The charts above show growth of active users on thelemmy.club (left) and lemmus.org which are suggested on join-lemmy.org. It shows that improvements to the official project site really have a (small) influence on user growth. There are also a few new features:

• Country-specific instance suggestions with API endpoint
• NSFW selection for instance list

This past month we’ve been working on lemmy-ui bug fixes and visual improvements, and a few remaining lemmy back end issues to get ready for the 1.0 release. We’ve closed over 20 lemmy-ui milestone issues, and have only a few remaining. The only major issue left is performance-testing, to ensure all our database changes and optimizations are working correctly.

You can follow our progress with these milestone links:

• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/milestone/24
• https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/milestone/5

If you’d like to see the new features and visual updates in production, you can visit voyager.lemmy.ml which deploys updates every night. Please help by testing the new features and reporting any problems.

If you have any experience with web development or want to learn it, consider contributing to lemmy-ui. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap.

If you have experience with Kotlin or Android development, you can help contribute to lemmy’s open source android app, Jerboa.

Thank you to everyone who has helped out with testing, development, spreading the word about lemmy, and building communities. Your help has brought lemmy from an idea to one of the most vital pieces of software in the fediverse.

Here are the major changes from February:

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• join-lemmy.org
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

We’re still working hard on the 1.0 release, needing a few more major additions to lemmy-ui, and some less critical items for lemmy.

Then it will be a period of performance and bug testing, as well as giving time to allow app devs to update to the API changes.

The major changes during November were:

• Upgrade to latest Rust version 1.91 (after being stuck with 1.81 for over a year)
• Backwards compatibility with API v3
• Multi-community UI
• Adding an estimated time till approval to the signup page
• Merged modlog tables

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

It’s been a busy month, with a lot of work to add new features to lemmy-ui which were already added to the Lemmy backend before. There were also a lot of bug fixes for the development version. We are gradually getting closer to a 1.0 release.

While the API changes for 1.0 are mostly finalized, we still have many more lemmy-ui 1.0 tasks to complete.

Some of the major additions:

• Simplified lemmy-ui development.
• Audio file support in lemmy-ui.
• Added comment locking (which also locks children). Thanks to @flamingos-cant)
• Post time filtering, with a smart dropdown.
• Added ability to block all users from an instance (separate from blocking all communities)
• Added ability to make a note for a person, and view the vote totals you’ve given to them.
• Fixed remote RSS feeds.
• Added ability to do actions on report items, from the reports page.

Or see the full list of changes at the links below:

• Backend
• Frontend
• Jerboa

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. 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 we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Changes

This version fixes a handful of bugs. Most importantly it prevents a background task from blocking the Lemmy server entirely. Edit marks on comments are now hidden if it was edited within 5 minutes of creation. Also the browser cache usage is significantly reduced. Additionally ARM builds are fixed by using the default memory allocator on that platform.

Backend

• Fixing active counts slow queries. by @dessalines in #5907
• Only use mimalloc on x86 and purge images in background task by @Nutomic in #5893
• Add missing comment depth check by @Nutomic in #5842
• Dont sanitize RSS content manually (fixes #5850) by @Nutomic in #5852
• Reduce false positives in URL blocklist to reduce scunthorpe problem by @Nothing4You in #5807

Frontend

• Don’t show edit mark if comment was edited in less than 5 minutes by @jfaustino #3197
• Increase bio max length to 1000 chars by @nutomic #3249
• Change link from element.io to matrix.org by @nutomic #3250
• Remove all caches (fixes #3195) by @Nutomic in #3248
• Fixed ordering for search results by @Nutomic in #3219
• Add search field to community sidebar by @Nutomic in #3217
• Add checkbox for title only search by @Nutomic in #3220

Upgrade instructions

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Thanks to everyone

We’d like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We’re glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

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. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed.

We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.