Update:
The comments from this post will not be removed as to preserve the discussion around the announcement. Any continued discussions outside of this thread that violate server rules will be removed. We feel that everyone that has an opinion, and wanted to vent, has been heard.

————-

Original post:
Yesterday, we received information about the planned federation by Hexbear. The announcement thread can be found here: https://www.hexbear.net/post/280770. After reviewing the thread and the comments, it became evident that allowing Hexbear to federate would violate our rules.

Our code of conduct and server rules can be found here.

The announcement included several concerning statements, as highlighted below:

• “Please try to keep the dirtbag lib-dunking to hexbear itself. Do not follow the Chapo Rules of Posting, instead try to engage utilizing informed rhetoric with sources to dismantle western propaganda. Posting the western atrocity propaganda and pig poop balls is hilarious but will pretty quickly get you banned and if enough of us do it defederated.”
• “The West's role in the world, through organizations such as NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - among many others - are deeply harmful to the billions of people living both inside and outside of their imperial core.”
• “These organizations constitute the modern imperial order, with the United States at its heart - we are not fooled by the term "rules-based international order." It is in the Left's interest for these organizations to be demolished. When and how this will occur, and what precisely comes after, is the cause of great debate and discussion on this site, but it is necessary for a better world.”

The rhetoric and goal of Hexbar are clear based on their announcement: to "dismantle western propaganda" and "demolish organizations such as NATO” shows that Hexbar has no intention of "respecting the rules of the community instance in which they are posting/commenting.” It’s to push their beliefs and ideology.

In addition, several comments from a Hexbear admin, demonstrate that instance rules will not be respected.

Here are some examples:

“I can assure you there will be no lemmygrad brigades, that energy would be better funneled into the current war against liberalism on the wider fediverse.”

“All loyal, honest, active and upright Communists must unite to oppose the liberal tendencies shown by certain people among us, and set them on the right path. This is one of the tasks on our ideological front.”

• https://lemmy.world/comment/121850
• https://lemmy.world/comment/1487168
• https://lemmy.world/comment/1476084
• https://lemmy.world/comment/171595
• https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3648500

Overall community comments:

• https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526128
• https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3526086
• https://www.hexbear.net/comment/3652828

To clarify, for those who have inquired about why Hexbear versus Lemmygrad, it should be noted that we are currently exploring the possibility of defederating from Lemmygrad as well based on similar comments Hexbear has made.

• https://lemmygrad.ml/post/158656
• https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/882559
• https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/540170
• https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/446529

Defederation should only be considered as a last resort. However, based on their comments and behavior, no positive outcomes can be expected.

We made the decision to preemptively defederate from Hexbear for these reasons. While we understand that not everyone may agree with our decision, we believe it is important to prioritize the best interests of our community.

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:

• !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
• !piracy@lemmy.ml
• !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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.

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

Hello World,

following feedback we have received in the last few days, both from users and moderators, we are making some changes to clarify our ToS.

Before we get to the changes, we want to remind everyone that we are not a (US) free speech instance. We are not located in US, which means different laws apply. As written in our ToS, we're primarily subject to Dutch, Finnish and German laws. Additionally, it is our discretion to further limit discussion that we don't consider tolerable. There are plenty other websites out there hosted in US and promoting free speech on their platform. You should be aware that even free speech in US does not cover true threats of violence.

Having said that, we have seen a lot of comments removed referring to our ToS, which were not explicitly intended to be covered by our ToS. After discussion with some of our moderators we have determined there to be both an issue with the ambiguity of our ToS to some extent, but also lack of clarity on what we expect from our moderators.

We want to clarify that, when moderators believe certain parts of our ToS do not appropriately cover a specific situation, they are welcome to bring these issues up with our admin team for review, escalating the issue without taking action themselves when in doubt. We also allow for moderator discretion in a lot of cases, as we generally don't review each individual report or moderator action unless they're specifically brought to admin attention. This also means that content that may be permitted by ToS can at the same time be violating community rules and therefore result in moderator action. We have added a new section to our ToS to clarify what we expect from moderators.

We are generally aiming to avoid content organizing, glorifying or suggesting to harm people or animals, but we are limiting the scope of our ToS to build the minimum framework inside which we all can have discussions, leaving a broader area for moderators to decide what is and isn't allowed in the communities they oversee. We trust the moderators judgement and in cases where we see a gross disagreement between moderatos and admins' criteria we can have a conversation and reach an agreement, as in many cases the decision is case-specific and context matters.

We have previously asked moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification when this was suggested in context of murder or other violent crimes. Following a discussion in our team we want to clarify that we are no longer requesting moderators to remove content relating to jury nullification in the context of violent crimes when the crime in question already happened. We will still consider suggestions of jury nullification for crimes that have not (yet) happened as advocation for violence, which is violating our terms of service.

As always, if you stumble across content that appears to be violating our site or community rules, please use Lemmys report functionality. Especially when threads are very active, moderators will not be able to go through every single comment for review. Reporting content and providing accurate reasons for reports will help moderators deal with problematic content in a reasonable amount of time.

While I was asleep, apparently the site was hacked. Luckily, (big) part of the lemmy.world team is in US, and some early birds in EU also helped mitigate this.

As I am told, this was the issue:

• There is an vulnerability which was exploited
• Several people had their JWT cookies leaked, including at least one admin
• Attackers started changing site settings and posting fake announcements etc

Our mitigations:

• We removed the vulnerability
• Deleted all comments and private messages that contained the exploit
• Rotated JWT secret which invalidated all existing cookies

The vulnerability will be fixed by the Lemmy devs.

Details of the vulnerability are here

Many thanks for all that helped, and sorry for any inconvenience caused!

Update While we believe the admins accounts were what they were after, it could be that other users accounts were compromised. Your cookie could have been 'stolen' and the hacker could have had access to your account, creating posts and comments under your name, and accessing/changing your settings (which shows your e-mail).

For this, you would have had to be using lemmy.world at that time, and load a page that had the vulnerability in it.

Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links

• https://lemmy.world/post/18829828
• https://lemmy.world/post/18817262

Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.

Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.

Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely,
FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

EDIT: Added org operations contact info

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.

Hello world,

as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won't start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.

All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We're currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it's certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.

We're looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.

You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005

An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:

Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto

If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name "Luigi".

Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.

Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can't go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. 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 Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.

Donate

edit, as this was frequently brought up:

Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?

It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.

lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.

[source]

For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it's not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.

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 👈

As requested by some users: 'old' style now accessible via https://old.lemmy.world

Code can be found here: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym , created by Ryan (Is he here?) (Yes he appears to be! @nnrx@sh.itjust.works ! Thanks for this awesome front-end!)

Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.

Most of these 'attacks' are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.

For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.

Another day, another update.

More troubleshooting was done today. What did we do:

• Yesterday evening @phiresky@phiresky@lemmy.world did some SQL troubleshooting with some of the lemmy.world admins. After that, phiresky submitted some PRs to github.
• @cetra3@lemmy.ml created a docker image containing 3PR's: Disable retry queue, Get follower Inbox Fix, Admin Index Fix
• We started using this image, and saw a big drop in CPU usage and disk load.
• We saw thousands of errors per minute in the nginx log for old clients trying to access the websockets (which were removed in 0.18), so we added a return 404 in nginx conf for /api/v3/ws.
• We updated lemmy-ui from RC7 to RC10 which fixed a lot, among which the issue with replying to DMs
• We found that the many 502-errors were caused by an issue in Lemmy/markdown-it.actix or whatever, causing nginx to temporarily mark an upstream to be dead. As a workaround we can either 1.) Only use 1 container or 2.) set ~~proxy_next_upstream timeout;~~ max_fails=5 in nginx.

Currently we're running with 1 lemmy container, so the 502-errors are completely gone so far, and because of the fixes in the Lemmy code everything seems to be running smooth. If needed we could spin up a second lemmy container using the ~~proxy_next_upstream timeout;~~ max_fails=5 workaround but for now it seems to hold with 1.

Thanks to @phiresky@lemmy.world , @cetra3@lemmy.ml , @stanford@discuss.as200950.com, @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com , @jelloeater85@lemmy.world , @TragicNotCute@lemmy.world for their help!

And not to forget, thanks to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml for their continuing hard work on Lemmy!

And thank you all for your patience, we'll keep working on it!

Oh, and as bonus, an image (thanks Phiresky!) of the change in bandwidth after implementing the new Lemmy docker image with the PRs.

Edit So as soon as the US folks wake up (hi!) we seem to need the second Lemmy container for performance. So that's now started, and I noticed the proxy_next_upstream timeout setting didn't work (or I didn't set it properly) so I used max_fails=5 for each upstream, that does actually work.

Status update July 4th

Just wanted to let you know where we are with Lemmy.world.

Issues

As you might have noticed, things still won't work as desired.. we see several issues:

Performance

• Loading is mostly OK, but sometimes things take forever
• We (and you) see many 502 errors, resulting in empty pages etc.
• System load: The server is roughly at 60% cpu usage and around 25GB RAM usage. (That is, if we restart Lemmy every 30 minutes. Else memory will go to 100%)

Bugs

• Replying to a DM doesn't seem to work. When hitting reply, you get a box with the original message which you can edit and save (which does nothing)
• 2FA seems to be a problem for many people. It doesn't always work as expected.

Troubleshooting

We have many people helping us, with (site) moderation, sysadmin, troubleshooting, advise etc. There currently are 25 people in our Discord, including admins of other servers. In the Sysadmin channel we are with 8 people. We do troubleshooting sessions with these, and sometimes others. One of the Lemmy devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml is also helping with current issues.

So, all is not yet running smoothly as we hoped, but with all this help we'll surely get there! Also thank you all for the donations, this helps giving the possibility to use the hardware and tools needed to keep Lemmy.world running!

Hello world,

as many of you may already be aware, there is an ongoing spam attack by a person claiming to be Nicole.

It is very likely that these images are part of a larger scale harassment campaign against the person depicted in the images shared as part of this spam.

Although the spammer claims to be the person in the picture, we strongly believe that this is not the case and that they're only trying to frame them.

Starting immediately, we will remove any images depicting "Nicole" and information that may lead to identifying the real person depicted in those images to prevent any possible harassment.
This includes older posts and comments once identified.

We also expect moderators to take action if such content is reported.

While we do not intend to punish people posting this once, not being aware of the context, we may take additional actions if they continue to post this content, as we consider this to be supporting the harassment campaign.

Discussion that does not include the images themselves or references that may lead to identifying the real person behind the image will continue to be allowed.

If you receive spam PMs please continue reporting them and we'll continue working on our spam detections to attempt to identify them early before they reach many users.

Hello World!

We've made some changes today, and we'd like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).

The "LAST REVISION DATE:" on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the "Page History" reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.

The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/

In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.

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:

• !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
• !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
• !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.

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

❤️

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.

• https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite is a beautiful and convenient desktop-first alternate web UI for Lemmy. Official site https://alexandrite.app
• https://p.lemmy.world - Photon A sleek client for Lemmy with powerful mod and admin tools. The only alternative client with feature parity to the official client. Official site https://phtn.app
• https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager was one of the first alternative UI's that became available. Optimized for Mobile. Official site https://vger.app
• https://old.lemmy.world - a familiar desktop experience for lemmy. Official site https://mlmym.org

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.

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)

Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal <3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@LemmyWorld@mastodon.world) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

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!

Communities should not be overly moderated in order to enforce a specific narrative. Respectful disagreement should be allowed in a smaller proportion to the established narrative.

Humans are naturally inclined to believe a single narrative when they're only presented with a single narrative. That's the basis of how fiction works. You can't tell someone a story if they're questioning every paragraph. However, a well placed sentence questioning that narrative gives the reader the option to chose. They're no longer in a story being told by one author, and they're free to choose the narrative that makes sense to them, even if one narrative is being pushed much more heavily than the other.

Unfortunately, some malicious actors are hijacking this natural tendency to be invested in fiction, and they're using it to create absurd, cult-like trends in non-fiction. They're using this for various nefarious ends, to turn us against each other, to generate profit, and to affect politics both domestically and internationally.

In a fully anonymous social media platform, we can't counter this fully. But we can prune some of the most egregious echo chambers.

We're aware that this policy is going to be subjective. It won't be popular in all instances. We're going to allow some "flat earth" comments. We're going to force some moderators to accept some "flat earth" comments. The point of this is that you should be able to counter those comments with words, and not need moderation/admin tools to do so. One sentence that doesn't jive with the overall narrative should be easily countered or ignored.

It's harder to just dismiss that comment if it's interrupting your fictional story that's pretending to be real. "The moon is upside down in Australia" does a whole lot more damage to the flat earth argument than "Nobody has crossed the ice wall" does to the truth. The purpose of allowing both of these is to help everyone get a little closer to reality and avoid incubating extreme cult-like behavior online.

A user should be able to (respectfully, infrequently) post/comment about a study showing marijuana is a gateway drug to !marijuana without moderation tools being used to censor that content.

Of course this isn't about marijuana. There's a small handful of self-selected moderators who are very transparently looking to push their particular narrative. And they don't want to allow discussion. They want to function as propaganda and an incubator. Our goal is to allow a few pinholes of light into the Truman show they wish to create. When those users' pinholes are systematically shut down, we as admins can directly fix the issue.

We don't expect this policy to be perfect. Admins are not aware of everything that happens on our instances and don't expect to be. This is a tool that allows us to trim the most extreme of our communities and guide them to something more reasonable. This policy is the board that we point to when we see something obscene on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com so that we can actually do something about it without being too authoritarian ourselves. We want to enable our users to counter the absolute BS, and be able to step in when self-selected moderators silence those reasonable people.

Some communities will receive an immediate notice with a link to this new policy. The most egregious communities will comply, or their moderators will be removed from those communities.

Moderators, if someone is responding to many root comments in every thread, that's not "in a smaller proportion" and you're free to do what you like about that. If their "counter" narrative posts are making up half of the posts to your community, you're free to address that. If they're belligerent or rude, of course you know what to do. If they're just saying something you don't like, respectfully, and they're not spamming it, use your words instead of your moderation abilities.

For those who find it interesting, enjoy!

The results are in!

We welcome and to the community.

To use the emoji's simply type :duckass: :silver: :trollface: :thonk: :pikachu: :popcorn: :sad: :smash: or :facepalm:

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.

Hey everyone,

The Fedihosting Foundation is looking for a new site-admin for Lemmy.World, to help our busy team. This moderator will help with reviewing and acting on reports, weighing in on user content, and helping foster our local communities while acting as a friendly neighbor to other fediverse instances.

You also DO NOT need to have an account on one of our FHF services but WILL have to create an account after joining. Users from other sites WELCOME!

Benefits:

• You'll get to work with a great team of passionate kind, goofy individuals from all over the (lemmy) world!
• We have weekly virtual hangouts where we brainstorm new ideas and catch up with each other. Community for us is not just a buzzword.
• We can also provide work and personal references, as we are a registered legal non-profit.
• While not a technical role, you will also gain exposure to best-in-class industry tooling and processes for large-scale hosted applications (aka modern DevOps).
• We also run a small blog, that we'd love to have folks contribute to.
• Join in on the editorial voice for our featured communities.
• We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work come first
  • If you're having a hard time finding time or are busy, we will always do our best to help and support you.

Applicants should have the following qualities:

• Experience moderating a diverse group of individuals from many geographic, religious, and LGBTQ+ backgrounds.
• Able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week.
• Excellent interpersonal skills and communication.
• Solid background in conflict resolution.
• Must be able to speak English.
• Works well asynchronously with remote teams.
• Grammar skills optional 😛

Bonus skills (which you will learn if you don't already)

• SQL / Business Intelligence software skills.
• N8N workflow automation
• Web Design (Hugo + GitHub Pages).
• Python scripting

Application process:

• It goes without saying that we will only be considering applicants with a significant positive history of online posts and/or comments, no trolls, please.
• Applicants must be okay with sitting for a video interview and must pass a basic background check.
• While not strictly required, a CV with relevant work and volunteer history will help during the application process.
• 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.

Please apply HERE https://forms.gle/epTdTy9Xh9kNFKsQA

(Edit: Updated post, thanks Donuts!)

(Edit2: Thanks for all the feed back on this post, it's much appreciated 💗💗💗)

(Edit3: If you feel like you'd fit in, apply, the req's that we posted are more of a suggestion, then a hard yes or no)

We just added Alexandrite to the server, it's an alternative desktop UI for Lemmy created by Sheodox who worked tirelessly to make the necessary changes to we could host it ourselves here. So go to https://a.lemmy.world and have a look!

He continues to update it constantly, you can follow the development on his github page or in his community. If you like what you see and want to support him, why not buy him a coffee? :)

For those who don't have Lemmy World as their home instance and want to use Alexandrite, either ask your instance admins to add it or go to https://alexandrite.app!

Edit: I should probably have mentioned that Alexandrite is meant for desktop!