemmy opentelemetry has been removed from Lemmy 1.0 this is not code that we are currently planning to upstream to the 0.19 branch, but we intend to keep using this going forward.

If you are an instance admin considering enabling opentelemetry in Lemmy 0.19, don't do that unless you also apply a similar set of patches to bring the related libraries to newer versions, as your instance will otherwise lock up after some requests.

Update 21:50 UTC: The update has been completed successfully and within the planned amount of time.

Hello,

as this is a fairly active community we just wanted to let you know that this community is no longer federating with Lemmy.World due to defederation from lemmy.one for lack of moderation.

Our announcement can be found here: https://lemmy.world/post/28173093

We recommend migrating to a community on an instance that is maintained better.

Hello world,

we've had various smaller updates lately that didn't all warrant their own update posts and we don't want to post too many announcements around the same time, so we collected them for a single larger post.

New alternative Lemmy frontend: Tesseract

We have recently added a new alternative Lemmy frontend to our collection: Tesseract.

Tesseract was forked from Photon a while back and includes a variety of additional customization options and moderation utilities.

It is available at https://t.lemmy.world/.

Lemmy-UI update to 0.19.11-ish

We have deployed a custom build of Lemmy-UI, the default Lemmy web interface, which includes most of the features included in the official 0.19.11 release.

While we haven't updated our backend to a newer version yet, as we still have to find a solution for dealing with the newly integrated functionality to send emails on rejected registration applications, all the frontend features that don't require a backend update have been included. The only part that is currently missing is Lemmy's new donation dialog, as this requires a backend upgrade as well.

You can find the list of changes in the frontend section in the announcement for the 0.19.11 release.

Defederation from lemmy.one and r.nf

A Lemmy.World user informed us about an instance we are federated with that was hosting very illegal content a while back. This was a result of an attack more than a year ago, and said content federated to many other instances, which made local copies of the material. Unfortunately, when this material was taken down at the source, that action did not federate to all linked instances, meaning that there are still some instances showing this material.

Once we were made aware of this, we realized that this was likely not the only occurrence, so we started looking for other instances where this content may also still exist. We have identified more than 50 affected instances and already reached out to many of them to inform them about this content to have it taken down.

Among these instances, r.nf and lemmy.one were some of the first instances that were informed, but even after 2 months since the initial report there has been zero reaction from either instance. Both of these instances don't appear to be moderated, as evident also by posts asking whether the instance is still maintaned on lemmy.one and 2 month old spam in r.nf's main community.

The community that gets hit the hardest by this is [email protected], which is the only larger community across these instances. We recommend looking for alternative communities on other instances.

Due to the lack of action and response we have since also reported this directly to their hosting providers through Cloudflare, which includes an automatic report to NCMEC.

Even when this material will get taken down now, we don't currently believe that the instance operators are willing or able to moderate these instances properly, so we will keep them defederated unless they can convince us that they are going to moderate their instances more actively and ensure that they provide usable abuse contacts that don't require going through their hosting provider.

We also defederate from other instances from time to time due to lack of moderation and unreachable admins among other reasons. If you're interested in the reasons for our defederations, we aim to always document them on Fediseer. Be warned though, as this list contains a mentions or references to various disturbing or illegal material.

Most of those instances are either very small, don't interact with Lemmy much anyway, or are explicitly stating support of content that is incompatible with our policies.

We also usually try to reach out to affected instances prior to defederation if we believe that they may not intentionally be supporting the problematic content.

We have temporarily re-federated to lemmy.one to allow this post and https://lemmy.world/post/28173100 to federate to them. We're waiting for federation to catch up with the activities since we defederated a day ago originally before we defederate again.

Reliability of media uploads

We have recently been receiving some reports of media uploads not working from time to time. We have already addressed one of the underlying issues and are working on addressing another one currently. Please continue to let us know about issues like that to ensure that they're on our radar.

We're currently also working on improving our overall application monitoring to collect more useful information that helps us track down specific issues, improve visibility for errors, as well as hopefully allowing us to identify potential performance issues.

Parallel federation

Back in Lemmy 0.19.6, Lemmy introduced the option to send federated activities in parallel. Without this, Lemmy would only ever have one activity in the process of being transmitted to another instance. While most instances don't have a large number of activities going out, we're at the point where instances far away from us are not able to keep up with our traffic anymore due to physics limitations when waiting for data from the other side of the world.

Some instances mitigated this by setting up an external federation queue near our instance that would batch activities together to work around these limitations while this was not implemented in Lemmy and deployed on our end. Unfortunately this also meant having to maintain an additional server, which means time investment, a few bucks every month to pay, as well as another potential component that could break.

We have enabled 2 parallel sends around a week ago and aussie.zone, who were pretty much constantly lagging behind multiple days have finally caught up with us again. We will continue to monitor this and if needed increase the number of parallel sends further in the future, but so far it looks like we should be fine with 2 for a good while.

edit: added section about parallel federation

Hello world,

as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.

It is very likely that these images are part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.

Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they're only trying to frame them.

Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting "Nicole" and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.

We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.

While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.

Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.

If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we'll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.

Hello,

we will be updating pict-rs to the latest version in about 2 hours.

We expect a short downtime of 1-2 minutes during the planned migration window, as there are no major database changes involved.

Most users won't be affected by this, as the majority of our media is cached and served by Cloudflare. This should primarily only affect thumbnail generation and uploads of new media while the service is down.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-03-28T22%3A00%3A00.000Z

The update has been completed successfully.

Hello,

as some of you may have noticed we just had about 25 minutes of downtime due to the update to Lemmy 0.19.10.

Lemmy release notes: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2025-03-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.10_and_Developer_AMA

This won't fix YouTube thumbnails for us, as YouTube banned all IPs belonging to our hosting provider.

We were intending to apply this update without downtime, as we're looking to apply the database migration that allows marking PMs as removed due to the recent spam waves.

Although this update contains database migrations, we expected to still be able to apply the migration in the background before updating the running software, as the database schema between the versions was backwards compatible. Unfortunately, once we started the migrations, we started seeing the site go down.

In the first minutes we assumed that the migrations contained in this upgrade were somehow unexpectedly blocking more than intended but still processing, but it turned out that nothing was actually happening on the database side. Our database deadlocked due to what appears to be an orphaned transaction, which didn't die even after we killed all Lemmy containers other than the one running the migrations.

While the orphaned transaction was pending, a pending schema migration was waiting for the previous transaction to complete or be rolled back, so nothing was moving anymore. As the previous transaction also didn't move anymore everything started to die. We're not entirely sure why the original transaction broke down, as it was started about 30 seconds before the schema migration query, which seems like that shouldn't have been broken by that happening at the same time.

Lemmy has a "replaceable" schema, which is applied separately from the regular database schema migrations, which runs every time a DB migration occurs. We unfortunately did not consider this replaceable schema migration in our planning, as we would otherwise have realized that this would likely have larger impact on the overall migration.

After we identified that the database had deadlocked, we resorted to restarting our postgres container, then run the migration again. Once we restarted the database, everything was back online in less than 30 seconds, which includes first running the remaining migrations and then starting up all containers again.

When we tested this process on our test instance prior to deploying this to the Lemmy.World production environment we did not run into this issue. Everything was working fine with the backend services running on Lemmy 0.19.9 and the database being upgraded to Lemmy 0.19.10 schema already, but the major difference here is the lack of user activity during the time of the migration.

Our learning from this is to always plan for downtime for Lemmy updates if any database migrations are included, as it does not appear to be possible to "safely" apply them even if they seem small enough to be theoretically doable without downtime.

Hello,

we will be performing the long awaited update to Lemmy 0.19.9 tomorrow.

We are planning for around 1 hour of downtime between 16:00-17:00 UTC on 16th of March.

You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-03-16T16%3A00%3A00.000Z

You can find an overview of the changes in our previous announcement here and in the Lemmy release notes:

• Lemmy v0.19.4 Release
• Lemmy v0.19.5 Release
• Lemmy v0.19.6 Release
• Lemmy v0.19.7 Release
• Lemmy v0.19.8 Release
• Lemmy v0.19.9 Release

Update 16:50 UTC:

The upgrade was successfully completed at around 16:27 UTC, but we're still fighting with some performance issues after the upgrade. Our database and the outbound federation container are currently using significantly higher CPU than expected, which is still being investigated to identify the root cause.

Hello,

while preparation our upcoming Lemmy update we're also be updating to a newer database version, which will provide additional performance benefits and functionality.

We are planning for around 10 minutes of downtime for the database update between 19:00-19:30 UTC on 22nd of February. This is not yet the planned Lemmy update, we will be announcing that separately when we are ready.

edit: You can convert this to your local time here: https://inmytime.zone/?iso=2025-02-22T19%3A00%3A00.000Z

edit 2: The database upgrade has been completed successfully.