Lemmy.World Announcements

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founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1
 
 

Hey all,

In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.

We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we've done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.

ToS Additions

That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.

Regarding misinformation, we've tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:

  • Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
  • We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
  • When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
  • Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
    • Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
    • Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.

We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.

By-laws Addition

We've also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.

This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we've created as a result of what has happened over the last week.

Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation

https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/

Sincerely,

FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team


EDIT:

We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.

EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):

We've posted a response, sorry for the delay.

👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈

2
 
 

Hello World,

Nothing as exciting as emojis, right? We would like to make it easier for you to express yourselves, so we'll be adding custom emojis to Lemmy.World. The question is, which ones? Let's pick together!

So, we're reaching out to everyone with a Lemmy.World account: Please provide a link to the image you'd like to suggest and upvote the ones you'd like to see! The most upvoted emoji's will, after review, be added to our list of custom emojis.

The emojis can be used by anyone on Lemmy.World in comments and posts.

3
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello World,

Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.

Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.

At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.

As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one's stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.

Thank you,

The Lemmy.World Team

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Phishing Mails (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

This will be a quick post. We have received a phishing mail to our info@lemmy.world mail address telling that they are "lemmy.world Security Team", telling that they will "disconnect" your account from our instance. This is ofc, not us. Do not fall for it! The attached image is how the mail looks like.

~Lemmy World Team.

5
 
 

Edit : OK so the outage was less brief than expected. The upgrade of the 3GB pictrs database took over 1 hour, and the version 0.4 database is now 14.5 GB... But anyway, it seems to be working alright now!

We will upgrade pictrs today, from 0.3.1 to 0.4.4. This will enable us to switch to S3 storage later on, and is needed for more anti-CSAM tools. Outage should only involve picture uploads, and should be brief.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca's post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.

7
 
 

Hello World!

As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

8
 
 

EDIT: The update is done - Lemmy Host now running 0.18.5

This is a short post to inform you that we will be updating Lemmy World to the latest stable release of Lemmy. This is small update that fixes issues with federation of moderation actions performed by admin accounts. There is a bigger update, v0.19.0, just around the corner but the developers wanted to get this federation issue fixed as soon as possible.

The server will be updated at 1700 UTC - if you want to know when that is in your timezone you can click here.

Since this is a small update, it shouldn't take long. Downtime should be minimal. Please feel free to check both https://status.lemmy.world and https://dash.lemmy.world before and during the upgrade.

9
 
 

I've written a short blog about what happened in August, and the finances.

10
 
 

Join the Adventure on the official Lemmy.world Minecraft Server!

Calling all Minecraft adventurers and builders! We're thrilled to invite you to embark on an incredible journey on the lemmy.world Minecraft Server. Get ready for an immersive experience like no other, where creativity knows no bounds, and the possibilities are endless.

Minecraft Version: 1.20.x
Address: minecraft.lemmy.world

You can ask questions, request features, share your stories on the discord, matrix and in the official lemmy community

The Server has some rules

Other info:

Server FAQ: https://lemmy.world/post/5467019

Server Info: https://lemmy.world/post/5468646

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello everyone,

Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it's up to the instance admins to clean it up.

There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.

We don't want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That's why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.

This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy's.

We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.

We hope you understand and support our decision.

The Lemmy World team

12
 
 

We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It's not perfect as emoji reactions aren't visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.

Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

We know most of you were thrilled about our Discord server, so we decided to make you even happier with our very own space on matrix!

And lastly, this one is more for admins of other instances but we have opened a "LW Defense HQ" room which we want to use in our ongoing fight against spammers: https://matrix.to/#/#defense:lemmy.world

Come join us!

EDIT: Madlad @ruud@lemmy.world was easily convinced to set up a lemmy.world matrix server. So I edited the links to the new space and rooms. The old ones still work too!

That means you can now also sign up for a Lemmy World matrix account. Instructions in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/3443207

14
 
 

Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.

Part of the problem is the instance's open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.

We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.

Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we're setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!

15
 
 

An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world

16
 
 

Hello everyone,

We unfortunately have to close the !lemmyshitpost community for the time being. We have been fighting the CSAM (Child Sexual Assault Material) posts all day but there is nothing we can do because they will just post from another instance since we changed our registration policy.

We keep working on a solution, we have a few things in the works but that won't help us now.

Thank you for your understanding and apologies to our users, moderators and admins of other instances who had to deal with this.

Edit: @Striker@lemmy.world the moderator of the affected community made a post apologizing for what happened. But this could not be stopped even with 10 moderators. And if it wasn't his community it would have been another one. And it is clear this could happen on any instance.

But we will not give up. We are lucky to have a very dedicated team and we can hopefully make an announcement about what's next very soon.

Edit 2: removed that bit about the moderator tools. That came out a bit harsher than how we meant it. It's been a long day and having to deal with this kind of stuff got some of us a bit salty to say the least. Remember we also had to deal with people posting scat not too long ago so this isn't the first time we felt helpless. Anyway, I hope we can announce something more positive soon.

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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Lemmy.world is temporarily disabling open signups and moving to an application-required signup process, due to ongoing issues with malicious bot accounts.

We know this is a major step to take, but we believe that it’s the right one for both us and our community right now.

We’re working on a better long-term technical solution to these bots, but that will take time to create, test, and verify that it doesn’t cause any problems with federation and how our users use our site, and we’d rather make sure we get it right than have a site that’s broken.

We’re making this change on 28 Aug 2023, and don’t have a specific timeline for how long registrations will require an application, but we will post an update once our new anti-abuse measures are in place and working.

Take care, LW Team

18
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Lemmy.World at Mastodon (mastodon.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hey everyone!

So we've been trying our best to listen to members of the community on how we provide updates and information to you fine folks! To that end, we would like to welcome a new secondary, fedi-friendly avenue, Mastodon.

https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld

We will be posting updates here in ADDITION to our normal !lemmyworld@lemmy.world community. As both a supplement to our Discord server and a place for the community to directly interact with us via micro-blogging.

We feel this opens up a few neat doors for sure to keep communication open and transparent.

See you there 😉

  • The LW Team
19
1
Recent Outages (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hey everyone, so as I'm sure everyone is aware Lemmy.World has been experiencing several outages throughout the last few days.

We have been investigating the root cause of these outages but believe that they are related to our current hosting provider (Hetzner) blocking access from ClouldFlare as (we think) they believe that our CDN is a DDoS'er, and is causing these disconnects to our backend server, problematic for sure.

We've opened support tickets with our current provider and are awaiting a response. We have no issue with being as transparent as possible with downtime. Anyone that is curious, can feel free to check out https://status.lemmy.world and https://dash.lemmy.world for up to the minute outage information. We are also looking into other fediverse friendly methods of posting status and outage updates

In the meantime, we are evaluating alternative hosting options and solutions to provide a high level of reliability to you, our users. Really, we want to say thanks to everyone for soldiering through all our technical growing pains.

Cheers

  • LW Infra Team
20
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world's users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.

This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

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Lemmy World outages (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

Hello there!

It has been a while since our last update, but it's about time to address the elephant in the room: downtimes. Lemmy.World has been having multiple downtimes a day for quite a while now. And we want to take the time to address some of the concerns and misconceptions that have been spread in chatrooms, memes and various comments in Lemmy communities.

So let's go over some of these misconceptions together.

"Lemmy.World is too big and that is bad for the fediverse".

While one thing is true, we are the biggest Lemmy instance, we are far from the biggest in the Fediverse. If you want actual numbers you can have a look here: https://fedidb.org/network

The entire Lemmy fediverse is still in its infancy and even though we don't like to compare ourselves to Reddit it gives you something comparable. The entire amount of Lemmy users on all instances combined is currently 444,876 which is still nothing compared to a medium sized subreddit. There are some points that can be made that it is better to spread the load of users and communities across other instances, but let us make it clear that this is not a technical problem.

And even in a decentralised system, there will always be bigger and smaller blocks within; such would be the nature of any platform looking to be shaped by its members. 

"Lemmy.World should close down registrations"

Lemmy.World is being linked in a number of Reddit subreddits and in Lemmy apps. Imagine if new users land here and they have no way to sign up. We have to assume that most new users have no information on how the Fediverse works and making them read a full page of what's what would scare a lot of those people off. They probably wouldn't even take the time to read why registrations would be closed, move on and not join the Fediverse at all. What we want to do, however, is inform the users before they sign up, without closing registrations. The option is already built into Lemmy but only available on Lemmy.ml - so a ticket was created with the development team to make these available to other instance Admins. Here is the post on Lemmy Github.

Which brings us to the third point:

"Lemmy.World can not handle the load, that's why the server is down all the time"

This is simply not true. There are no financial issues to upgrade the hardware, should that be required; but that is not the solution to this problem.

The problem is that for a couple of hours every day we are under a DDOS attack. It's a never-ending game of whack-a-mole where we close one attack vector and they'll start using another one. Without going too much into detail and expose too much, there are some very 'expensive' sql queries in Lemmy - actions or features that take up seconds instead of milliseconds to execute. And by by executing them by the thousand a minute you can overload the database server.

So who is attacking us? One thing that is clear is that those responsible of these attacks know the ins and outs of Lemmy. They know which database requests are the most taxing and they are always quick to find another as soon as we close one off. That's one of the only things we know for sure about our attackers. Being the biggest instance and having defederated with a couple of instances has made us a target.  

"Why do they need another sysop who works for free"

Everyone involved with LW works as a volunteer. The money that is donated goes to operational costs only - so hardware and infrastructure. And while we understand that working as a volunteer is not for everyone, nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. As a volunteer you decide how much of your free time you are willing to spend on this project, a service that is also being provided for free.

We will leave this thread pinned locally for a while and we will try to reply to genuine questions or concerns as soon as we can.

22
 
 

Edit: Upgrade finished

We will upgrade lemmy.world to v0.18.4 tomorrow at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone. Expect the site to be down for a few minutes.

Release notes for 0.18.4 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

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Alternative UI: Photon (photon.lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by antik@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world
 
 

We added an extra UI for our users. Photon by Xylight is an interface with a sleek, modern look and has all the bells and whistles you would need. Moderator tools included! You can access the UI from https://photon.lemmy.world.

Visit Photon's project page on github or get in touch with the developer in the !photon@lemmy.xylight.dev community. If you want to use photon on other instances you can do so from https://phtn.app.

Update: @Xylight has set up a donation link so if you like photon as much as I do, show him some love! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/xylight

24
 
 

We've launced a public discord server at https://discord.gg/lemmyworld

The reason for why we choose discord is because it was easier to moderate and manage than other options. Besides we also had a discord-bot guru by the name of Rooki who created a neat bot that allowed us to connect/verify discord users to their Lemmy World account.

So if you are a moderator and you are looking for some extra hands to moderate your community, or if you need to contact anyone from the LW team, this is the most efficient way to do it!

Come have a look!

25
 
 

Lemmy.World is looking for 4 new Systems operators to help with our growing community.

Volunteers will assist our existing systems team with monitoring and maintenance.

We’re ideally looking for chill folks that want to give back to their community and work on our back-end infrastructure. Must have 4+ years of professional experience working in systems administration. We are not looking for junior admins at this time. Please keep in mind that, while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to help at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.

Applicants must be okay with providing their CV and/or LinkedIn profile AND sitting for a video interview. This is due to the sensitivity of the infrastructure you will have access to.

We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

If you are in AEST (+10) or JST (+9) please let us know, as we are looking for at least one Sysadmin to help out during our overnight.

You may be asked to participate in an on-call pool. Please keep in mind that this is a round-robin style pool, so it's alright if you're busy as it will just move along the chain.

If you're interested and want to apply, click here.

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