I'm sure this will come as a disappointment to many of you as you have joined this instance specifically because we do not block or defederate with anybody. Unfortunately my hand is forced on this occasion.

As many of you know this server is hosted in Ireland. It has been brought to my attention that under Irish law:

Virtual child pornography is illegal in Ireland per the Child Trafficking and Pornography Act of 1998 which includes "any visual representation".[Irish Statute Book] The country has strict laws when it comes to child abuse material, even if it doesn't contain any "real children".

As you can understand this requires me to defederate and remove the offending material from my server. There are newer admin tools in the works which will allow me to block specific communities instead of whole servers. Once this is in place I will refederate with burggit and block the individual offending communities.

This will also apply to other servers with offending content but as far as I'm aware burggit is the only one for the moment.

I still maintain my ideal of not defederating as much as possible but sometimes its out of my hands.

Thanks to everyone for helping create this vibrant community and for supporting. I am dedicated to make VLemmy the best it can be.

The server have been updated to the latest Lemmy Version 0.18.1. As usual if you notice any odd behaviour leave it for a hour. If problems or issues persist please report them in the comments. Ill be taking notes for future fixes and updates.

Hi all. With the recent growth that the server I will be looking for another admin or 2 or 3. Not sure yet.

If you would like you join the admin team PM me with the answers to the questions below.

1. Do you have any admin/mod experience?
2. Do you have any IT technical experience?
3. Your Timezone
4. Time/Avalaibilty you feel you would contribute to VLemmy
5. Rough age range 18 - 28, 29 - 38, 39 - 48, 49+
6. What would be your moderation style?
7. Do you have a Discord or Matrix account your willing to communicate on?
8. What would you like to change or contribute to VLemmy or Lemmy as a whole?
9. Any feedback good or bad you would like to share?
10. Tell me a bit about you. Whatever you feel like sharing. (Not Mandatory)
11. Who would you nominate to join the admin team with you? (Must be a VLemmy Member)

Welcome to Vlemmy!!

See the Quick Start Guide.

Ask your questions in the Support Community.

The image describing Lemmy, made by @ulu_[email protected] : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

If you would like to support us you can do so at https://liberapay.com/vlemmy

Hope you enjoy you new home at VLemmy!!

Hi all, tomorrow is when Reddits API change takes place and we are expecting a large influx of users and signups. I have prepared as much as possible but there still may be some down time. I will try my best to keep it as minimal as possible.

Please be helpful and welcoming to all the new users. Also keep an eye out in the Support community if you can and help answer any questions if possible. Thanks for eveyones help and contribution.

Also a massive thank you to everyone who donates. Its a huge help with the expenses for running the site. Im commitied to making this instance the best I can and any feedback good or bad is very much welcome.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1465740

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

HTTP API instead of Websocket

Until now Lemmy-UI used websocket for all API requests. This has many disadvantages, like making the code harder to maintain, and causing live updates to the site which many users dislike. Most importantly, it requires keeping a connection open between server and client at all times, which causes increased load and makes scaling difficult. That's why we decided to rip out websocket entirely, and switch to HTTP instead. This change was made much more urgent by the sudden influx of new users. @CannotSleep420 and @dessalines have been working hard for the past weeks to implement this change in lemmy-ui.

HTTP on its own is already more lightweight than websocket. Additionally it also allows for caching of server responses which can decrease load on the database. Here is an experimental nginx config which enables response caching. Note that Lemmy doesn't send any cache-control headers yet, so there is a chance that private data gets cached and served to other users. Test carefully and use at your own risk.

Two-Factor Authentication

New support for two-factor authentication. Use an app like andOTP or Authenticator Pro to store a secret for your account. This secret needs to be entered every time you login. It ensures that an attacker can't access your account with the password alone.

Custom Emojis

Instance admins can add different images as emojis which can be referenced by users when posting.

Other changes

Progressive Web App

Lemmy's web client can now be installed on browsers that support PWAs, both on desktop and mobile. It will use an instance's icon and name for the app if they are set, making it look like a given instance is an app.

Note for desktop Firefox users: the desktop version of Firefox does not have built in support for PWAs. If you would like to use a Lemmy instance as a PWA, use use this extension.

Error Pages

Lemmy's web client now has error pages that include resources to use if the problem persists. This should be much less jarring for users than displaying a white screen with the text "404 error message here".

Route Changes

Pages that took arguments in the route now take query parameters instead. For example, a link to lemmy.ml's home page with a few options used to look like this:

https://lemmy.ml/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

Note that you now only have to specify parameters you want instead of all of them.

Searchable select redesign

The searchable selects, such as those used on the search page, have a new look and feel. No more inexplicable green selects when using the lightly themes!

Share button

Posts on the web client now have a share button on supported browsers. This can be used to share posts to other applications quickly and easily.

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

lemmy-ui is now upgraded to bootstrap 5, and every component is now much cleaner.

Special thanks to sleepless, alectrocute, jsit, and many others for their great work on improving and re-organizing lemmy-ui.

Database optimizations

Special thanks to johanndt, for suggesting improvements to Lemmy's database queries. Some of these suggestions have already been implemented, and more are on the way.

Query speed is Lemmy's main performance bottleneck, so we really appreciate any help database experts can provide.

Captchas

Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.

Upgrade instructions

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.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation.

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. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

If you notice any odd behaviour leave it for a few hours. If problems or issues persist please report them in the comments. Ill be taking notes for future fixes and updates.

cross-posted from: https://vlemmy.net/post/63994

Hi all, thanks so much for your input on this post in regards to de-federation. I have read through every comment and have taken all perspectives on board. I think I have come up with my stance on the matter for the moment.

For now I wont be de-federating with any other instances or servers. I feel it is important as many people have mentioned to "leave the power to the users" and let them decide the content they wish to see. In regards to this I think it will be extremely important to educate people on how to block communities that they do not wish to see. If you all could assist me with that and help guide new users that would be much appreciated. I will be creating a post on this soon and will put a note in the sidebar about it.

I also am aware and agree that certain content has no place in peoples feeds and that they want nothing to do with it. I myself am one of those people. Therefore there are a few things that I will still strongly be pushing for.

Site admins are currently discussing what moderation tools that we think we need. And this is what I propose and hope to implement into VLemmy.

A mod/admin tool that allows me to block certain communities/servers from appearing in all/new/hot feeds while they will still show for users that are subscribed. This stops the unwanted propagation of harmful/unwanted content while not restricting access to it and allowing users to interact if they wish.

A user tool that will show the users what communities the admin/mod has hidden from showing up in the new/all/hot feeds and allow them to uncheck it for themselves if they wish.

I feel like this is a reasonable compromise and I hope that this will help give a balanced experience for all. Critiques, criticism, refinements, suggestions, questions, all are welcome in the comments and are much appreciated.

Hi all, thanks so much for your input on this post in regards to de-federation. I have read through every comment and have taken all perspectives on board. I think I have come up with my stance on the matter for the moment.

For now I wont be de-federating with any other instances or servers. I feel it is important as many people have mentioned to "leave the power to the users" and let them decide the content they wish to see. In regards to this I think it will be extremely important to educate people on how to block communities that they do not wish to see. If you all could assist me with that and help guide new users that would be much appreciated. I will be creating a post on this soon and will put a note in the sidebar about it.

I also am aware and agree that certain content has no place in peoples feeds and that they want nothing to do with it. I myself am one of those people. Therefore there are a few things that I will still strongly be pushing for.

Site admins are currently discussing what moderation tools that we think we need. And this is what I propose and hope to implement into VLemmy.

A mod/admin tool that allows me to block certain communities/servers from appearing in all/new/hot feeds while they will still show for users that are subscribed. This stops the unwanted propagation of harmful/unwanted content while not restricting access to it and allowing users to interact if they wish.

A user tool that will show the users what communities the admin/mod has hidden from showing up in the new/all/hot feeds and allow them to uncheck it for themselves if they wish.

I feel like this is a reasonable compromise and I hope that this will help give a balanced experience for all. Critiques, criticism, refinements, suggestions, questions, all are welcome in the comments and are much appreciated.

A throwback to when I first got into orbit. It was a huge milestone back then. This is my first ever screenshot of the game.