Until now it has been very complicated to work on the official Lemmy frontend, as you had to set up an entire local Lemmy stack with Postgres database and Rust backend built from source. Now there is a much easier way, as lemmy-ui can directly connect to a remote production or test instance.

To get started you need to have git and pnpm installed. Then run:

# for development branch (1.0):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive
# for stable branch (0.19):
git clone https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui --recursive -b release/v0.19

# then:
cd lemmy-ui
pnpm install
LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE=enterprise.lemmy.ml pnpm dev

Alternatively you can use ./scripts/test.sh. Finally open http://0.0.0.0:1234/ in your browser. You can replace the value for LEMMY_UI_BACKEND_REMOTE with any production instance. The local lemmy-ui connects to that instance for all API calls, so you will see the same content. All actions work as usual including login, voting, posting etc.

Note, due to breaking changes in the development version, you may need to switch branches. main is for the new 1.0 version and all new feature development is happening there. With this you can connect to the test instance voyager.lemmy.ml. release/v0.19 is the stable branch, with it you can connect to enterprise.lemmy.ml, or existing production instances. Only bug fixes should be made there.

Hopefully this will encourage some of you to contribute to lemmy-ui. If you have any experience with web development it will be easy get started.

If I find a link to a conversation on another Lemmy instance, I can just throw the URL of that into the search on my own instance and I'll get directed to a link that works on my instance.

It seems, however, that if the conversation is hosted in a piefed instance instead of lemmy instance, such a conversion using the search tool is not possible.

Could that feature please be added? There are anyways sometimes links to conversations on Piefed instances, and it's not really visible for a random Lemmy user that it's on a different type of platform.

For example, say I want to see the top posts from January 2025. Is there a way to do that?

I'm looking for input on how well Lemmy responds to occasional downtime of up to a few days, specifically regarding how federation recovers after such an event.

Basically looking to know how amenable it is to selfhosting via reverse proxy from dodgy setups which are the best some of us proles can manage. I try to run some services where I can but my situation inevitably results in an event or three per year, on average, with some days down.

It would be interesting to sort posts in different ways then the current Active, Hot, New, ... Criteria. I searched the backend-codebase and found this enum:

crates/db_shema_file/src/enums.rs

...
/// The post sort types. See here for descriptions: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
pub enum PostSortType {
  #[default]
  Active,
  Hot,
  New,
  Old,
  Top,
  MostComments,
  NewComments,
  Controversial,
  Scaled,
}

and the database uses this for example in crates/db_views/post/src/impls.rs

NewComments => pq.then_order_by(key::newest_comment_time_at),

I have multiple questions regarding this:

• lets say I add another variant to this enum, and add some functionality to it in the backend, would the frontend dropdown-menu in the UI update and show it? (guess this is not the case, since frontend and backend live in different folders.
• here is a sample sorting url for the Scaled sort type "https://lemmy.world/?dataType=Post&listingType=All&sort=Scaled". This will trigger the backend to query the database and receive a sorted list of items to display as hypertext to my understanding.
• since Diesel implements the Database Query I would not need to write any postgresql?
• would other instances support my new sorting method or only my own modified codebase instance? I guess its the latter.

A first simple idea: Add a "random" sort type, that sorts post in random order. Some uuid or hashed timestamp of a post could work for this.

I'd like to tweak my feed by hiding all posts containing certain key words, e.g. 'democracy, leftists, murder, liberals, fbi, market' etc.

Basic use case: Don't like what you see? Select keyword -> click RMB -> "Fitler for a week". Now you won't see any posts with this keyword on any Lemmy instance.

Is it possible somehow? Maybe a client with this functionality exists? Does it sound useful to anyone but me?

Post.

The line that shows the links to other crossposts should add a (#comments), if there is any, after each link.

Some links get crossposted to multiple communities but I don't know if any of these posts have any comments and it's tedious to check them out one by one, and in my experience most of them don't have any comments which discourages me from checking them out.

Also crosspost links could be in order of comments.

Another idea: instead of (#comments) it could be a different color or some other indicator.

Post.

I suggest changing it to

"[Crossposted](Hyperlink to the post), Via !Lemmy@lemmy.ml (Original post community)

The post content.(Unquoted if It's own post, quoted if other person post) "

This is a more human readable Template and it gives more info about the crosspost.

Lemmy is by default a link aggregator which means users who are browsing posts get 2 things only:

• Link.
• Title.

From my experience, literally those 25 extra characters could just include that word that can be the word that will give a meaning to the previous 200 characters. Especially that the main competitor for Lemmy (Reddit) allows for up to 300 characters titles.

Overall, it seems pretty essential to give people more context about the link they about to click.

Example where extra characters would highly improve the title: https://programming.dev/post/34472919

missing lemmy servers

Inspired by the Low Tech Magazine, I thought about adding a dithering option to Lemmy. When posting a new link or image, you could set the image to "dithered", choose one from a couple different colors and the image will be created in this style. It looks cool, saves bandwith, storage and energy.
What so you think?

Problem

Currently, anyone can attempt to brute-force user passwords almost effortlessly, even without advanced technical knowledge.

Proposed Feature

Introduce a setting that activates after a configurable number of failed login attempts. Users could choose to:

• Block all further login attempts and automatically send a password reset email
• Temporarily block login for a set duration (for example, 10 minutes)

Implementation

Once the failed-attempt threshold is reached, the system applies the user’s chosen block option. The counter resets upon successful login or after completing a password reset.

Benefits

This approach makes large-scale brute-force attacks impractical and takes a proactive step toward stronger account security.

~Rewritten with the help of AI for better formatting and clarity.~

can I send a PM to someone on mastodon, public or private?

In a recent discussion it was mentioned that the search function in Lemmy is awkward to use and could be improved. As a result I already made two small changes:

• Change community selector to use [!community@example.com](/c/community@example.com) format (#3218)
• Search field in community sidebar (#3217)

Are there any other UI or UX changes you can think of to improve searching in Lemmy? Im mainly looking for frontend changes, such as reorganizing the input positions, changing default values etc.

I started to notice that my posts get no interactions at all and that a lot of communities seem to be empty. At first I thought that it's just the effect of Lemmy. ee shutting down, but after checking some of the communities from my current alt account I started to notice that .Dev does not pull the latest posts and does not federate my posts.

I really like an idea for making a mascot have a full body I even added one that look close to the lemming (4th image)

ignore the 3rd one I made this as a joke

I feel like non political posts are controversial more often now than they were before. Ive seen it on some communities I visit often.

Maybe I'm seeing smth that isn't there.

Maybe its to do with more reddit migrations who aren't as accusatomed to Lemmy?

Has anyone else noticed it?

This might be a client thing, but... I'm subscribed to several overlapping communities: !linux on one server, !linux on another, !linux on two others. Same with !lemmy, !commandline, and a couple other communities with the same topic and slightly different membership and/or focus.

Crossposting is a valid and useful tool, but I'm noticing an increase of crossposting where the submitter automatically crossposts to 4 similar communities at the same time. Seems reasonable, and yet... I'm starting to get annoyed by seeing the same post 4 or 5 times in a row. I sort by New and since the posting happens concurrently, they just spam my feed with a page of identical posts.

I could unsubscribe from some similar communities, but the content doesn't exactly overlap and I feel like this is solving the wrong problem. I could decide that automatic crossposting by the same author is "bad behavior" and downvote crossposts, but I feel like this solves the wrong problem and violates a valid use case.

What I think a solution might look like involves a unique ID that persists between crossposts, and a corresponding way to filter s.t. only one post is shown. Some communities are more active than others, and comments on a filtered crosspost would be invisible, so it would be necessary to aggregation crosspost comments, interleaving them under the single, unique, unfiltered post. All comments on all subscribed communities where the post was crossposted would be aggregated; replies to any specific comment would reference the comment in its source community and therefore show up in the right community, for folks who aren't subscribed to multiple duplicate communities.

It requires a more complex solution than it might initially seem. Whatever the solution, I feel as if something should be done, because there's an increasing noise-to-signal ratio resulting from increased crossposting.

Had an account on there. Couldn't access it. Just tried getting on the website and didn't work either.

Am I making some mistake or is it over?

Posts and communities are still visible from other instances, but going to lemmy.blahaj.zone just shows an error. Anyone know what’s going on? (Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’m still new to this)