The charts above show growth of active users on thelemmy.club (left) and lemmus.org which are suggested on join-lemmy.org. It shows that improvements to the official project site really have a (small) influence on user growth. There are also a few new features:
This past month we've been working on lemmy-ui bug fixes and visual improvements, and a few remaining lemmy back end issues to get ready for the 1.0 release. We've closed over 20 lemmy-ui milestone issues, and have only a few remaining. The only major issue left is performance-testing, to ensure all our database changes and optimizations are working correctly.
You can follow our progress with these milestone links:
If you'd like to see the new features and visual updates in production, you can visit voyager.lemmy.ml which deploys updates every night. Please help by testing the new features and reporting any problems.
If you have any experience with web development or want to learn it, consider contributing to lemmy-ui. It is written in standard Typescript with Bootstrap.
If you have experience with Kotlin or Android development, you can help contribute to lemmy's open source android app, Jerboa.
Thank you to everyone who has helped out with testing, development, spreading the word about lemmy, and building communities. Your help has brought lemmy from an idea to one of the most vital pieces of software in the fediverse.
Here are the major changes from February:
Full list of changes by user
malsadev
iByteABit256
flamingos-cant
dessalines
- Running cargo features prune
- Adding missing target columns for a lot of modlog actions.
- Dont check slur filter in apub verify, only rewrite them in from_json.
- Suggested community fixes
- Don't allow pool sizes below 2
- Allow viewing deleted tags, to be able to restore them.
- Adding viewer.js as an image expander.
- Add ability for mods to edit post nsfw and tags.
- In profile, dont show sort or view filters when uploads are selected.
- Cleaning up reports page.
- Fix enable_nsfw
- Fixing a first loading issue with create-post
- Fixing login / signup
- Making private message header bar match the others.
- Put show subscribed and show_sidebar on the same line as other selects.
- Adding loading as props, rather than faked as state
- suggested_multi_community_id
- Add dropdown labels
- Add show read post filter to home and community pages.
- Add consistent design for notification items.
- Add accept terms and conditions / legal checkbox on signup.
- Adding ability to mark comments as read from the notifications screen.
- Adding links and titles for community/multi-community settings.
- Fixing admin instance allows and blocks, adding filters and search.
- Close post editing form after saving.
- Responsive design rework for dropdowns and filters
- Fixing nonfinalresIds
Nutomic
- Include error cause in api response
- Rename translations folder
- Enable more lints from restriction group, use Rust 1.92
- Nested spoilers (fixes #5804)
- Move existing captcha logic to plugin (fixes #6148)
- Report to local instance admins should not be federated (fixes #6343)
- Fix random failure in tags test (fixes #6349)
- Sort outbox by newest first (fixes #6336)
- For federation make instance.published optional (fixes #6339)
- Enable connection timeout (ref #5112)
- Fix bug preventing comment fetch if parent creator deleted (fixes #6335)
- Disable link blocklist for federated community sidebar (fixes #6320)
- Add check for local instance in sitemap
- Add community, person last_refreshed_at to api
- Fix some wrong plugin hooks
- Rename translations folder
- Fix init for disallow_nsfw_content in site_form (fixes #3906)
- Captcha plugin
- Add admin setting for suggested communities (fixes #3434)
- Fix webpack warning by changing client target
- Fix lint no-floating-promises
- Fix lints for unsafe call
- Fix reload of admin settings (fixes #3884)
- Reduce vertical margins
- Show warning in community if instance is dead
- Fix vote percentage (fixes #3865)
- Add modlog input for community, communityId to query (fixes #3790)
- Remove usage of linkEvent (fixes #3791)
- Check if masonry is enabled before update (ref #3663)
- Remove permission for browser notifications (ref #3663)
- Enable typecheck lint (fixes #3812)
- Improvements for nsfw select
- Add endpoint for suggested instance (fixes #581)
- Darker theme colors
- Add nsfw select for instance list
- Upgrade to Infernojs 9
- Add lemmy.org to suggested (ref #545)
- Move suggested instances to state
- Add some more instance definitions, rename to InstanceMetadata
- Update readme
- Read gzip stats file, dont use async
- Changes to app screen
- Add chachara.club
- Instance filters in url
- Fix field name for crawl date
- Disable renovate
- Move app images to subfolder, remove unused
- Enable type checking, fix various lint errors
Or see the full list of changes at the links below:
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and Nutomic work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. The only available option are user donations.
To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached we can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
Looking forward to the community visibility feature.
There are bots on Lemmy that duplicate posts from sources like Reddit. They usually post into special locked communities on dedicated instances (such as lemmit.online). Most instances have banned these bots to avoid flooding the local feed with high-volume bot reposts. And this makes perfect sense.
But with the ability to unlist a community, we probably won't need to ban such bots and can instead ask their authors to unlist those automated communities. This way, people who want to occasionally read posts from niche Reddit communities can still access them without hurting proper Lemmy growth.