Please create or suggest Communities for Lemmy.world. I’m considering making Community creation for admins only, but for now it’s open to everyone.

I still see some federation issues:

• It sometimes takes a few tries before a remote post or community is found
• Remote replies don't show up
• Subscriptions to remote communties are stuck in 'pending'

I'll look into that.

I see we've just reached 100 users!! In 5 days..

In this post I will list the known issues or possible improvements for Lemmy.world.

Please comment with any issue or area for improvement you see and I will add it here.

Remember: this instance was only started June 1st so a lot of troubleshooting and tweaking to be done.

Issues can be:

• Local (lemmy.world) (also performance issues)
• Lemmy software issues
• Other software related (apps/Fediverse platforms etc)
• Remote server related
• (User error? ...)

Known issues

Websockets issues

There are some issues with the Websockets implementation used in Lemmy, which handles the streaming. Websockets will be removed in version 0.18 so let's hope these issues will be all gone then!

• Top posts page gets a stream of new posts ? Websockets issue
• You're suddenly in another post than you were before > Websockets issue
• Your profile will briefly display another name/avatar in the top right corner

Spinning wheel issues

Error handling is not one of Lemmy's strongpoints. Sometimes something goes wrong, but instead of getting an error, the button will have a 'spinning wheel' that lasts until eternity. These are some of the known cases:

• You want to create an account but the username is already taken
• You want to create an account but the username is too long (>20 characters)
• You want to create an account but the password is too long
• You want to create a community but the name is already taken
• You want to create a community but the name is not in all lowercase letters
• You want to create a post over 2000 characters
• You want to post something in a language that isn't allowed in the community

Other issues

• Federation not always working; Apparently not everything gets synced all the time. This needs troubleshooting.
• “404: FetchError: invalid json response body at http://lemmy:8536/api/v3/site” This sometimes happens when the Lemmy app container is very busy. Needs troubleshooting

Enhancement requests

• Can themes be added? > To be checked if this can be done without changing code.

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

I'm not happy with the performance, especially when clicking 'Post' it takes too long.

First I will upgrade this VPS from 2cpu/4GB to 4cpu/16GB.

Then I will tune the database (more shared_buffers to start with)

After that I'll see what more I can tune, together with the Lemmy admin channel.

lemmy.world just reached 1000 users.

Please remember that the server was created June 1st! So still might notice some startup issues... but so far so good! Welcome @all!

Installed latest image of Lemmy because it should fix some performance issues. Let's see if it improves some stuff.

(I'm creating a starting guide post here. Have patience, it will take some time...)

Disclaimer: I am new to Lemmy like most of you. Still finding my way. If you see something that isn't right, let me know. Also additions, please comment!

Welcome!

Welcome to Lemmy (on whichever server you're reading this)

About Lemmy

Lemmy is a federated platform for news aggregagtion / discussion. It's being developed by the Lemmy devs: https://github.com/LemmyNet

About Federation

What does this federation mean?

It means Lemmy is using a protocol (Activitypub) which makes it possible for all Lemmy servers to interact.

• You can search and view communities on remote servers from here
• You can create posts in remote communities
• You can respond to remote posts
• You will be notified (if you wish) of comments on your remote posts
• You can follow Lemmy users/communities on other platforms that also use Activitypub (like Mastodon, Calckey etc) (There's currently a known issue with that, see here

Please note that a server only starts indexing a server/community once it has been interacted with by a user of this server.

A great image describing this, made by @ulu_mulu@lemmy.world : https://imgur.com/a/uyoYySY

About Lemmy.world

Lemmy.world is one of the many servers hosting the Lemmy software. It was started on June 1st, 2023 by @ruud@lemmy.world , who is also running https://mastodon.world, https://calckey.world and others.

A list of Lemmy servers and their statistics can be found at FediDB

Quick start guide

Account

You can use your account you created to log in to the server on which you created it. Not on other servers. Content is federated to other servers, users/accounts are not.

Searching

In the top menu, you'll see the search icon. There, you can search for posts, communities etc.

You can just enter a search-word and it will find the Post-titles, post-content, communities etc containing that word that the server knows of. So any content any user of this server ever interacted with.

You can also search for a community by it's link, e.g. [!Netherlands@lemmy.nl](/c/Netherlands@lemmy.nl). Even if the server hasn't ever seen that community, it will look it up remotely. Sometimes it takes some time for it to fetch the info (and displays 'No results' meanwhile..) so just be patient and search a second time after a few seconds.

Creating communities

First, make sure the community doesn't already exist. Use search (see above). Also try https://browse.feddit.de/ to see if there are remote communities on other Lemmy instances that aren't known to Lemmy.world yet.

If you're sure it doesn't exist yet, go to the homepage and click 'Create a Community'.

It will open up the following page:

Here you can fill out:

• Name: should be all lowercase letters. This will be the /c/
• Display name: As to be expected, this will be the displayed name.
• You can upload an icon and banner image. Looks pretty.
• The sidebar should contain things like description, rules, links etc. You can use Markdown (yey!)
• If the community will contain mainly NSFW content, check the NSFW mark. NSFW is allowed as long as it doesn't break the rules
• If you only want moderators to be able to post, check that checkbox.
• Select any language you want people to be able to post in. Apparently you shouldn't de-select 'Undetermined'. I was told some apps use 'Undetermined' as default language so don't work if you don't have it selected

Reading

I think the reading is obvious. Just click the post and you can read it. SOmetimes when there are many comments, they will partly be collapsed.

Posting

When viewing a community, you can create a new post in it. First of all make sure to check the community's rules, probably stated in the sidebar.

In the Create Post page these are the fields:

• URL: Here you can paste a link which will be shown at the top of the post. Also the thumbnail of the post will link there. Alternatively you can upload an image using the image icon to the right of the field. That image will also be displayed as thumbnail for the post.
• Title: The title of the post.
• Body: Here you can type your post. You can use Markdown if you want.
• Community: select the community where you want this post created, defaults to the community you were in when you clicked 'create post'
• NSFW: Select this if you post any NSFW material, this blurs the thumbnail and displays 'NSFW' behind the post title.
• Language: Specify in which language your post is.

Also see the Lemmy documentation on formatting etc.

Commenting

Moderating / Reporting

Client apps

There are some apps available or in testing. See this post for a list!

Issues

When you find any issue, please report so here: https://lemmy.world/post/15786 if you think it's server related (or not sure).

Report any issues or improvement requests for the Lemmy software itself here: https://github.com/LemmyNet

Known issues

Known issues can be found in the beforementioned post, one of the most annoying ones is the fact that post/reply in a somewhat larger community can take up to 10 seconds. It seems like that's related to the number of subscribers of the community.

I'll be looking into that one, and hope the devs are too.

Apparently in some parts of the world it's already Monday June 12th. I see registrations going up.

This results in the server CPU staying around 70% even spiking over 90%. So I will upgrade the VPS from 4cpu/16GB to 8cpu/32GB.

Expect a few minutes downtime at 17:00 CET

I'm trying to fix this annoying slowness when posting to larger communities. (Just try replying here...) I'll be doing some restarts of the docker stack and nginx.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Edit: Well I've changed the nginx from running in a docker container to running on the host, but that hasn't solved the posting slowness..

So after we've extended the virtual cloud server twice, we're at the max for the current configuration. And with this crazy growth (almost 12k users!!) even now the server is more and more reaching capacity.

Therefore I decided to order a dedicated server. Same one as used for mastodon.world.

So the bad news... we will need some downtime. Hopefully, not too much. I will prepare the new server, copy (rsync) stuff over, stop Lemmy, do last rsync and change the DNS. If all goes well it would take maybe 10 minutes downtime, 30 at most. (With mastodon.world it took 20 minutes, mainly because of a typo :-) )

For those who would like to donate, to cover server costs, you can do so at our OpenCollective or Patreon

Thanks!

Update The server was migrated. It took around 4 minutes downtime. For those who asked, it now uses a dedicated server with a AMD EPYC 7502P 32 Cores "Rome" CPU and 128GB RAM. Should be enough for now.

I will be tuning the database a bit, so that should give some extra seconds of downtime, but just refresh and it's back. After that I'll investigate further to the cause of the slow posting. Thanks @veroxii@lemmy.world for assisting with that.

We're still working to find a solution for the posting slowness in large communities.

We have seen that a post does get submitted right away, but yet the page keeps 'spinning'

So right after you clicked 'Post' or 'Reply' you can refresh the page and the post should be there.

(But maybe to be sure you could copy the contents of your post first, so you can paste again if anything would go wrong..)

Hey there lemmings!

It's your friendly neighbourhood Sun-Spider here. I recently volunteered as a mod on this community, so I just wanted to introduce myself and let you know my plans.

Many of you will have seen that there are a lot of off-topic posts in this community right now. I suspect that new users, especially ones not yet familiar with how Lemmy and the fediverse work, are seeing it as a kind of default community or a place to generally discuss the world of Lemmy.

However, as it says in the sidebar, this is a community about the lemmy.world instance specifically. If it's going to serve as that, then it can't be drowned in off-topic posts.

To that end, I plan to start going through and removing posts that are not discussing this instance, with two exceptions.

Firstly, I know that some of these posts are providing good info to new users coming from Reddit, so I'd like to not take those down just yet. Since this is such a visible community, keeping them has value. Therefore highly upvoted posts that are specifically for newcomers from Reddit may get left.

Secondly, I know that removing posts with many upvotes and comments could be seen as overly harsh. While we don't have a karma system here, if you had a post that has done well then suddenly seeing it removed is painful. Therefore if a post is off topic, but is nonetheless highly upvoted, then I may instead simply lock the post. This preserves the content, but prevents further engagement. This should mean that it gradually falls off the front page, whose default sort is Active.

TLDR

• Posts that are not about the lemmy.world instance specifically will be removed, with the following exceptions:
• Some posts providing value to new users will be left
• Some posts with high engagement may be simply locked

Update

Check out the new communities !newcomers@lemmy.world and !general@lemmy.world! These are intended to be a good home for a lot of the content that's getting removed/locked.

I just installed the 0.18.0 release candidate 1 of the lemmy-ui component.

This version removes websockets and should solve many strange issues. Like the glitching vote totals, sudden changes of posts etc.

Let me know if you see improvements, or new issues.

I enabled the ipv6 address for lemmy.world. Should work now.

Next step would be enable dnssec, have to figure out how that worked again.

Thanks to a comment by @LargeHardonCollider@lemmy.world , I checked and saw that 'Federation debugging' mode was enabled. I had enabled that when the server just started (less than 3 weeks ago) and I had an issue with federation.

I thought I had switched that off again, but apparently not. This mode causes the federation to be done in the foreground, so your 'Post' or 'Comment' action will wait for that to finish...

This solves the most annoying issue, and makes the site way more useable. There are many other issues, but we'll get there.

So some spam signups just happened (all username12345678@gmail.com format e-mail) This caused bounced mail to increase, causing Mailgun to block our domain to prevent it getting blacklisted.

So:

• Mail temporarily doesn't work
• I closed signups for now
• I will ban the spam accounts
• I will check how to prevent (maybe approval required again?)

Stay tuned.

Edit: so apparently there is a captcha option which I now enabled. Let's see if this prevents spam. Registrations open again.

Edit2 : Hmm Mailgun isn't that fast in unblocking the domain. Closing signups again because validation mails aren't sent

Edit 3: I convinced Mailgun to lift the block. Signups open again.

I wrote my fist post about Lemmy.world. When June is finished, I'll also include Lemmy in the financial update on the same blog.

I added some known issues with websockets / spinning wheel to the known issues post

The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.

But we can't upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.

Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won't work with servers older than 0.18. So if you're on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.

We've upgraded lemmy.world to 0.18.1-rc.1 and rolled back that upgrade because of issues.

(If you had posted anything in those 10 minutes between upgrade and rollback, that post is gone. Sorry!)

The main issue we saw is that users can't login anymore. Existing sessions still worked, but new logins failed (from macos, ios and android. From linux and windows it worked)

Also new account creation didn't work.

I'll create an issue for the devs and retry once it's fixed.

Edit Contacted the devs, they tell me to try again with lemmy-ui at version 0.18.0. Will try again, brace for some downtime!

Edit 2 So we upgraded again, and it seemed to work nicely! But then it slowed down so much it was unuseable. There were many locks in the database. People reported many JSON errors. Sorry, we won't be on 0.18.1 any time soon I'm afraid..

We're closing this thread. Everything that could be said has been said. Thank you

Original Post:
Today, we want to inform everyone that we have decided to defederate from https://exploding-heads.com/. We understand that defederating should always be a last resort, and individuals can certainly block communities. However, blocking alone does not prevent potential harm to vulnerable communities.

After carefully reviewing the instance, reported posts, and multiple comments from the community, we have concluded that exploding-heads is not adhering to the Lemmy or Citizen Code of Conduct. Therefore, we cannot, in good faith, continue to federate with an instance that consistently promotes hate, racism, and bullying.

Examples:
https://lemmy.world/post/577526 - Community Moderator Harassment
https://exploding-heads.com/post/92194 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/90780 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/91488 - Systemadmin Post
https://exploding-heads.com/post/93725 - Community Moderator Post

Again, deciding to defederate from an instance is not taken lightly. In the future, we will continue to review instances on a case-by-case bases.

As for our community, please refrain from posting or commenting with hateful words as well. Arguing back and calling people names is not the solution. The best course of action is to report the posts or comments violating our server rules.

Lemmy Code of Conduct
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
Citizen Code of Conduct https://github.com/stumpsyn/policies/blob/master/citizen_code_of_conduct.md

“We are committed to providing a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.”

So I've been troubleshooting the federation issues with some other admins:

(Thanks for the help)

So what we see is that when there are many federation workers running at the same time, they get too slow, causing them to timeout and fail.

I had federation workers set to 200000. I've now lowered that to 8192, and set the activitypub logging to debugging to get queue stats. RUST_LOG="warn,lemmy_server=warn,lemmy_api=warn,lemmy_api_common=warn,lemmy_api_crud=warn,lemmy_apub=warn,lemmy_db_schema=warn,lemmy_db_views=warn,lemmy_db_views_actor=warn,lemmy_db_views_moderator=warn,lemmy_routes=warn,lemmy_utils=warn,lemmy_websocket=warn,activitypub_federation=debug"

Also, I saw that there were many workers retrying to servers that are unreachable. So, I've blocked some of these servers:

commallama.social,mayheminc.win,lemmy.name,lm.runnerd.net,frostbyrne.io,be-lemmy.org,lemmonade.marbledfennec.net,lemmy.sarcasticdeveloper.com,lemmy.kosapps.com,pawb.social,kbin.wageoffsite.com,lemmy.iswhereits.at,lemmy.easfrq.live,lemmy.friheter.com,lmy.rndmm.us,kbin.korgen.xyz

This gave good results, way less active workers, so less timeouts. (I see that above 3000 active workers, timeouts start).

(If you own one of these servers, let me know once it's back up, so I can un-block it)

Now it's after midnight so I'm going to bed. Surely more troubleshooting will follow tomorrow and in the weekend.

Please let me know if you see improvements, or have many issues still.