Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.
We failed to publish the update last Friday as scheduled, so this update contains more changes than usual. We also added @dullbananas as maintainer for the Lemmy backend repo.
@matc-pub reduced the amount of data that needs to be fetched by the browser for rendering lemmy-ui, by loading only translations which are actually used.
@flamingo-cant-draw added a URL Blocklist, to prevent link spamming.
@SleeplessOne exposed Lemmy errors in the Rust API. In lemmy-ui he added a badge for number of local subscribers to a community and added a UI to see and edit community visibility. In the leptos UI, he made the UI use the lemmy-client crate for API requests.
@Nutomic fixed synchronization of featured posts. He added a ‘delete content’ checkbox for account deletion which was missing from previous releases. He also fixed various bugs related to password reset, signed fetch from Mastodon, search listing type, password reset and 2FA. He updated the federation library with security improvements. Added dont require leading ! or @ for webfinger resolve. Fixed video thumbnail generation.. Added including an apub hashtag with a post.
@Dessalines added a new API endpoint for users to hide posts. He made various moderation improvements, such as removing content from local communities when a remote user is banned or purged, viewing mod action history and report history for specific posts and comments. Additionally he added an alt_text field for posts, and a new user setting for vote display mode. Also added extra fields to PostReport and CommentReport views. Has also, along with @MV-GH, been making many improvements to Jerboa.
In personal news, @nutomic’s daugher will be born next month. Afterwards he will take a break from Lemmy to take care of her for some months.
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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
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In personal news, @nutomic’s daugher will be born next month.
Aww. Congrats man! Happy to hear that. Have fun with your daughter on your break and don’t worry too much about the project! As always, thanks for your work!
Thank you :)
Congratulations!
Great works as always and congrats nutomic do take needed break and don’t worry about lemmy .
Thanks, I hope nothing bad will happen while I’m gone :D
Congratulations @nutomic
Good stuff! Thanks for all that you guys do for Lemmy and the open internet
No probs!
Thank you for doing this. It’s really helpful for users like me who are intimidated by GitHub.
Dont require leading ! or @ for webfinger resolve looks particularly exciting.
Congrats nutomic . Have fun with your daughter and don’t worry about the project cheers.
Thanks for posting this, really highlights all the hard work, and congrats @nutomic!
Alt-texts in posts were sorely lacking so i’m very grateful that it’s an official feature now.
Nice!
A quick suggestion. I personally would prefer if you mention what you will be working on rather than what you’ve completed. It creates more excitement to know what’s coming next. I also find it easier to understand issues than pull requests.
I actually have a question: is it possible to make crossposts more unifying (i.e. crossposted posts gets the same page with comments from across lemm) instead of splintering. It sounds kinda nightmarish on who hosts what and blocking things, but maybe it can be done?
I don’t see how that would work with federation, as there would be multiple separate groups of community mods (and also admins) who could remove comments.
hypothetically? small table of binary flags which comment trees to show/hide. But yeah too complicated, especially who hosts the main full tree of comments :(
That kinda defeats the purpose of federation, no?
I mean why? If you post topic of interest for several instances, you would have one discussion with differing viewpoints (but not too different, cause those instances would be cross-blocked). Maybe i don’t understand the purpose of crossposts now then, why would you cross post if people will see it anyways on some instance?
He made various moderation improvements, such as removing content from local communities when a remote user is banned or purged
Does this mean when a user is banned, all of their previous comments and posts are deleted? I understand the usefulness of the change, but I think this maneuver could get rid of a lot of useful information too, be it a misclick, a temporarily high tempered staff member, or user behavior that goes against instance rules but do not warrant deletion of their content (because they were not a spammer, neither a serial liar).
When the user is unbanned, is their content restored, or it is unrecoverably deleted on a ban?
Also, about the last part: does that mean that when the remote user has been banned locally, or when they are banned on their hosting instance?
Its optional to remove their content when banning.
Unfortunately if you want to restore their comments, you’ll have to unban them, and go to each comment individually to restore. Its not database deleted, so its all recoverable.
Thanks for a lot for the update. I wouldn’t say that auto apub hashtags is a good change. IMO they will spam the mastodon hashtags and should be implemented properly and extensively with customization and optionality.
I would say that this should be made into an RFC and current implementation removed before next realase.
I see a lot of mod tools improvements. That’s great to hear.
I personally think it’s a good idea overall and would take it a step further. It should hashtag “lemmy”, the instance it was posted on and the comm it was posted to. That way when you’re on mastodon you can subscribe to a lemmy comm by subscribing to its hashtag.
Being able to have the (almost)[Mastodon lacks downvoting] full Lemmy experience from a completely different website is what makes the federation so great.
Yes, I don’t oppose the hashtags as a concept. I am just saying that they should be fleshed out in a RFC before they would be implemented half way into production.
As is stands current implementation is sub optimal.
I think this might convince the Mastodon devs to fix their rendering of Lemmy posts, and then this will be a good thing
also Lemmy itself might find a way to make use of hashtags
Thank you for all your work and congratulations to Nutomic! Best wishes!
