Lemmy v0.18.1 Release

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.

53 comments

No joke, this is probably the best update anyone can do for lemmy at the moment. The performance improvements are massive
- Yeah, like, I press upvote and I get no spinner. How crazy is that?!
  Great job devs :)
  
  I do, I'm on .lm if they reduce it by half it's fast enough for anyone to never complain again
- I had become so adapted to the latencies on lemmy.ml (which had gotten pretty bad at some times in the day) that I honestly for a short while felt the new update was too fast.
  The improvement is really significant!
  What's the go from admins? Does lemmy now take up substantially fewer resources than it used?
  
  Based on graphs by @ruud@lemmy.world. It's safe to assume, yes, there was a HUGE improvement
  
  Yeah I thought something was maybe wrong until I saw this post. Massive improvement.
- So was 0.18.0. In fact I think the next few releases will all be like this.
  (just cheekily testing to make sure federation didn't break between updates)

Can captchas be setup to create communities? That would prevent a lot of spam communities I’m seeing.
- You can open an issue for it.

Thanks for your hard work! Lemmy is really taking off and it's showing how people can communicate without a corporation in the middle. Somehow this has been lost on younger internet users. They think they need to go to some big tech site to connect to other people. Who made those guys our overlords? Fuck them.
- This is a new way to communicate for many people & I am exited to learn more as time progresses.
  
  I love it. And notice how most people are incredibly nice to eachother here? I remember when browsing reddit sometimes, it was easy to feel like people were really trying to insult eachother, push eachother down and act like they were the smartest little person ever to be born on the planet.
  I see none of that here. Its such a wonderful place right now.

Awesome work, big thanks to all who contributed!
- Right back atcha!

I DID IT MOM. I CONTRIBUTED TO LEMMY

The momentum of Lemmy is very impressive as of late!
- For sure. We've been going full speed for what feels like a month now, but thanks to all those identifying an, helping fix performance issues, we have a little breathing room now. 🤞

The performance difference is ridiculous...everything feels faster.
Thank you so much!
- Any concrete examples?
  
  It used to take like 7 seconds to upvote and most of the times it did not work and now it does almost instantly

Thanks for the great work! According to Christian the revenue received by reddit per user per year was $1.50 (optimistically). I just set up a donation on liberapay of $15 per year with the idea that if 10% of Lemmy users donate $15 per year then Lemmy will receive the same income per user as Reddit.
- joining that 10% now 🤞 let’s keep this thing running
- I donated 12 usd, to make it 1 usd per month, without even knowing I am so close to some real value.
  It will be interesting in a year to see the costs instances have.

Thank you for all of your hard work! Lemmy is my very first selfhosted app and I'm impressed how easy it is spin up a new instance. It inspired me to learn coding from scratch, starting with TheOdinProject, and it's been fun so far. Can't wait to contribute to lemmy a few years from now :D!

Great, thank you. The network is much more stable and working solid!
- Thanks!

I’m really encouraged by the growing number of new contributors with each post.

This release includes major improvements to performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to @phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these.
Love to see the community coming together to improve things !

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
according to my calculations you are at about 6808$ , is that enough?
Might be worth setting up some fundraising goal, for example if you want 10K a month for two devs and the result will be lower that might incentivize people to donate (patreon has that feature, iirc drew devault created software that can add up the results from various platforms) .
And don't be afraid to ask for a salary comparable to other tech companies , you do good meaningful work and deserve every cent (even if you feel like the money is not really needed now, you might start families and those can be expensive ... )

Thank you guys
- No probs!

The difference in performance is noticeable and I love the ability to change themes in the platform itself. Thank you two for this release, it's awesome.

Thanks devs and contributors❤️

Great job, everyone!

Great work! It really is amazing how much better Lemmy works now compared to only 2 weeks ago.

@dessalines as always: well done, thank you!

Quite a noticeable performance difference with this update over the last several hours. Good stuff 👍

Great work devs!

Is viewing kbin instances fixed?
- In general, yes. Lemmy 0.18.1 does federate again with kbin, mastodon and all the others.
  But I think there are still some issues with lemmy.ml and kbin.
  Not exactly sure why, but I have them informed already 🙂