Hey all,

In light of recent events concerning one of our communities (/c/vegan), we (as a team) have spent the last week working on how to address better some concerns that had arisen between the moderators of that community and the site admin team. We always strive to find a balance between the free expression of communities hosted here and protecting users from potentially harmful content.

We as a team try to stick to a general rule of respect and consideration for the physical and mental well-being of our users when drafting new rules and revising existing ones. Furthermore, we've done our best to try to codify these core beliefs into the additions to the ToS and a new by-laws section.

ToS Additions

That being said, we will be adding a new section to our “terms of service” concerning misinformation. While we do try to be as exact as reasonably able, we also understand that rules can be up to interpretation as well. This is a living document, and users are free to respectfully disagree. We as site admins will do our best to consider the recommendations of all users regarding potentially revising any rules.

Regarding misinformation, we've tried our best to capture these main ideas, which we believe are very reasonable:

• Users are encouraged to post information they believe is true and helpful.
• We recommend users conduct thorough research using reputable scientific sources.
• When in doubt, a policy of “Do No Harm”, based on the Hippocratic Oath, is a good compass on what is okay to post.
• Health-related information should ideally be from peer-reviewed, reproducible scientific studies.
  • Single studies may be valid, but often provide inadequate sample sizes for health-related advice.
  • Non-peer-reviewed studies by individuals are not considered safe for health matters.

We reserve the right to remove information that could cause imminent physical harm to any living being. This includes topics like conversion therapy, unhealthy diets, and dangerous medical procedures. Information that could result in imminent physical harm to property or other living beings may also be removed.

We know some folks who are free speech absolutists may disagree with this stance, but we need to look out for both the individuals who use this site and for the site itself.

By-laws Addition

We've also added a new by-laws section as well as a result of this incident. This new section is to better codify the course of action that should be taken by site and community moderators when resolving conflict on the site, and also how to deal with dormant communities.

This new section provides also provides a course of action for resolving conflict with site admin staff, should it arise. We want both the users and moderators here to feel like they have a voice that is heard, and essentially a contact point that they can feel safe going to, to “talk to the manager” type situation, more or less a new Lemmy.World HR department that we've created as a result of what has happened over the last week.

Please feel free to raise any questions in this thread. We encourage everyone to please take the time to read over these new additions detailing YOUR rights and how we hope to better protect everyone here.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#80-misinformation

https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/

Sincerely,

> FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

---

EDIT:

We will be releasing a separate post regarding the moderation incident in the next 24-48 hours, just getting final approval from the team.

EDIT 2 (2024-08-31):

We've posted a response, sorry for the delay.

👉 https://lemmy.world/post/19264848 👈

Hello World,

we know one of the most important indicators of comment and post community interest is votes. Beyond that, reports help to regulate comments and posts that go beyond down-votes and into the rule-breaking territory.

Unfortunately, Lemmy's current reporting system has some shortcomings. Here are a few key technical points that everyone should be aware of:

• Reports are NOT always visible to remote moderators. (See Full reports federation · Issue #4744 · LemmyNet/lemmy · GitHub)
• Resolving reports on a remote instance does not federate if the content isn't removed.
• Removal only resolves reports in some cases, e.g. individual content removal. Some people remove individual content before banning the user, especially when the ban is with content removal, as individual content removals resolve reports on all instances. Bans with the remove content checkbox selected will not currently resolve reports automatically.

Our moderators are also volunteers with other demands on their time: work gets busy, people take vacations, and life outside of Lemmy goes on. But that doesn't mean content that causes distress to users should stick around any longer than reasonable. Harmful content impacts both Lemmy.world users AND users of all other instances as well. We always strive to be good neighbors.

While the devs work on the technical issues, we can work to improve the human side of things. To help keep the reports queue manageable and help reports be resolved in a REASONABLE amount of time we will be enabling global notifications for all stale reports. Open reports older than 1 day will trigger a notification for 1 week every 2 days so as not to overwhelm community moderators endlessly. If a community moderator does not wish to receive these reports, they may simply block the bot, but we still expect them to address unresolved reports.

We expect that this feature will eventually be removed once Lemmy has a better reporting system in place.

As an aside, we recommend that all LW communities have at least two moderators so there is some redundancy in resolving reports themselves, and to reduce the workload on individual moderators. We know this can be harder for smaller communities, but this is just a recommendation.

We recommend that moderators have alt accounts on Lemmy.world to resolve reports that are from federated instances.

As always feedback is welcome. This is an active project which we really hope will benefit the community. Please feel free to reply to this thread with comments, improvements, and concerns.

Thanks!

> FHF / LemmyWorld Admin team 💖

Additional mods

We recommend using the Photon front-end for adding mods to your community.

With the standard lemmy-ui, additional mods can only be appointed if the account has made a post or comment in the community.

Photon (<https://p.lemmy.world>) does not have this limitation. You can use the community sidebar, click Gear (settings) icon, then click the Team tab, and add any user as a mod.

Finally a new blog post about all our instances and the finances..

Intro

We would like to address some of the points that have been raised by some of our users (and by one of our communities here on Lemmy.World) on /c/vegan regarding a recent post concerning vegan diets for cats. We understand that the vegan community here on Lemmy.World is rightfully upset with what has happened. In the following paragraphs we will do our best to respond to the major points that we've gleaned from the threads linked here.

Links

• https://lemmy.world/post/18829828
• https://lemmy.world/post/18817262

---

Actions in question

Admin removing comments discussing vegan cat food in a community they did not moderate.

The comments have been restored.

The comments were removed for violating our instance rule against animal abuse (https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#11-attacks-on-users). Rooki is a cat owner himself and he was convinced that it was scientific consensus that cats cannot survive on a vegan diet. This originally justified the removal.

Even if one of our admins does not agree with what is posted, unless the content violates instance rules it should not be removed. This was the original justification for action.

Removing some moderators of the vegan community

Removed moderators have been reinstated.

This was in the first place a failure of communication. It should have been clearly communicated towards the moderators why a certain action was taken (instance rules) and that the reversal of that action would not be considered (during the original incident).

The correct way forward in this case would have been an appeal to the admin team, which would have been handled by someone other than the admin initially acting on this.

We generally discuss high impact actions among team before acting on them. This should especially be the case when there is no strong urgency on the act performed. Since this was only a moderator removal and not a ban, this should have been discussed among the team prior to action.

Going forward we have agreed, as a team, to discuss such actions first, to help prevent future conflict

Posting their own opposing comment and elevating its visibility

Moderators' and admins' comments are flagged with flare, which is okay and by design on Lemmy. But their comments are not forced above the comments of other users for the purpose of arguing a point.

These comments were not elevated to appear before any other users comments.

In addition, Rooki has since revised his comments to be more subjective and less reactive.

---

Community Responses

The removed comments presented balanced views on vegan cat food, citing scientific research supporting its feasibility if done properly.

Presenting scientifically backed peer reviewed studies is 100% allowed, and encouraged. While we understand anyone can cherry pick studies, if a individual can find a large amount of evidence for their case, then by all accounts they are (in theory) technically correct.

That being said, using facts to bully others is not in good faith either. For example flooding threads with JSTOR links.

The topic is controversial but not clearly prohibited by site rules.

That is correct, at the time there was no violation of site wide rules.

Rooki's actions appear to prioritize his personal disagreement over following established moderation guidelines.

> Please see the above regarding addressing moderator policy.

---

Conclusions

Regarding moderator actions

We will not be removing Rooki from his position as moderator, as we believe that this is a disproportionate response for a heat-of-the-moment response.

Everybody makes mistakes, and while we do try and hold the site admin staff to a higher standard, calling for folks resignation from volunteer positions over it would not fair to them. Rooki has given up 100's of hours of his free time to help both Lemmy.World, FHF and the Fediverse as a whole grown in far reaching ways. You don't immediately fire your staff when they make a bad judgment call.

While we understand that this may not be good enough for some users, we hope that they can be understanding that everyone, no matter the position, can make mistakes.

We've also added a new by-laws section detailing the course of action users should ideally take, when conflict arises. In the event that a user needs to go above the admin team, we've provided a secure link to the operations team (who the admin's report to, ultimately). See https://legal.lemmy.world/bylaws/#12-site-admin-issues-for-community-moderators for details.

TL;DR In the event of an admin action that is deemed unfair or overstepping, moderators can raise this with our operations team for an appeal/review.

Regarding censorship claims

Regarding the alleged censorship, comments were removed without a proper reason. This was out of line, and we will do our best to make sure that this does not happen again. We have updated our legal policy to reflect the new rules in place that bind both our user AND our moderation staff regarding removing comments and content. We WANT users to hold us accountable to the rules we've ALL agreed to follow, going forward. If members of the community find any of the rules we've set forth unreasonable, we promise to listen and adjust these rules where we can. Our terms of service is very much a living document, as any proper binding governing document should be.

Controversial topics can and should be discussed, as long as they are not causing risk of imminent physical harm. We are firm believers in the hippocratic oath of "do no harm".

We encourage users to also list pros and cons regarding controversial viewpoints to foster better discussion. Listing the cons of your viewpoint does not mean you are wrong or at fault, just that you are able to look at the issue from another perspective and aware of potential points of criticism.

While we want to allow our users to express themselves on our platform, we also do not want users to spread mis-information that risks causing direct physical harm to another individual, origination or property owned by the before mentioned. To echo the previous statement "do no harm".

To this end, we have updated our legal page to make this more clear. We already have provisions for attacking groups, threatening individuals and animal harm, this is a logical extension of this to both protect our users and to protect our staff from legal recourse and make it more clear to everyone. We feel this is a very reasonable compromise, and take these additional very seriously.

See Section 8 Misinformation

Sincerely, FHF / LemmyWorld Operations Team

---

EDIT: Added org operations contact info

Hello Lemmy.World users,

yesterday we had an incident where human error lead to accidental removal of 2FA for all Lemmy.World users. Until the mistake had been corrected and the original state had been restored where possible, 2FA was not enforced for any logins, even if the user enabled 2FA prior to this.

Timeline (all times in UTC):

Approximately at 2024-08-09 09:30 MFA had been removed for all users due to a mistake when MFA was intended to be reset for an individual user. Around 2024-08-09 22:10 we became aware of the issue due to a user reporting that they were no longer prompted for 2FA on login. We immediately started an investigation to determine the root cause for this and discovered the mistake that was done earlier. Once the root cause was identified we started working on restoring the original state. At 2024-08-10 01:10:00 2FA had been reactivated for all users that previously had 2FA enabled and hadn't reactivated it on their own since. After additional investigation to identify affected users with 2FA that had logged in during this period, we have sent out individual messages with information about logins to their accounts during this period.

Although less than 2% of our active users have 2FA enabled, we are committed to keep our user accounts as secure as reasonably possible, and we will review our processes for resetting 2FA for individual users going forward to reduce the risk of this happening again in the future. Fortunately our robust backup database backups allowed us to revert the exact state we had just before this change happened, allowing us to restore the original 2FA secrets for all affected users. During this period, we have observed a total of 824 logins. 18 of these logins were done by 14 users who had 2FA disabled. Notifications to all affected users who we observed logins for during this period have been sent shortly after publishing this post. 2 users had reactivated their 2FA already on their own, so we have not reverted their 2FA to the previous state.

If you have any concerns that your account may have been compromised during this period due to the lack of 2FA enforcement feel free to reach out to us via email to info@lemmy.world or via PM to @lwadmin@lemmy.world.

Hey everyone,

We wanted to address a common situation we've seen over the years with some large online forums, reaching out to moderators for questions and concerns.

Typically a good first line of contact is to use the Report button for any posts that need moderator attention. This will open a report for both the community moderators and the site admins. This is normally enough for most larger communities with active mod staff. You may also reach out to your community mods, they're here to help. 💖

We do encourage our communities to take care of their own and want them to always feel empowered to run themselves as they see fit (provided they are following the global site rules). Issues can arise for some smaller communities with only one moderator or situations where the local mod staff is inactive for one reason or another for an extended time.

In these situations, we've seen folks email our ticket system, and while we will try and get back to them, this ticket system tends to get end-user support cases mixed in (as well as a low stream of spammers trying to buy ads 🙄).

What we do want, is to provide a more direct line of contact to the site-admin team, so when ANYONE needs to reach out to us when something is amiss, they can get a timely response. While the team all are on a few different platforms, this tends to create a fragmented approach of not just the WHO, but the HOW to contact us.

While we as a team use our internal chat platform, we want to find a happy middle ground between @'ing us each directly in random chats, and issues sitting for too long in our ticket system.

This new system would be for PRIVATE Messages as a supplement to our Lemmy.world Support community, which we do monitor very closely, and our ticket email info@lemmy.world, both for more technical issues. Think of it like the bat signal 🦇🎆!

To this end, we've created two methods for reaching the site-mod team directly.

• A Lemmy Bot User that will relay DMs: https://lemmy.world/u/lwreport
• A dedicated email account: report@lemmy.world
  • We've also provided a Keyoxide profile https://keyoxide.org/hkp/report@lemmy.world for PGP / authenticity

We hope that between both an anonymous platform approach AND a secure email-based approach, we can keep everyone happy 💝

In closing, please, always try and reach out to your community mods FIRST, they usually will know best how to handle a difficult or tricky situation, and use this only when you feel you need to reach out now.

---

• The FHF/Lemmy.World Admin team 💓

Hey all, We are planning to do a Docker upgrade tomorrow 6/30 Sunday, around 1800 UTC. The whole site will be down during the upgrade, but should only be down for a short while. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up. Thanks!

• @jelloeater85@lemmy.world

Hey everyone,

The Fedihosting Foundation is looking for a new site-admin for Lemmy.World, to help our busy team. This moderator will help with reviewing and acting on reports, weighing in on user content, and helping foster our local communities while acting as a friendly neighbor to other fediverse instances.

You also DO NOT need to have an account on one of our FHF services but WILL have to create an account after joining. Users from other sites WELCOME!

Benefits:

• You'll get to work with a great team of passionate kind, goofy individuals from all over the (lemmy) world!
• We have weekly virtual hangouts where we brainstorm new ideas and catch up with each other. Community for us is not just a buzzword.
• We can also provide work and personal references, as we are a registered legal non-profit.
• While not a technical role, you will also gain exposure to best-in-class industry tooling and processes for large-scale hosted applications (aka modern DevOps).
• We also run a small blog, that we'd love to have folks contribute to.
• Join in on the editorial voice for our featured communities.
• We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work come first
  • If you're having a hard time finding time or are busy, we will always do our best to help and support you.

Applicants should have the following qualities:

• Experience moderating a diverse group of individuals from many geographic, religious, and LGBTQ+ backgrounds.
• Able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week.
• Excellent interpersonal skills and communication.
• Solid background in conflict resolution.
• Must be able to speak English.
• Works well asynchronously with remote teams.
• Grammar skills optional 😛

Bonus skills (which you will learn if you don't already)

• SQL / Business Intelligence software skills.
• N8N workflow automation
• Web Design (Hugo + GitHub Pages).
• Python scripting

Application process:

• It goes without saying that we will only be considering applicants with a significant positive history of online posts and/or comments, no trolls, please.
• Applicants must be okay with sitting for a video interview and must pass a basic background check.
• While not strictly required, a CV with relevant work and volunteer history will help during the application process.
• We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2), so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

Please apply HERE https://forms.gle/epTdTy9Xh9kNFKsQA

(Edit: Updated post, thanks Donuts!)

(Edit2: Thanks for all the feed back on this post, it's much appreciated 💗💗💗)

(Edit3: If you feel like you'd fit in, apply, the req's that we posted are more of a suggestion, then a hard yes or no)

cross-posted from: https://toast.ooo/post/3740832

> turns out I did my math wrong, so it’s a little less than 30 days > > # July 12th, 2024 @ midnight EDT > > https://canvas.fediverse.events > > ✨ this year’s event also supports the entire fediverse not just Lemmy! > > (you have to be able to make/receive text posts, like mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed, etc) > (peertube accounts will not work) > > you can get update announcements on other fedi platforms with @canvas@fediverse.events link > > chat about Canvas on Matrix or Discord (they’re bridged)

What’s the Problem?

Over the past few weeks we have been receiving large amounts of activity requests from kbin instances, primarily kbin.social. The issue is intermittent and the root cause is unknown. It appears as though some process occasionally gets stuck in a loop on the kbin side. For example, a legitimate user may upvote a post in one of our communities, causing kbin to send an upvote action, then an undo action, then an upvote action again, an undo action again, and on and on.

This is not straining lemmy.world’s infrastructure at the moment. However, it does create enough network traffic to be problematic for the Lemmy network in general because these activity requests get passed on to other instances. Some instances have already struggled to keep up with normal traffic from lemmy.world due to how Lemmy processes activity requests (see https://reddthat.com/post/15383278, for more info). When this kbin issue occurs it multiples our outbound traffic and makes the problem worse. The additional activity requests can easily triple the number of outgoing activities from lemmy.world to other instances.

Short-Term Fixes

As a temporary fix we are currently blocking all incoming activity requests from kbin.social. Users on that site are effectively "read-only" in lemmy.world communities at the moment.

We are hoping to replace the current block with a rate limit on incoming kbin activities. Unfortunately, it may take a few days before the lemmy.world infrastructure team has time to implement that.

We were initially banning the individual users whose actions were being repeated, with the intention of unbanning them when the repeated requests stopped. However, the problem has persisted, and that game of whack-a-mole is manual and too time-consuming. It also gives the impression that those users had done something wrong, which is not the case.

Long-Term Solution

We have reached out to Ernest, who is the kbin dev and kbin.social admin. So far we have not received a response. Ultimately, this appears to be a bug on the kbin side. Hopefully he will be able to dig into this issue soon and resolve it. Until then, we will try to mitigate it on our end as best we can.

We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for bearing with us.

For some recent history regarding this issue please see these comments: https://lemmy.world/comment/9081380 https://lemmy.world/comment/8961882 https://lemmy.world/comment/9330566

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!

Sooo...

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

> =Sincerely, > Fedihosting Foundation

PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

Removal of piracy communities

Hello world!

Some of you will already have noticed that we have removed some piracy related communities from Lemmy.World during the last day.

Lack of communication

First off, we want to address the lack of communication.

Not everyone in our current admin team has been with us long enough to be aware of the previous issues and discussions related to these communities and the impact this has on our community.

We should absolutely have published this announcement when or before we removed the communities, not hours later. After realizing this mistake, we would have liked to write this a lot earlier already, but we were all busy with irl things, that we just didn’t have time for it.

Lemmy.World is run by volunteers on their personal time, nobody here gets paid for what we do.

Removed communities

Next, we want to explain how we got to the decision to remove these communities.

!crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com

A lot of the recent content posted to this community included images instructing users to visit a specific website to obtain a copy of the release that the post is about. These instructions were in the form of Type in Google: visit-this.domain. The domain referenced in these posts is entirely focused on video game piracy and providing people with access to copyright infringing material.

While there may be legal differences between whether one is linking to specific content on a domain or just linking to the domain itself, such as linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy compared to linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/, we do not consider this to be clear enough in laws and previous lawsuits that linking to just the domain is acceptable, if that domain is primarily about distributing copyright infringing material. We therefore do not allow linking to such domains. Additionally, we do not see a significant difference between posting a link directly to a website and embedding said link in an image, so we treat them equally.

!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

This community is, for the most part, just about discussing various topics related to piracy. We do not at all mind discussion about this topic, and if it had been limited to that, this community would be fine.

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is willing to accept this content on their instance, as well as the potential legal risk coming from this, which they’re free to do.

We do not plan to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com, is a great person, and we have no problems with him as a person. This is just a matter of different risk tolerance.

!piracy@lemmy.ml

Same as !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

Why have the piracy communities been restored previously? What changed?

Currently, based on the memories of team members involved in the decision back then, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the community moderators and Lemmy.World admins in how the community will be moderated going forward, as well as which types of content are allowed.

Lemmy.World expected/assumed that links to websites primarily focused on facilitating distribution of pirated content would be disallowed in these communities.

The community moderators however do tolerate references to such websites, as long as people are not linking to individual content directly.

We suspect that this may have been missed during our original review when restoring the communities, which lead us to previously restoring these communities.

Why now?

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

Terms of Service clarification

Last, as we’ve reviewed our Terms of Service, we have updated our wording here to make it more clear what is and what isn’t allowed when it comes to piracy. This was already covered by "Do not post illegal content of any type. Do not engage in any activity that may […] facilitate or provide access to illegal transactions" in section 4, but we have now added section 4.1 to better explain this.

We apologize for the delays in communication.

Currently we have an images issue. Our Wasabi (S3) account was disabled because of some illegal content that was found, we're working with them to get the account re-enabled and the content removed.

[Update 20240308 14:47 UTC] The issue has been fixed.

There's some unrest because the Open Collective Foundation is stopping.

Don't worry, we use Open Collective Europe as a donations platform, they're going nowhere.

We've added some donation platforms, so if you would like to support us running our .world servers, you can do so here:

• Ko-Fi‬ (Preferred because of low fees)
• Liberapay
• PayPal
• Patreon
• OpenCollective
• Bunq

And for those wanting to donate crypto:

• Monero address: 83tnuFN4f28jRxTBW9qGDad2U23qNE5nfeW4Pfyd85oWMW7J9gqpXi3S8FDbX5uEeCAKcGnSpS2XT5dGwYiELthg8XuDrxH
• Cardano address: addr1v9qv6xvfwcx9ny56uag4umu6238sw2e7ff2kcxl3qe7p9esayjxgu

Thank you!

[Edit] Some of the links were broken, they should now all work! [Edit 20240314: Added Liberapay]

[Update - March 3rd 2024 , 21:14 CET]

The update seems to have worked well. The database migration took some time, but after that it looks everything works as far as we tested. Let us know what you think! And if you like our work, check the donations links in the sidebar ;-)

(As you might notice, the new comments are shown YELLOW, that's not a bug, it's apparently a new feature in Lemmy...)

---

Hey everyone,

We wanted to announce that we will be attempting to upgrade Lemmy.World to version 0.19.3 on Sunday. The update will start at 2024-03-03 1900 UTC and should hopefully take no more than 2 hours. In the event there are issues, we will roll back to 0.18.5. In the event of a roll back, any data created by users will be lost, so we'll try our best to avoid this!

Hopefully downtime should be minimal &lt;3

During the upgrade, please feel free to make yourself at home on our Matrix and Discord chat rooms.

Lemmy.World Pub

Matrix

Please follow Lemmy.World (@LemmyWorld@mastodon.world) - Mastodon for updates.

As usual, status can be tracked by visiting https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

Thanks for your patience in waiting for us. Stability is king for us!

-LW Tech Group

Just wanted to keep everyone in the loop. If you encounter an issue where you cannot post or comment, but voting is functioning correctly, it is most likely because we have implemented a block for VPN &amp; Tor users. If you are using these services, you can still take part in activities such as voting, reporting posts, and performing other passive actions on the site. We implemented this restriction because of users posting illegal content.

See https://lemmy.world/post/11571711

While we value our users' right to privacy, we also prioritize the protection of both ourselves and our users. We want to emphasize that we weigh the pros and cons of restrictions like these with the entire team. We do not take these actions lightly, and we hope everyone understands the reasoning behind it.

Dear Lemmy.world Community,

Recently posts were made to the AskLemmy community that go against not just our own policies but the basic ethics and morals of humanity as a whole. We acknowledge the gravity of the situation and the impact it may have had on our users. We want to assure you that we take this matter seriously and are committed to making significant improvements to prevent such incidents in the future. Considering I'm reluctant to say exactly what these horrific and repugnant images were, I'm sure you can probably guess what we've had to deal with and what some of our users unfortunately had to see. I'll add the thing we're talking about in spoilers to the end of the post to spare the hearts and minds of those who don't know.

Our foremost priority is the safety and well-being of our community members. We understand the need for a swift and effective response to inappropriate content, and we recognize that our current systems, protocols and policies were not adequate. We are immediately taking immediate steps to strengthen our moderation and administrative teams, implementing additional tools, and building enhanced pathways to ensure a more robust and proactive approach to content moderation. Not to mention ensuring ways that these reports are seen more quickly and succinctly by mod and admin teams.

The first step will be limiting the image hosting sites that Lemmy.world will allow. We understand that this can cause frustration for some of our users but we also hope that you can understand the gravity of the situation and why we find it necessary. Not just to protect all of our users from seeing this but also to protect ourselves as a site. That being said we would like input in what image sites we will be whitelisting. While we run a filter over all images uploaded to Lemmy.world itself, this same filter doesn't apply to other sites which leads to the necessity of us having to whitelist sites.

This is a community made by all of us, not just by the admins. Which leads to the second step. We will be looking for more moderators and community members that live in more diverse time zones. We recognize that at the moment it's relatively heavily based between Europe and North America and want to strengthen other time zones to limit any delays as much as humanly possible in the future.

We understand that trust is essential, especially when dealing with something as awful as this, and we appreciate your patience as we work diligently to rectify this situation. Our goal is to create an environment where all users feel secure and respected and more importantly safe. Your feedback is crucial to us, and we encourage you to continue sharing your thoughts and concerns.

Every moment is an opportunity to learn and build, even the darkest ones.

Thank you for your understanding.

-------

Sincerely,

The Lemmy.world Administration

Legal / ToS

spoiler

CSAM ___

Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I'm sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

| Version | Release Date | | ------- | ------------ | | 0.19.0 | 2023-12-15 | | 0.19.1 | 2023-12-20 | | 0.19.2 | 2024-01-10 | | 0.19.3 | 2024-01-24 |

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

Check the new blog post about the past 3 months for our .worlds

Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!

You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world

We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.

Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗

Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.

Hello World,

You may have seen the LW holiday themed logos we have used for Halloween and Thanksgiving. LW's users represent many countries around the world and we want to celebrate holidays and other special days that are local to you, but our team is fairly small and we aren't aware of a lot of the local customs out there. So we're asking you what you would like to see represented in a LW themed logo. What are some holidays/special days in your area and how do you celebrate them? And not just major holidays, we would like to celebrate festivals, days of remembrance, and other special days.

Please, comment below your suggestions and ideas on how we could represent them in the LW logo.

EDIT: Mostly looking for events throughout the year. What's left of 2023 is already in work. Thanks!

Hello World!

Lemmy.World is looking for new engineers to help with our growing community. Volunteers will assist our existing infrastructure team with monitoring, maintenance and automation development tasks. They will report to our head of infrastructure.

We are looking for junior admins for this role. You will learn a modern cloud infra stack, including Terraform, DataDog, CloudFlare and ma

Keep in mind that while this is a volunteer gig, we would ask you to be able to commit to at least 5-10 hours a week. We also understand this is a hobby and that family and work comes first.

Applicants must be okay with providing their CV, LinkedIn profile; along with sitting for a video interview.

We are an international team that works from both North America EST time (-4) and Europe CEST (+2) so we would ask that candidates be flexible with their availability.

To learn more and begin your application process, click here. This is not a paid position.

Hello World,

Due to our pace of growth, our platform ended up with thousands of communities created by you, our dear users. While we are still appreciative of every community effort, we decided we need to be able to better assist and publicize them. To assist with this effort, we now have two community team positions available:

• The Community Engagement Team: This team will work with community moderators and find ways to increase their engagement, provide them with easy access to logo and banner options, and communicate with you better to assure transparency as needed. Team capacity: 6 new members expected
• The Community Management Team: This team will be responsible of making sure communities have active moderators, assuring compliance in Lemmy.World communities, and keeping track of community moderation logs in order to assure they are moderated in good health. Team capacity: 6 new members expected

Both of these teams will be working closely with the admin team, and are expected to become ways for our users to have enhanced control of their instance. Let's build something great together!

How to apply

All applications must include the following information:

• Your Lemmy.World registered username, and your reason to apply
• The position you are interested in
• Your time zone, and average availability level

All applications may be sent to @clueless_stoner@lemmy.world or @antik@lemmy.world, or e-mailed to info@lemmy.world

Hello World!

The Lemmy.World Terms of Service was recently updated, and we have also published 3 new documents set to be in use, starting from today. These documents are:

• The Privacy Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/
• The Cookie Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/cookie-policy/
• The Fair Use Policy, which may be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/fair-use/

___

they're too long, didn't read

___

Okay.

Here are some simplified explanations to save you from the trouble. This update of our documentation was made to further reassure transparency towards our users, to comply with applicable laws to the best of our abilities, and to make it more convenient for all of us to use Lemmy.World safely.

___

The Changes Made to the Terms of Service

Highlights:

• Section 8 was updated to refer to our new documents.
• Section 5 was updated to further accommodate some of our communities, which were requesting exemptions from the previous version.
• The minimum age was raised from 16 to 18.

https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/

___

The Privacy Policy in Short

We don't collect any real data from you. The only actual data we do collect are your username, password, the e-mail address you provide, and your Internet Protocol(IP) address.

We will never share your data with anyone for any reason, unless you do illegal stuff.

https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/

___

What's the Fair Use Policy?

The Fair Use Policy defines the main user and bot rules, and it is made so that rules of conduct and participation are easier for our users to read and access.

https://legal.lemmy.world/fair-use/

___

The Cookie Policy

Lemmy.World uses cookies like any other website. If you'd like to learn more or disable cookies, then visit the relevant link to our Cookie Policy.

https://legal.lemmy.world/cookie-policy/

___

end of relevant content

___

Upon these bits of info, we are also dying to tell you about why are we even bothering with any of this at all, and much more about our efforts and struggles that we hadn't had the time to tell you yet. But let that be a topic for our next post, haha :) stay safe, and with love!

Lemmy.World

❤️

>

Hello World!

First off, better late than never: Happy Halloween!

Sorry we've been a bit quiet lately. But we love you, promises given! We're just working on a lot of things, and most of us are very busy with their daily lives lately. We'll be back with you to announce some of our projects tomorrow. &lt;3

Lately, and gladly, here's a grand thanks to @canthidium@lemmy.world for giving us an amazing Halloween icon!

!

Hello World!

We've made some changes today, and we'd like to announce that our Code of Conduct is no longer in effect. We now have a new Terms of Service, in effect starting from today(October 19, 2023).

The "LAST REVISION DATE:" on the page also signifies when the page was last edited, and it is updated automatically. Details of specific edits may be viewed by following the "Page History" reference at the bottom of the page. All significant edits will also be announced to our users.

The new Terms of Service can be found at https://legal.lemmy.world/

___

In this post our community mods and users may express their questions, concerns, requests and issues regarding the Terms of Service, and content moderation in Lemmy.World. We hope to discuss and inform constructively and in good faith.

The results are in!

We welcome !Lemmy Silver !Trollface !Thonking !Surprised Pikachu !Popcorn !Crying !Lemmy Smash !Facepalm and !duckass to the community.

To use the emoji's simply type :duckass: :silver: :trollface: :thonk: :pikachu: :popcorn: :sad: :smash: or :facepalm:

------------------------------------------

Hello World,

Nothing as exciting as emojis, right? We would like to make it easier for you to express yourselves, so we'll be adding custom emojis to Lemmy.World. The question is, which ones? Let's pick together!

So, we're reaching out to everyone with a Lemmy.World account: Please provide a link to the image you'd like to suggest and upvote the ones you'd like to see! The most upvoted emoji's will, after review, be added to our list of custom emojis.

The emojis can be used by anyone on Lemmy.World in comments and posts.

Hello World,

Today, after careful consideration and evaluation of recent events, we have decided to defederate from Lemmygrad.

Regrettably, we have observed a significant increase in hate speech and calls to violence originating from the Lemmygrad instance. Due to the severity of the posts and comments, we are not waiting for the next Lemmy update that will allow users to block instances.

At Lemmy.world, we have always strived to foster an inclusive and welcoming user environment. However, recent posts and comments from Lemmygrad have clearly violated our server rules and, more importantly, our core values. We firmly believe that hate speech and incitement of violence have no place in our community, regardless of personal beliefs or affiliations.

As always, we encourage all users to report any content they deem inappropriate or harmful. No matter one's stance in any conflict, Lemmy.world will always take immediate action to remove and ban any posts or comments that incite violence or propagate hatred.

We encourage everyone to continue engaging in discussions within the boundaries of respect and understanding. As we move forward with this decision, we remain committed to providing all community members with a safe and welcoming space. We appreciate your continued support and cooperation in upholding our shared principles.

Thank you,

The Lemmy.World Team

This will be a quick post. We have received a phishing mail to our info@lemmy.world mail address telling that they are "lemmy.world Security Team", telling that they will "disconnect" your account from our instance. This is ofc, not us. Do not fall for it! The attached image is how the mail looks like.

~Lemmy World Team.

Edit : OK so the outage was less brief than expected. The upgrade of the 3GB pictrs database took over 1 hour, and the version 0.4 database is now 14.5 GB... But anyway, it seems to be working alright now!

We will upgrade pictrs today, from 0.3.1 to 0.4.4. This will enable us to switch to S3 storage later on, and is needed for more anti-CSAM tools. Outage should only involve picture uploads, and should be brief.

Hello World!

The last week or so we have seen quite a big 'boost' in the amount of new users signing up so we thought it would be a good time to highlight some things that are of interest to new users.

CODE OF CONDUCT

Lemmy World is not a free speech instance, there are a couple of ground rules that need to be followed. If you're new, I would advise you to read our Code of Conduct.

NEW USER QUESTIONS

If you are new to the fediverse as a whole, it might all be a bit overwhelming. What is Lemmy? What is federation? What even is an instance? For those questions I would suggest you have a look at the getting starting guide. It should cover most of your questions.

STILL HAVE QUESTIONS?

You can head over to the !support@lemmy.world community. This community should be used for questions regarding Lemmy World and is not the support community for the Lemmy software this site uses.

Our Admin @quinten recently made a post covering the most recurring questions there too. Read about that here.

ALTERNATIVE USER INTERFACES

Lemmy World hosts a few custom User Interfaces which give you a completely different experience both on the desktop as on mobile.

• https://a.lemmy.world - Alexandrite is a beautiful and convenient desktop-first alternate web UI for Lemmy. Official site https://alexandrite.app
• https://p.lemmy.world - Photon A sleek client for Lemmy with powerful mod and admin tools. The only alternative client with feature parity to the official client. Official site https://phtn.app
• https://m.lemmy.world - Voyager was one of the first alternative UI's that became available. Optimized for Mobile. Official site https://vger.app
• https://old.lemmy.world - a familiar desktop experience for lemmy. Official site https://mlmym.org

THIRD PARTY APPS

There are a lot of Third Party apps available for Lemmy. From Paid to Open Source, you will find something that suits you easily.

For a complete list of apps have a look at https://lemmyapps.netlify.app/ (Thanks Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de).

EDIT: Updated the apps list. Also some more interesting links in @otter@lemmy.ca's post here: https://lemmy.world/comment/3962001

EDIT 2: Instead of https://photon.lemmy.world you can now just go to https://p.lemmy.world. You can thank @Rootiest@lemmy.world laziness for that.

Hello World!

As we've all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

• !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
• !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
• !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn't want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it's time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it's been a rough ride with everything, and we'd like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

EDIT: The update is done - Lemmy Host now running 0.18.5

This is a short post to inform you that we will be updating Lemmy World to the latest stable release of Lemmy. This is small update that fixes issues with federation of moderation actions performed by admin accounts. There is a bigger update, v0.19.0, just around the corner but the developers wanted to get this federation issue fixed as soon as possible.

The server will be updated at 1700 UTC - if you want to know when that is in your timezone you can click here.

Since this is a small update, it shouldn't take long. Downtime should be minimal. Please feel free to check both https://status.lemmy.world and https://dash.lemmy.world before and during the upgrade.

I've written a short blog about what happened in August, and the finances.

Join the Adventure on the official Lemmy.world Minecraft Server!

Calling all Minecraft adventurers and builders! We're thrilled to invite you to embark on an incredible journey on the lemmy.world Minecraft Server. Get ready for an immersive experience like no other, where creativity knows no bounds, and the possibilities are endless.

Minecraft Version: 1.20.x Address: minecraft.lemmy.world

You can ask questions, request features, share your stories on the discord, matrix and in the official lemmy community

The Server has some rules

Other info:

Server FAQ: https://lemmy.world/post/5467019

Server Info: https://lemmy.world/post/5468646

Hello everyone,

Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it's up to the instance admins to clean it up.

There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.

We don't want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That's why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.

This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy's.

We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.

We hope you understand and support our decision.

The Lemmy World team

We set up a bridge between the Lemmy.world General Matrix room and the Public-1 channel on the Lemmy World discord server yesterday. It's not perfect as emoji reactions aren't visible and some minor things like how it handles edited messages but other than that it seems to be working well.

Now people on both chat clients can interact with eachother!

We know most of you were thrilled about our Discord server, so we decided to make you even happier with our very own space on matrix!

• There is an announcement room for all the latest and greatest about Lemmy World: https://matrix.to/#/#announcements:lemmy.world

• A General channel where everyone is welcome to join and talk: https://matrix.to/#/#general:lemmy.world

And lastly, this one is more for admins of other instances but we have opened a "LW Defense HQ" room which we want to use in our ongoing fight against spammers: https://matrix.to/#/#defense:lemmy.world

Come join us!

EDIT: Madlad @ruud@lemmy.world was easily convinced to set up a lemmy.world matrix server. So I edited the links to the new space and rooms. The old ones still work too!

That means you can now also sign up for a Lemmy World matrix account. Instructions in this comment: https://lemmy.world/comment/3443207

Lately we have been dealing with a few abusive members from Feddit.nl and we were unable to get in touch with the instance administrator.

Part of the problem is the instance's open registrations which do not require you to enter an e-mail address during signup. This in combination with an inactive admin is a recipe for abuse.

We hope this is only temporary but we have to do this to protect our users.

Edit: we use fediseer, have a look https://gui.fediseer.com/instances/detail/lemmy.world

Edit 2: We got in touch with the Feddit.nl admin. Email requirements were added to the sign-up process and we're setting up a communication channel. So that means we are federating with Feddit.nl again!

An overdue blog post about the finances and other news from the .world