As of deep last light (cest), the error was identified and tchncs started to inform other servers about the events they were missing out on. It wasn't processing one of the outgoing queues correctly due to a well hidden typo in a configfile – causing one of the federation senders not identifying itself correctly.

You may run into a few recent messages that can't be decrypted, but otherwise everything federation related should be back to normal.

Sorry about this mess and thanks to everybody who has helped in identifying the issue.

Well hello again, I have just learned that the host that recently had both nvme drives fail upon drive replacement, now has new problems: the filesystem report permanent data errors affecting the database of both, Matrix server and Telegram bridge.

I have just rented a new machine and am about to restore the database snapshot of the 26. of july, just in case. All the troubleshooting the recent days was very exhausting, however, i will try to do or at least prepare this within the upcoming hours.

Update

After a rescan the errors have gone away, however the drives logged errors too. It's now the question as to whether the data integrety should be trusted.

Status august 1st

Well ... good question... optimizations have been made last night, the restore was successful and ... we are back to debugging outgoing federation :(

The new hardware also will be a bit more powerful... and yes, i have not forgotten that i wanted to update that database. It's just that i was busy debugging federation problems.

References

• federation issues after restore: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/16025
• why we had to restore initially: https://text.tchncs.de/tchncs/about-the-matrix-incident-on-july-26-2023

Just in case we have people here who could not see the infobox on the statuspage due to adblockers :)

Crossgeposted von: https://lemmy.ml/post/2540925

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2540874

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Other than that, there are numerous bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Support development

@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency (scroll to bottom of page)

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker. There are no config or API changes with this release.

This upgrade takes ~5 minutes for the database migrations to complete.

You may need to run sudo chown 1000:1000 lemmy.hjson if you have any permissions errors.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

This instance was updated a little while ago.

You might have heard of the recent security incident on some instances – that specific xss fix had been added to this instance in advance. However, there are no custom emojis yet, which was the source of that incident. But .... I'll likely add some soon. :)

Crossgeposted von: https://lemmy.ml/post/1808829

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

This release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these. Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as possible.

As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by community members.

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Support development

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

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Hey there, many of you worried after recent registration bot waves on other instances and now after the temp captcha removal for this Lemmy release.
It was fine until now, but it looks like the bored kids with their bots have now found this server. Approval of new signups is now required again. Especially sad as this does not scale well.

Crossposted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1465740

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Major Changes

HTTP API instead of Websocket

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

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

Two-Factor Authentication

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

Custom Emojis

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

Other changes

Progressive Web App

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

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

Error Pages

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

Route Changes

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

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

The new route would look like this:

https://lemmy.ml?listingType=All

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

Searchable select redesign

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

Share button

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

Lemmy-UI Overall look and feel

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

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

Database optimizations

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

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

Captchas

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

Upgrade instructions

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Support development

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

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. No one likes recurring donations, but they've proven to be the only way that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.

Anytype ist eine E2EE Notion Alternative – die so lange Invite-only war, dass Leute spekuliert haben, ob es nur Vaporware sei.

Ich habe eben zufällig den Downloadlink gefunden: https://download.anytype.io/ – außerdem heißt es auf Reddit, dass das Ding Anfang/Mitte Juli endlich opensource werden soll.

-> Community Beta Release & Alpha Migration Trail Guide

Hello there friendly users!

Update 3:50pm CEST
The container has been moved, most work on the new host has been completed. There are some permanent data errors on the original storage pool, but it does not like it affected this linux container. Please give DNS and federation a moment.

Some (but only a few) of you have experienced an outage today around 5-8am CEST. This – as far as my current findings go – happened due to a filesystem panic. So far, i only experienced such a thing on virtual servers with a certain amount of load.

Even tho relatively speaking, i didn't feel like there was much to worry about with the current setup and its utilization, i feel like when looking at a potential second wave from Reddit, this instance should be prepared – so i just did a thing:

What we are moving to

We will be moving from a Netcup RS 4000 G9.5 KVM with 32 GB memory and 10 dedicated EPYC cores, (that was meant for various smaller tchncs services such as XMPP, Email, Clouds, Websites and stuff and lots of headroom), to a Hetzner serverauction baremetal thing with an Intel Core i7-7700, 2x SSD M.2 NVMe 512 GB, 64 GB DDR4 Mem, 1 Gbit Networking in Finland.

I plan to migrate today as soon as the thing is ready and configured. There will be a downtime of up to 1 hour.

Lemmy will share its seat on the machine with the tiny Calckey instance that was deployed around the same time.

Increased monthly cost: around 40 EUR

Note on the thing Meta is developing with ActivityPub federation support:
I am not a friend of Meta and am happy to keep it out of my life an off of my servers. However there are lots of rumors and barely any confirmed informations around the project. I will act accordingly once more is known. I also won't make any exceptions in terms of enforcing our rules. However i won't participate in signature lists for pre-blocking everything Meta and run around in circles, screaming in panic.

Oh noes, that short community list 😱 – but hey, some have been shown to the instance already! 🎊
An instance needs to learn the network either organically from interactions or by getting pointed to nice places of the fediverse.

Finding a community

You might have seen the instancelist already. You can view their communities and subscribe to them from tchncs. Also check out browse.feddit.de for finding all teh nice communities across instances.

Syntax

The syntax for a community is !community.
The syntax for a remote community is [!community@server.xyz](/c/community@server.xyz)
The searchbox also understands full links like https://lemmy.ml/c/unixporn

Show this server a community:

Note: make sure you are searching the fediverse. Do not filter for local, which might be your default!

1. Go to the search and look up a remote community that you either found on the network or simply guessed.
2. The server will now try to subscribe to it in the background
3. After a while the ui will refresh and show the community as a search result. This might take a few seconds. (otherwise see below).
4. If you want to make sure, just search again after a few seconds or check the community-list and you should find what you were looking for.

If it's stuck at pending

There currently are many discussions around this. Right not it seems like it still works, even tho it says pending.