1y ago

Lemmy v0.18.3 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 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.

76 comments

80% reduction is crazy! Good job!

80% is wizard like, great work, thanks phiresky@lemmy.world!
- That particular improvement is actually mine. Lemmy was storing a lot of federation data which was completely unused so I removed it. However the 80% improvement is actually overstated, because not all data was migrated to the new table. So the db will grow a bit bigger over time, but still much smaller than before.
  Phiresky made a lot of other sql optimizations which make Lemmy snappier and reduce CPU usage on the server. We don't have any benchmarks in that regard, but server load on lemmy.ml has gone down a lot since upgrading.
  
  Thanks for the clarification! Your stewardship along with everyone collaborating in work and donations makes for a wonderful project. Really demonstrates the power of people working together to provide spaces outside of the control of corporate interests that are destroying other platforms.
  
  Do we need to run a full vacuum after upgrade? And for that matter, is the data not used truncated during upgrade?

80%?? Legend
- It was actually easy because a lot of data was stored which was never used at all.
  
  Shhh let me compliment youuuu
  
  I was saving that data, you never know when it might come in handy.

Update on lemmy finances (not including cryptocurrencies)
patreon: $1,591/month
liberapay: $374.22 per week (about 1609 per month)
open collective: $2082 (29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023)
Assuming 63K active users , the per user monetization of 0.08 dollar per user (Reddit's revenue per monthly user is roughly $1.19).
Estimated developer salary for the two main developers is about 2600$, estimated median salary for developer in the US is about 10K a month.
For comparison firefish made about 1424$ ((29/6/2023 -> 29/7/2023) with an active users count of 11868 (or 8146 if you don't count calckey, which i think is important because they added a pop up asking for donation, but i don't know if that is after the name change) so that gives a per user monetization of 0.11 dollar per user ( or 0.17 not counting calckey).
Corrections are welcomed.
- Thanks for the insight!

I want to clarify that most/ a lot of the DB work of this release actually came from others e.g. nutomic, RocketDerp, Sh4d ;)
- Thank you all for your work!

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !lemmy_support@lemmy.ml
- I think they know what they're doing, bot
  
  It's just that the text is copied directly from join-lemmy.org, which requires actual links.

🙏 Thank you Devs.
Kind People, please donate .
- As a donor I had to spend some amount of time finding where to donate, that could be more explicit

Thank you for your and the contributors' work!

Upgraded without issue (other than manually restarting docker after upgrading)! Thanks!
I did it with Lemmy-Easy-Deploy by simply running sudo ./deploy.sh -y
- Same, updated effortlessly.

well my Lemmy backups did exceed 10MB, but the 0.18.3 database optimizations brought me under 10MB again lol
undefined

11M Jul 28 22:35 bak-lemmy-2023-07-28_22.35.52.zip 8.8M Jul 28 22:39 bak-lemmy-2023-07-28_22.38.59.zip
(hosting an instance with communities but no users doesn't need much hardware at all btw)
- Willing to share any numbers? How many communities and how many resources?
  
  there's not a lot on there
  https://lemmy.mods4ever.com/communities
  10 communities, few hundreds of subs, maybe like 30 posts
  unzipped storage usage:
  undefined
  
  # du -h --max-depth=2 . | sort -h 8.0K ./volumes/lemmy-ui 9.5M ./volumes/pictrs 76M ./volumes/postgres 85M . 85M ./volumes
- undefined
  
  1,4G jul 29 19:15 lemmy_dump_2023-07-29_19_01_51.sql.gz 262M jul 30 12:58 lemmy_dump_2023-07-30_12_56_35.sql.gz

Neat!
If you can, please keep supporting the devs with some resources.

docker compose down && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d update was flawless. nice!
- You can pull new images while the old ones continue running happily. That docker-compose down command is completely unnecessary.
  @ohai
  @dessalines
  
  that's fair, just force of habit, i guess. thanks for the heads up! :)
- docker compose down &&
  Looks like the & parsing in code blocks is another bug in 0.18.3 like the post title one. I'll add your comment to the GitHub issue.

Please make Lemmy easily crawable by search engines so people can get useful search results
- It is, the problem is search engines aren't designed to deal with federation. Ty search-lemmy.com for one that is

Heads-up that a new issue on GitHub reporting this problem upgrading from 0.18.2 to 0.18.3:
thread 'main' panicked at 'Couldn't run DB Migrations: Failed to run 2023-07-08-101154_fix_soft_delete_aggregates with: syntax error at or near "trigger"', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:221:25 note: run with 'RUST_BACKTRACE=1' environment variable to display a backtrace
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3756
If you use "Lemmy from scratch" install,
you may be on an older PostgreSQL that Ubuntu distro provides, not the same as the Docker install method.
- Yes, I had to upgrade from Postgres 13 to get this working. I’m not sure if there’s a minimum Postgres version specified anywhere in the docs, I took a quick look but couldn’t find it.
  For anyone else running Debian like me, you can add the official Postgres repo and use the pg_upgrade script to migrate to the new version.
  
  I’m not sure if there’s a minimum Postgres version specified anywhere in the docs, I took a quick look but couldn’t find it.
  I do not find it in the "From Scratch Install" documentation. I will work to revise those documents this weekend to warn people that 0.18.3 and later is incompatible. Thank you again for sharing.

Thank you for all of your hard work devs! I'm a supporter with monthly payments.

Upgraded! No issues.
Again, thank you for your amazing work!! :D

Ran into this issue with database migrations:
Failed to run 2023-07-08-101154_fix_soft_delete_aggregates with: syntax error at or near "trigger"', crates/db_schema/src/utils.rs:221:25
Will open an issue on GitHub.
- That has to do with you running a custom install with an older postgres that lemmy doesn't support.
  
  I'll update to a newer Postgres version and report back. It would be nice to know what the minimum supported version is, maybe that should be added to the documentation.
  EDIT: Upgrading to Postgres 15 resolved my issue, but not without some pain since the migration scripts had already tried to run on my Postgres 13 database. So after dumping the 13 database, I had to make some modifications after the fact to satisfy the migration scripts. It was a pretty janky process but I seem to be in a good place now.
  I would highly advise communicating to people that they should upgrade past Postgres 13 before trying to upgrade Lemmy to 0.18.3 or higher, or you're gonna have a bad time.
- Thank you for sharing.

80% is a massive improvement! Nice work!

Thank you for the continuing work! Just one bug report: when I click to load lemmy (either .world or .ml) from my homepage of various links, I'm logged out. If I refresh the page though, I'm logged in!
- You might have to clear your browser cache, we saw that issue a few times with lemmy-ui 0.18.0
  
  Thank you, I just did. The problem remains.

Super straightforward upgrade via docker compose, thanks for all the hard work ❤️

Thanks to everyone who are working hard on these improvements! You guys are awesome.

you're all amazing! thank you and keep up the good work!

I wish clicking this link would actually show the context instead of just refreshing the page.
- yeah, the comment thread navigation is broken. the same is true for following “More Reply” links deeper into a thread

And... upgraded. Thanks!

and again, docker images for arm64 are ready as well :)

I think Lemmy is cool if search engines crawls the contents easily so people can get useful answers
- Can't we already use https://search-lemmy.com/? I actually found some answers so my questions today thanks to it
  
  That’s awesome. I was wondering just today that lemmy may have already accumulated enough content to provide hits for a number of searches.

Amazing, thank you!

Great news!

Sunday, lemmy.ml is performing better than I have seen it in 60 days. I did get errors on Saturday and significant lag. Not sure if activity is just today or what, but it's really been fast in routine browsing.

Heads-up for anyone who compiles the Rust code from source and is testing/integrating their own manual changes/patches to the code... the main git branch is not what Lemmy 0.18.3 is based on. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3602
- For rust app developers, the publishing of lemmy_api_common crate is also discontinued with this release: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/5cd4c6c5868c8bec964b6065d079f3a057885be7
  For LASIM I switched to point at the Git Repo + Specific Tag in my Cargo.toml.

It's been amazing to watch Lemmy evolve over the years, the project has come such a long way. Kudos on the amazing work!
- @yogthos I need your help, you're a moderator on the platform “lemmygrad.ml”, to avoid redundancy, please read this post.
  https://mastodon.social/users/HormoneNeurotransmitterRecepto/statuses/111550570002306073
  @dessalines
  
  looks like the ban reason was conspiracy https://lemmygrad.ml/modlog?page=1&actionType=ModBan&userId=394827
  which I assume refers to this post
  https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/3195775

@dessalines
@LemmyDev
This is a repost from the matrix channel.
My account was banned on the platform “https://lemmygrad.ml” without any explanation & indefinitely after not using it for 1 or 2 days, here's my profile “https://lemmygrad.ml/u/abieNathanTheyThem”.
How can this be undone?

Amazing thank you! Would love to see "awards" implemented similar to reddit, would be a great fundraising tool for instances.
- Normally, I'd be against the concept of awards. However, considering this is a completely free reddit-like app without ads, I'd be completely fine with awards so the creators can get at least some amount of money out of it.

I am sorry to all the never-joined, never-stayed users of Lemmy in May, June, July 2023 "Tweet is X", "Reddit is $API" ------ because I could not draw enough attention and developers to Github Issue #2910 avoidance. I failed entirely in my social effort I tried to do for 60+ days. I really failed, brain damaged fuck-up I am. The worst failure in my life, and it's the end of the line.
- Ummm … what is going on here? Is this a spat between you and the devs?