Let’s start with the biggest news first: Lemmy is receiving funding from the NLnet foundation! The funding is for a total amount of 45.000 €, which will allow /u/dessalines and me (/u/nutomic ) to work on Lemmy full-time for at least half a year.

We have created various milestones for the work we are planning to do. Most of them are about getting ActivityPub federation ready for production. In addition, we will work on:

  • better accessibility
  • private communities and instances
  • reworking search
  • creating a joinlemmy.ml type site
  • the option to block other users or communities

The details of the milestones will be posted on our github issue tracker soon.

We’re very excited about this opportunity, and can’t wait to finish federation.

In other news, we have just released Lemmy v0.7.0. Most importantly, this update switches to Pict-rs for image hosting, due to various performance-related issues with Pictshare. Pict-rs was coded from scratch in Rust by the amazing @asonix, who also created the ActivityPub library for Rust. We can’t thank him enough for all the work he is doing for Lemmy!

We’d also like to thank the following people for their contributions:

  • @iav for their work in building arm compatible rust docker images and builds.
  • @ernestwisniewski and @bytesnake for code contributions.
  • Many others for contributing translations via the Lemmy weblate.
  • Our Patreon and Liberapay supporters who help us devote more time to Lemmy (We’re still very far from these being able to sustain two developers)
  • Everyone else who contributes to Lemmy, be it by coding, hosting instances or just using it and spreading the word!

Other than that, since v0.6.0 in January we’ve closed over 100 issues, fixed tons of bugs and added many new features.

You can find the full changelog and upgrade instructions here.

Edit: Here are the milestones for the funding

  • k_o_t
    12·
    5 years ago

    Lemmy is receiving funding from the NLnet foundation!

    While that’s certainly a positive thing, I feel obligated ask about the nature of this funding? Does it carry with it any obligations from Lemmy/leverage for NLnet?

    • DessalinesMA
      21·
      5 years ago

      To add, the projects nlnet helps fund can give you an indication of how cool a foundation they are: stuff like searx, wireguard, meilisearch, matrix, nextcloud, funkwhale, pixelfed…

    • nutomicOPMA
      18·
      5 years ago

      We gave them a list of milestones that we are going to work on, and then signed a “Memorandum of Understanding”. We will get the agreed amount of money in the form of a donation once we finish a milestone. There is no company Lemmy or anything like that, we are just doing this as individuals.

  • magicalprivacy
    12·
    5 years ago

    Thank you for all the work you’re doing! I hope to see Lemmy as a place open to all that gets better than the crap that Reddit is becoming. I’ll make sure I contribute as much as I can!

  • andycuccaro
    9·
    5 years ago

    Awesome news, guys! Lemmy is looking better every day :grinning face with smiling eyes:

  • IngrownMink4
    8·
    5 years ago

    Congratulations! I love this social network and the users who are part of it! I will try to contribute by translating the social network into my native language, Basque, so that more people can use it :)

  • zaggynl
    8·
    5 years ago

    Great news! I’ve upgraded without issue on my own instance, lemmy.zaggy.nl, it’s open for testing, break away, I have snapshots.
    I apologize for the ongoing nonsense topics and Dutch.

  • z11h
    8·
    5 years ago

    Congrats! Excited for the future of this site!

  • Hactar
    8·
    5 years ago

    I’ve been in the matrix chat for a month or so and love the project. I’m glad to see that it’s gaining a lot of momentum due to the funding and HN exposure. Just became a patron on Patreon, and good luck with the dev work!

  • DelishVeg
    8·
    5 years ago

    Congrats guys, awesome news. Thanks for all you do

  • gregf
    7·
    5 years ago

    Congratulations to the devs, this is great news!