nutomic

I have finished writing instructions for deploying lemmyBB on a production server, which you can follow at the link above. Right now the project is still in a very early stage, nevertheless main funcionality is already working. This includes browsing communities, posts and comments, writing posts/comments and registration/login. Before developing the project further, I would like to get some feedback from users and admins.

If you are interested, you can follow the instructions to install lemmyBB on your own server. This setup also installs lemmy-ui, in order to access functionality which is not yet available in lemmyBB (particularly moderation).

You can also try out lemmyBB on a test server with this setup, namely lemmybb.lemmy.ml. It runs lemmy-ui at lemmyui.lemmy.ml, which shows the same data in another format, and the same account login works on both domains. Registrations are currently open, but keep in mind that this instance is only meant for testing, until other instances are created.

If you notice any bugs or want to request new features, please open an issue or comment here.

Lemmy is structured in a way that backend (database, api, federation etc) and frontend (html, css, javascript) are completely separate. This makes it possible to create other frontends which can take the place of lemmy-ui. I have long been playing with the thought of having a Lemmy frontend that looks more like a traditional forum. Now I finally found some time to work on this, and get an initial proof of concept working.

To reduce the amount of work, the project uses HTML templates and CSS themes from phpBB, which are open source under GPLv2. This also has the advantage that many preexisting phpBB themes can be used for lemmyBB. It is written in Rust, because it allows for tight integration with the Lemmy API, and is generally a great language for webservers.

For now the funcionality is very basic, but nonetheless its already usable. You can:

• browse the local post listing
• browse comments
• login and logout
• create new posts and comments

To give it a try, run the following commands on your local computer, replacing lemmy.ml with your own instance:

git clone https://github.com/Nutomic/lemmyBB.git
LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=https://lemmy.ml cargo run

If there is any specific feature that you would like to see added, please open an issue. For now there arent any instructions for deploying lemmyBB to a server. If you would like to do that, please open an issue as well.

This post was made from lemmyBB.

Activitypub is decentralized social networking protocol recommended by the W3C. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server to server API for delivering notifications and content. As part of the work on Lemmy, we have implemented some high-level abstractions for handling the server-to-server protocol in Rust. These abstractions are now available as a standalone library.

The main features are:

• Data structures for federation are defined by the user, not the library. This gives you maximal flexibility, and lets you accept only messages which your code can handle. Others are rejected automatically during deserialization.
• ObjectId type, wraps the id url and allows for type safe fetching of objects, both from database and HTTP
• Queue for activity sending, handles HTTP signatures, retry with exponential backoff, all in background workers
• Inbox for receiving activities, verifies HTTP signatures, performs other basic checks and helps with routing
• Generic error type (unfortunately this was necessary)
• various helpers for verification, (de)serialization, context etc

Documentation is currently lacking. If you want to get started with the library, best look at the example.

The code has already been used in production as part of Lemmy for a long time, without any notable problems. However, ergonomics are lacking and need to be improved. There are also many additional features which would be worth implementing. See the project readme for details. Contributions and suggestions are very much welcome!

You can find the project here:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/activitypub-federation-rust

https://crates.io/crates/activitypub-federation

Lemmy.ml has long had some political conflict among the userbase, especially in communities like worldnews. This is because the instance is composed of both leftists (anarchist/communist) and liberals (those who agree with the mainstream political views in western countries). Additionally, the instance admins all belong to the former group.

Recently we made an announcement offering free Lemmy instance hosting for one year, for non-politics instances. We are hereby making a similar offer to host a liberal or mainstream political instance, which can accomodate those who are unhappy with lemmy.ml moderation.

This has many advantages. Instance admins have full power to set the rules, block federated instances (like lemmygrad.ml), or remove unwanted content. An administration team that is closer aligned politically would certainly be an improvement for some of the users here.

So if you are interested to host such an instance, send an email to [email protected] some relevant details about yourself. You will also have to buy a domain. We will only host one such instance, so if multiple people are interested, you should coordinate among yourselves. As in the original offer, the hosting will be limited to one year.

On a side note, we would also like to help with the creation of a general-purpose instance that is less focused on politics than most of the existing instances. This is fully within the terms of the initial "free instance hosting" announcement, so if you are interested, send us an email!

We just released a new patch which fixes an important federation problem. Due to a mistake in the code, activities were only sent out once, even if delivery failed (e.g. because the target instance is down, or a temporary connection issue). Instance admins should definitely upgrade.

This problem is fixed, so that failed deliveries are retried up to 9 times, with exponentionally increasing intervals. The only limitation now is that it will not keep retrying after Lemmy is restarted, but that case should be less common.

PR link