245
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

Hello World,

as many of you know, several newer Lemmy versions have been released since the once we are currently using.

As this is a rather long post, the TLDR is that we're currently planning for late January/early February to update Lemmy.World to a newer Lemmy release.

We're currently running Lemmy 0.19.3 with a couple patches on top to address some security or functionality issues.

As new Lemmy versions have been released, we've been keeping an eye on other instances' experiences with the newer versions, as well as tracking certain issues on GitHub, which might impact stability or moderation experience.

We updated to Lemmy 0.19.3 back in March this year. At that point, 0.19.3 had been released for a little over a month already and at that point all the major issues that troubled the earlier 0.19 releases had been addressed.

Several months later, in June, Lemmy 0.19.4 was released with several new features. This was a rather big release, as a lot of changes had happened since the last release. Only 12 days later 0.19.5 was released, which fixed a few important issues with the 0.19.4 release. Unfortunately, Lemmy 0.19.5 also introduced some changes that were, and to some part are still not fully addressed.

Prior to Lemmy 0.19.4, regular users may see contents of removed or deleted comments in some situations, primarily when using third party apps. Ideally, this would have been fixed by restricting access to contents of removed comments to community moderators in the communities they moderate, as well as admins on each instance. Deleted comments will be overwritten in the database after some delay, but they might still be visible prior to that. This is especially a problem when moderators want to review previously removed comments to either potentially restore them or to understand context in a thread with multiple removed comments. Lemmy modlog does not always record individual modlog entries for bulk-removed items, such as banning a user while also removing their content would only log their ban but not the individual posts or comments that were removed.

We were considering writing a patch to restore this functionality for moderators in their communities, but this is unfortunately a rather complex task, which also explains why this isn't a core Lemmy feature yet.

While admins can currently filter modlog for actions by a specific moderator, this functionality was lost somewhere in 0.19.4. While this isn't something our admin team is using very frequently, it is still an important feature to have available for us for the times we need it.

This also included a few security changes for ActivityPub handling, which resulted in breaking the ability to find e.g. Mastodon posts in Lemmy communities by entering the post URL in the search. It also caused issues with changes to communities by remote moderators.

The 0.19.4 release also broke marking posts as read in Sync for Lemmy. Although this isn't really something we consider a blocker, it's still worth mentioning, as there are still a lot of Sync for Lemmy users out there that haven't noticed this issue yet if they're only active on Lemmy.World. Over the last 2 weeks we've had nearly 5k active Sync for Lemmy users . This is unfortunately something that will break during the upgrade, as the API has changed in upstream Lemmy.

There are also additional issues with viewing comments on posts in local communities that appear to be related to the 0.19.4/0.19.5 release, appear to be a lot more serious. There have been various reports of posts showing with zero comments in Sync, while viewing them in a browser or another client will show various comments. It's not entirely clear to us right now what the full impact is and to what extent it can be mitigated by user actions, such as subscribing to communities. If anyone wants to research what is needed to restore compatibility and potentially even propose a patch for compatibility with both the updated and the previous API version we'll consider applying it as a custom patch on top of the regular Lemmy release.

If there won't be a Sync update in time for our update and we won't have a viable workaround available, you may want to check out !lemmyapps@lemmy.world to find potential alternatives.

There were also several instances reporting performance issues after their upgrades, although they seemed to mostly have been only for a relatively short time after the upgrades and not persistent.

Lemmy 0.19.6 ended up getting released in November and introduced quite a few bug fixes and changes again, including filtering the modlog by moderator. Due to a bug breaking some DB queries, 0.19.7 was released just 7 days later to address that.

Among the issues fixed in this release were being able to resolve Mastodon URLs in the search again and remote moderators being able to update communities again.

0.19.6 also changed the way post thumbnails generated, which resulted thumbnails missing on various posts.

A month later, now we're in December, 0.19.8 was released.

One of the issues addressed by 0.19.8 was Lemmy returning content of removed comments again for admins. For community moderators this functionality is not yet restored due to the complexity of having to check mod status in every community present in the comment listing.

At this point it seems that most of the issues have been addressed, although there seem to still be some remaining issues relating to thumbnails not reliably being created in some cases. We'll keep an eye on any updates on that topic to see if it might be worth waiting a little longer for another fix or possibly deploying an additional patch even if it may not be part of an official Lemmy release yet at the time.

While we were backporting some security/stability related changes, including a fix for a bug that can break federation in some circumstances when a community is removed, we accidentally reverted this patch while applying another backport, which resulted in our federation with lemmy.ml breaking back in November. This issue was already addressed upstream a while back, so other instances running more recent Lemmy versions were not affected by this.

Among the new features released in the Lemmy versions we have missed out on so far, here are a couple highlights:

  • Users will be able to see and delete their uploads on their profile. This will include all uploads since we updated to 0.19.3, which is the Lemmy version that started tracking which user uploaded media.
  • Several improvements to federation code, which improve compatibility with wordpress, discourse, nodebb.
  • Fixing signed fetch for federation, enabling federation with instances that require linked instances to authenticate themselves when fetching remote resources. Not having this is something we've seen cause issues with a small number of mastodon instances that require this.
  • Site bans will automatically issue community bans, which means they're more reliable to federate.
  • Deleted and removed posts and comments will no longer show up in search results.
  • Bot replies and mentions will no longer be included in notification counts when a user has blocked all bots.
  • Saved posts and comments will now be returned in the reverse order of saving them rather than the reverse order of them being created.
  • The image proxying feature has evolved to a more mature state. This feature intends to improve user privacy by reducing requests to third party websites when browsing Lemmy. We do not currently plan on enabling it with the update, but we will evaluate it later on.
  • Local only communities. We don't currently see a good use for these, as they will prevent federation of such communities. This cuts off users on all other instances, so we don't recommend using them unless you really want that.
  • Parallel sending of federated activities to other instances. This can be especially useful for instances on the other side of the world, where latency introduces serious bottlenecks when only sending one activity at a time. A few instances have already been using intermediate software to batch activities together, which is not standard ActivityPub behavior, but it allows them to eliminate most of the delays introduced by latency. This mostly affects instances in Australia and New Zealand, but we've also seen federation delays with instances in US from time to time. This will likely not be enabled immediately after the upgrade, but we're planning to enable this shortly after.

edit: added information about sync not showing comments on posts in local communities

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 11 points 10 hours ago

Wait, mods can undelete and revert edits? That's not scary at all...

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 22 points 10 hours ago

not at all. nobody can revert edits, only the creator can edit it again.

moderators can restore removed (mod action) posts and comments, but not deleted (creator action) posts and comments.

[-] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 6 points 9 hours ago

Ah, that makes sense.

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 29 points 19 hours ago

Thank you for all you do to make this place so great. I have promised myself to sign up to Patreon specifically to support the server as soon as I have a job. You provide all of this for us for free and I would like to give back.

Obviously going to do that $8 tier. I need that non-offer!

[-] frankspurplewings@lemmy.world 9 points 15 hours ago

Can you link the patreon please?

[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 10 points 15 hours ago

Sure! It's also linked to in the sidebar on the front page along with other donation options:

https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld

(I know that says "mastodonworld," but it supports three .world servers including lemmy.world.)

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago
[-] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

My mistake. I thought it said three on the Patreon.

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 6 points 14 hours ago

it does indeed. i've let @ruud@lemmy.world know.

[-] Syrc@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

There seems to be an issue with Youtube links posted from .world accounts not showing thumbnails, is this related to the thumbnail bug in the post?

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

this is a completely different issue than the one seen on the newer lemmy versions unfortunately. i believe that issue in newer lemmy versions is already prepared to be addressed in the next lemmy release.

for some reason youtube/google decided that hetzner customers don't get any opengraph metadata anymore, so it doesn't really matter which lemmy or even client in general we use. fetching youtube pages with curl yields the same result where the necessary metadata isn't included.

this also affects other instances hosted on hetzner.

see also https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/31308

[-] Syrc@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago

Ouch. Thanks for the answer.

So I’m guessing we shouldn’t expect it to work in the near future unless the folks at YT change their metadata output, correct?

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 4 points 9 hours ago

Unfortunately at this point I don't see another option.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 4 points 12 hours ago
[-] Syrc@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

Dang, I found nothing on c/lemmysupport but didn’t think of searching on c/fediverse, thanks.

…though I’m still kinda lost, is the TL;DR just that posts from non-.world accounts are all using the 0.19.4 function to manually add thumbnails?

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 12 hours ago

Not an expert, but that's my understanding

[-] Serinus@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago

Appreciate the communication. It's nice that a large instance works to be stable, both in tech and in your organization (a non-profit foundation based in the Netherlands). It sure beats hosting it out of my basement server as my personal pet project.

[-] ticoombs@reddthat.com 11 points 21 hours ago

Thank you for the update and it's good to hear your upcoming plans. Being one of those people in Australia (Reddthat) it will be good to see if it actually works as it's designed too!
I'd love to save $7/m to not have a server dedicated to batching the federation traffic 😅

When you lay out the timelines for 0.19.3 onwards no time at all has gone by, and having to deal with the issues after .3 has certainly not been fun as an admin. (And I'm only a small server compared!)
Being such a huge player in our Lemmyverse, thanks for taking the time to plan this out as I know how much testing has been done to get us this far.

It's always a nice experience chatting to the LW team!
Hope your updates go smoothly!

[-] Godnroc@lemmy.world 47 points 1 day ago

I like the stable pace of updates. Good work!

[-] Tarquinn2049@lemmy.world 18 points 1 day ago

Thank you for taking updates as seriously as you do. Making sure to only update when it is overall a good idea to do so. I'm sure you get no shortage of flak for being out of date. Thank you for being able to stand up to that.

Your well thought out decision process on everything is what reassures me I found a good home. And your open and honest posts about every major decision are nice to read when I initially disagree with a decision made, until I see why it was made.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 7 points 22 hours ago

Nice to see this post !

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 17 points 1 day ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Re: Sync users

I haven't been able to view comments on posts on any local communities since the update unless I'm the poster or mod of the community.

No idea why.

Edit: there's no outrage about this, so I may be alone, which is more frustrating, but maybe there's just that many of you still on LW

Edit: each Lemmy.world user replying proved that point lol.

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago

I was surprised to see such a large part of our active users using Sync, although given that there aren't really any bad breakages yet it shouldn't be that unexpected.

The comments in local communities issue seems a lot more serious than "only" not marking posts as read, I've read about that before and totally forgot about it since. There were quite a few threads in !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world about that.

If anyone wants to spend some time on figuring out which change exactly broke this for Sync we might consider a patch to restore compatibility with the old API if it's simple enough to do. I probably won't have time to look into this much until somewhere in January, and my time will probably be better spent with migration preparation and testing of Lemmy itself there.

People looking for alternatives might find some inspiration in !lemmyapps@lemmy.world.

[-] Plastic_Ramses@lemmy.world 5 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

The only issues i run across using Sync are glide ocassinaly failing to grab an image which i dont think is an exclusively Sync related problem.

I am running the most current version of Sync available on the Play Store via android.

[-] can@sh.itjust.works 1 points 15 hours ago

It's possible it's only me and I'm just unlucky tbh.

[-] kratoz29@lemm.ee 7 points 1 day ago

The app is beyond broken for me since it stopped supporting mark read on scroll... The worst thing is that AFAIK this "new" change is just a minor code fix... But the dev is missing.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[-] ByteMe@lemmy.world 4 points 21 hours ago

I'm not sure I understood the update schedule tho😅. Are you planning for an update ? Is there an ETA?:))

[-] 4Robato@lemmy.world 8 points 21 hours ago

They are waiting a bit more to see if some fix arrives or not:

we're currently planning for late January/early February to update Lemmy.World to a newer Lemmy release.

A bit more detail:

We'll keep an eye on any updates on that topic to see if it might be worth waiting a little longer for another fix or possibly deploying an additional patch even if it may not be part of an official Lemmy release yet at the time.

[-] ByteMe@lemmy.world 2 points 20 hours ago

Oh, I guess I missed them. Thanks a lot! I hope devs have the time to update their apps until then too

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 16 hours ago

Those new versions have been around for a while, Voyager and other apps updated a while ago for other instances

[-] ByteMe@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Some others haven't like sync boost and eternity. I think

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 16 hours ago

Sync seems okay: https://feddit.org/post/6031775/3789768

Boost and Eternity not sure, their communities are not that active

Maybe you can post on !lemmyapps@lemmy.world to have people from other instances using those apps to share their experiences?

[-] MrKaplan@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

there's another sync issue where posts in local communities don't show any comments, i had forgotten about that. there are several posts in !syncforlemmy@lemmy.world about that issue, as well as 2 issues on the github issue tracker.

[-] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 15 hours ago

Ah, good to know!

load more comments
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2024
245 points (98.0% liked)

Lemmy.World Announcements

29157 readers
284 users here now

This Community is intended for posts about the Lemmy.world server by the admins.

Follow us for server news 🐘

Outages 🔥

https://status.lemmy.world

For support with issues at Lemmy.world, go to the Lemmy.world Support community.

Support e-mail

Any support requests are best sent to info@lemmy.world e-mail.

Report contact

Donations 💗

If you would like to make a donation to support the cost of running this platform, please do so at the following donation URLs.

If you can, please use / switch to Ko-Fi, it has the lowest fees for us

Ko-Fi (Donate)

Bunq (Donate)

Open Collective backers and sponsors

Patreon

Join the team

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS