Ⓜ️ Instance Meta Discussion

Tried a few times uploading different images around 11:55 a.m. central time. Response:

Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out

Uploading an 844 KB image times out with:

{ "data": { "error": "unknown", "message": "Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out" }, "state": "success" }

Tried twice around 8:45 a.m. CST

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.

Major Changes

This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy's sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn't affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don't get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don't have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn't have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer . The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn't have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

• Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. The upgrade should take less than 30 minutes.

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

Pict-rs 0.5 is also close to releasing. The upgrade takes a while due to a database migration, so read the migration guide to speed it up. Note that Lemmy 0.19 still works perfectly with pict-rs 0.4.

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 three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

This month we are running a funding drive with the goal of increasing 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.

Read more details in the funding drive announcement.

Compared against the predominant incumbent social media platforms, the fediverse is very small.

information sources:

• List of social platforms with at least 100 million active users - Wikipedia
• Fediverse Observer

About 2 months ago I unceremoniously shut down the Mastodon server at www.superstork.org.

I shut down this Mastodon server primarily because nobody was using it. It had no real energy.

I am a fan of Mastodon and I owe Mastodon gratitude for bringing a large amount of energy and life to the fediverse.

I initially set it up at the suggestion of somebody in superstonk, somebody who had concerns about reddit and that subreddit, and I shared those concerns. I had heard of Mastodon, and looked into it, and looked into the fediverse, and immediately I was intrigued, and I was motivated, so I spun up a Mastodon server.

But, evidently, Mastodon is simply not a valid replacement for superstonk / reddit, considering that it is a Twitter clone. It was never meant to be a discussion board. But, at that time, I hadn't even heard of Lemmy, I never gave it much thought at all. At that time, Mastodon was the hotness. Elon Musk had just finalized the purchase of Twitter, and many people had issues with this, and they left and joined Mastodon. This can be seen in usage statistics, such as can be found at: https://fediverse.observer/stats.

But, much has changed over the last year. Eventually, this Lemmy instance came to life, and I have been using it ever since. The Lemmy experience is obviously the appropriate Reddit alternative and not Mastodon.

superstork.org now redirects to gmehydra.org, which lists this Lemmy instance as the one and only current fediverse instance for GME investors.

I think originally I was expecting a bit more enthusiasm towards the fediverse, I expected other people to be as interested in it as I was, but I have learned that people can be very hard to motivate. This is why I put together gmehydra.org, because I was hoping for a large collection of fediverse servers, but they simply never came (yet).

Most people have a tendency, I think, to not want to be the ones to "risk" their personal time and energy as an early adopter of a new idea. Let other people spend their time and energy and figure it out and give it some life, and then once it has some life, maybe then it would be attractive enough to go join.

So, for obvious reasons, Lemmy is the superior practical app compared to Mastodon, for the purposes of GME investors having a place where long form discussions can be had.

Also, side note, I am happy to be moving away from any kind of name that in any way is similar to or might be thought to be associated with "superstonk". Initially, I grabbed the name superstork because I thought it was kind of a fun and unserious play on the name superstonk. One kind Redditor had previously purchased the domain superstonk.net, and kindly offered to give that domain name to me for my Mastodon purposes. I respectfully declined the offer at that time, as I did not want to be seen trying to take or co-opt the name superstonk for my own purposes, I didn't feel comfortable with it.

Now, a year later, I don't want to have anything at all to do with that "brand". Even if I had wanted to keep the Mastodon instance running, I wasn't really happy with the domain that I had, it was too similar.

As we move forward I still expect that the fediverse will continue to grow, and eventually there will be additional instances for the purposes of GME investors, or at least instances that share common purposes.

As for right now, this instance is one of my favorite places in the social media landscape for discussing GME and other related information.

Lemmy is cool. I'm a big fan.

Sure, there are numerous valid criticisms that can be made against Lemmy. However if you add up all the pros and all the cons, what I personally see is a great platform with a ton of long term potential.

It's really exciting to me how any community existing around a specific subject, in this case primarily DRS & GME, can set up their own instance and simply "plug in" to the rest of Lemmy / the fediverse.

This instance currently has around 780 user accounts, and of those, only about 50 monthly active users at this time.

However, the largest community on this instance, drs_your_gme, has a total of roughly 1100 subscribers and 165 monthly active users.

I think this necessarily means that, of all the active users in the drs_your_gme community on this instance, the majority of them are accounts hosted on instances other than this one. Roughly 1/3 from this instance, 2/3 from outside of this instance.

Personally i think that is very cool. It's so powerful!

If we were using some non-federated platform for example, something else other than Lemmy that otherwise serves the functionality that Reddit has, but not federated, not otherwise connected to the fediverse -- we would only have our small little bubble and that's it.

But because of how the fediverse works, we get the benefit of connecting to potentially thousands of additional people, maybe one day millions. We get to enjoy other content on Lemmy, and other Lemmy users get to see our content too, if they so choose.

Sometimes content is posted in the drs_your_gme community that maybe isn't specifically about DRS or GME, but has larger general appeal, and gains the attention of users outside of this instance. I love it when that happens. And of those users, some of them might be totally unaware or otherwise ambivalent towards GME or towards DRS, but by being exposed to this community organically through the natural machinations of the fediverse, they may feel inclined to subscribe here and learn a little bit more about what we like to discuss.

On Reddit, any sufficiently large subreddit that might get a lot of attention, that might make it for example to r/all, Reddit always retains the ability to prevent that exposure from happening, if they want. I can't remember the last time anything at all GME related ever made it to the front page of reddit. Not because the content isn't good enough or popular enough, but I think because Reddit has very specific controls about what does and does not make it onto the front page of r/all.

Here on Lemmy, we have an opportunity to speak our truth and to let it exist without fear of a centralized authority deciding that they don't want our community to have a voice and unilaterally preventing us from having one.

There might be a long ways to go, but as the fediverse grows it will continue to demonstrate its value as a viable alternative social media platform.

Cheers everyone! 🥂

Attempting to upload twice a 774 KB .jpg during Create Post to community DRS Your GME.

Front end red popup:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'R', "Request er"... is not valid JSON

Payload response:

Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image): operation timed out

Tried 3 times uploading an image during Create Post.

The error message in the bottom left corner: SyntaxError: Unexpected token 'R', "Request er"... is not valid JSON

Edit 1: Also tried uploading an image via the comment section's GUI, but it also fails with the same error message.

Edit 2: Similar to https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1489

• But not the same as user dcx's comment that it was due to file size greater than 1 meg. The file I'm uploading is 766 KB.
• Tested with 264 KB and 20 KB files, both fail to upload.
• Tested from multiple browsers, upload also fails.

[email protected] is currently "frozen" since last night. It's not under our control, and is affecting all mirrored subs. Hopefully the owner of lemmit.online is able to restore service soon. We'll try reaching out if we don't see any update posted in about a day or so.

Update: As of 2023-07-26, the issue seems to be resolved.

The last few years have been an interesting journey, and it is far from over.

Just wanted to say kudos and thanks to the DRSGME.org / WhyDRS.org team for putting together this instance, for their continued efforts that benefit all GME investors, for providing a location where we can more freely discuss topics of conversation that are relevant to our interests that might be censored elsewhere.

I see that nearly 500 approved users have signed up to this instance, and an even larger number of subscribers to the DRSyourGME community on this instance, meaning that users from other Lemmy instances are also subscribed to communities here.

A more relevant metric for social media activity is monthly active users, which is currently showing as over 100 on this instance.

Milestone achieved! It took just over 1 month. It will be fun to watch the continued growth of this community.

Cheers to everyone that has joined this instance and participated!

I believe that as things stand now, the fediverse is the bast path forward for investors of GME and other groups that want to ensure that they can properly express themselves on the internet without being subject to the control of centralized authorities that might have conflicting interests.

I remember watching the DRSyourGME subreddit grow, how it started small, naturally, but attracted bits of attention here and there, and as certain events unfolded it grew faster, and reached roughly 13 thousand users before Reddit rugpulled us.

So here we are. This time, the community will continue to grow just like last time, only this time, there won't be a banning because there is no social media authority that exists that can take such an action.

How to install wefwef on iOS:

1. Open safari and enter “wefwef.app” in url

2. Tap “Settings” in lower right corner

3. Select “Install app” then press up arrow icon in bottom center of Saffari.

4. Select “Add to Home Screen”

5. Edit name if you would like, then press “Add” in upper right corner

6. Tap “wefwef” icon then “lemmy.word” portrait icon at the bottom center

7. Select “Login” in upper right corner

8. Select “other” and type in url: “lemmy.whynotdrs.org” then select “Next” in upper right corner

9. Enter your username and password and select “Confirm” in upper right corner

10. You are now logged in, will see your profile, and can start navigating threads.

11. To Navigate threads, Select “Posts” in bottom left corner then “Local” to see WhynotDRS instance

So.. I noticed in the "all" feed that it's really not feeds from ALL of the lemmy communities out there.. Then I read on the self hosted feed that the size of the instance grows depending on what users are subscribed to. Does that mean that the things I see on all are only what others signed in to this instance are subscribing to? The instance here is caching feeds from other communities? And thereby what I subscribe to will be seen in the "all" feed for others signed in here?

I saw another user crosspost some due diligence they had written last year and posted on Reddit to one of the related communities on this instance.

Here is that post: https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/post/8800

It covers a subject which still is worth learning about today, and sets a great example. The user is able to make sure their content can stay available on a reliable host, and for the reader, there is a quick message at the top explaining that it was originally hosted elsewhere and when it had been posts there.

I love this idea - as I experienced with the DD I had written on the removed subreddit DRSyourGME, Reddit can wipe a slate clean if it chooses to.

Crossposting to this Lemmy instance is a great way to help have more redundancy so you know your work will stay available, and it also helps grow this fledgling platform.

Hey all!

Quick update to the community about the upgrades we performed today:

1. We upgraded the lemmy application from version 0.17.x to 0.18.1-rc4. This should resolve some issues preventing people from logging in. Thanks to @[email protected] for assisting with this, including testing and summarizing benefits of the new version.

2. Set up a Cloudflare proxy & CDN layer. This will reduce load on our instance for static assets like images and javascript, speed up delivery of those assets for users that are spread around the world, and may help us respond more fluidly to any DDOS threats that may arise in the future.

For an alternate place to follow updates being made to the instance, you can check out the #lemmy channel on the DRSyourGME Discord - https://discord.com/channels/1102309240145707049/1121464479021006960

Not sure where to put this... but I noticed now that others are creating communities in this instance that I wasn't subscribed to any of the ones that were created after I had joined. Might not have even been subscribed to all of them that had existed when I did - it may have been just the community that i registered under..

So I guess this is just a reminder to all to periodically check the communities list so you're not missing out on the new new.

!

We have some upgrade work planned for this Saturday. It may involve prolonged downtime due to DNS changes.

Should we have sub-communities (or whatever we call them here on Lemmy) to separate things? Like a meme sub, a DD sub, a TA sub, a data sub, a TrustMeBro^TM sub.. anyone else think this would be a good idea?

Is it ok to create communities here for other stocks, ETFs, options and investments?

Un-privacy Policy

TLDR: Treat everything you submit to this instance as public. Instance admins (we) will attempt to reduce data collection as much as practicable, and will maintain open access for anyone to view posts and comments on this instance.

The main goal we seek to address with our Lemmy instance is community resilience in the face of censorship or bad actors.

In support of this goal, we intend to make back-ups of the instance’s database available on a regular basis to a select few semi-trusted community members. (This is in addition to the already semi-trusted nature of the instance admin group itself, and in addition to the normal operation of the Lemmy application as a federated service which broadly shares a lot of information with other instances and the public.)

As a result, users of the instance should consider that all information they submit to the instance may immediately or later become public. This includes things such as IP address, upvotes, and browsing patterns.

Accordingly, we will seek to limit data collection as much as practicable.

Lack of Email Collection and Password Recovery

While the Lemmy software does not allow us to entirely disable the email field in the user sign up form, we will not require emails, will not be enabling any sending of emails from the instance, and will discourage users from providing their email during the sign up process. We may proactively purge any email data we do receive from time to time.

This does come with some downsides: primarily, you must be careful about holding onto your password, as you will not be able to reclaim your account if you lose it. In the case of a lost password, you may wish to create a new user account.

Password Re-use Recommendations

In general, you should not re-use passwords across multiple applications. In the case of this Lemmy instance, this applies doubly as multiple community members may have access to backups. Of course, the Lemmy app does apply industry standard bcrypt encryption to all stored passwords, so as long as your password is sufficiently long and complex, it is cryptographically difficult to extract it from the data. Regardless, as a matter of precaution, you should use a long and unique password.

Additional Implicitly-collected Data

While we will disable any additional data collection whenever we are aware of it and are able to conveniently do so, you should assume that some data will still be collected by us and by third parties, such as IP addresses and/or browsing patterns.

Some such data may be recorded to the instance’s database, and thus may be proactively shared as a part of backups, or even as a part of the regular operation of the Lemmy application. To understand what types of data the database contains, you may reference Lemmy’s source code.

Alternatively, some such data may be collected and retained in server logs, or by technology providers that help us host the service, such as Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, etc. While we do not intend to proactively share server log information to back-up recipients, due to the semi-trusted nature of the instance admin group and of technology providers, this data may still become accessible in ways which are difficult to predict. Users concerned with their IP address being revealed should use a VPN. (Also, people should use a VPN, period.)

Additionally, due to the federated nature of Lemmy, when you use our Lemmy instance, your browser may communicate with other Lemmy instances operated by third-parties. We encourage users to research and understand precisely how this communication may enable data collection by reading Lemmy documentation and the privacy policies of any third-party Lemmy instances with which they interact. However, at a minimum, we believe users should assume that third party instances can associate patterns of Lemmy browsing activity with their Lemmy account. We encourage users to exercise caution in voluntarily associating additional personal information with their Lemmy account.

Finally, hypothetically, web applications can facilitate the collection of user data by third-party tracking, analytics, and marketing technology services. We believe our Lemmy instance does not facilitate any such data collection. Nevertheless, as a matter of precaution, we recommend that users use tracking blocking solutions, such as uBlock Origin, first-party isolation, or others.

Content Policy

The primary focus and scope of our instance is subjects relating to GameStop, household investors participating in US stock markets, direct registration, holding the financial industry/Wall Street accountable, and/or related economic and financial topics. Although we do not intend to censor discussion, and will not enforce around any stance or viewpoint within this scope, we may prevent or remove communities with an out-of-scope topic from hosting themselves on our Lemmy instance. As a reminder, due to the federated nature of Lemmy, users (including those on our instance) may and do follow communities hosted on other instances. In the event of another instance hosting content that we determine may be illegal or harmful for us to display, we may disable its federation to our instance. Due to the federated nature of Lemmy, users who are unhappy with our instance’s federation policies may also register via other instances, including their own, and thereby interact with content from our instance as well as any third-party instances with fewer disruptions related to our federation policies.

Moderation Policy

On Lemmy, there are instance administrators and community moderators. Communities are analogous to subreddits on Reddit. Anyone can create a community on this instance. When a community is created, the creator is automatically made the head mod and can appoint other users as mods as needed. These communities can develop their own rules and moderation structure. Meanwhile, instance moderators can moderate any community on the instance, just like Reddit Administrators could moderate any subreddit.

The main differences as compared to Reddit are that:

1. Moderator logs are public and transparent on Lemmy.
2. Due to the federated nature of Lemmy, communities that feel unfairly limited by instance admins have the recourse of hosting their community on another Lemmy instance or even their own Lemmy instance.
3. Due to the federated nature of Lemmy, users that feel unfairly limited by our instance’s federation policies can subscribe and contribute from another Lemmy instance or even their own Lemmy instance.
4. Due to our planned efforts to share backups, the community will be more easily able to create a replacement instance in response to any overreach from the admins of this instance.
5. Our instance admins believe that moderation is best delegated to the communities, and will not engage in moderation of content based on the viewpoints or ideas therein.

Areas where instance admins may engage in moderation will be limited to:

• Removal of content which we believe may be illegal in the US to host, store, or distribute
• Removal of content which violates copyright for which we receive legal takedown notice
• Removal of content pursuant to any legal/government/court order
• Removal of users who have required repeated content removal per the above
• Removal of users who attempt to overload some aspect of the instance through the quantity of some action (e.g. flooding the instance with communities, excess and repeated data uploads, etc.)
• Moderating a community for which they are also a community mod

We are new to operating Lemmy ourselves, so we may need to amend this list as we discover Lemmy’s features and limitations. Although we prioritize open discussion, these concessions are necessary to maintain a consistent server solution and avoid personal liability.

Contributing

At this time, the admin instance team is not accepting monetary contributions. If we need to take contributions in the future, it will only be in response to operational costs which we will make transparently available to the community.

We are interested in tech contributions, though we still need to set up the processes for contributors. For example, we are considering accepting contributions via source-controlled devops scripting.

Thanks for reading.

Maintaining an available and open platform for free discussion is crucial.

Edits:

• 2023-07-24: Fixed formatting issue

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