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.

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.

  • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.com
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
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      1 year ago

      That has to do with you running a custom install with an older postgres that lemmy doesn’t support.

      • wpuckering@lm.williampuckering.com
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        1 year ago

        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.