Hey folks!

It's time for some lemm.ee updates! Feel free to skip ahead to whichever sections seem interesting to you.

New bot rules

The reception to my previous meta post was very positive, so we are going ahead with the new bot rules on lemm.ee. The new rules have been added to our front page sidebar and will be enforced by admins starting on the 1st of August.

The final version of the rules look like this:

• All bot accounts must be explicitly marked as bots
• Bots must not vote on any posts or comments
• Bots must disclose their specified purpose in their profile
• Bots must not be responsible for the majority of content in any community

The goal for now is to limit bots to a support role. In other words, we have nothing against bots which are used to support running a community for real people, but we do not currently want to host communities which are completely filled with bot content on lemm.ee.

It's definitely true that bot-only communities might provide valuable content, but we need to balance this value with how bots affect our feeds. If in the future the volume of organic user-created content on lemm.ee increases to a point where bots can't easily overwhelm the local feeds, then we may reconsider the last rule.

I apologize again to any bot developers who have chosen lemm.ee as the home for your bot-driven communities, I hope you can find another instance without too much trouble.

0.18.3 update

Last week, lemm.ee was updated to Lemmy version 0.18.3. We were previously already running a patched version of 0.18.2 which included many of the performance improvements that landed in .3, so the upgrade did not have as much of an effect on lemm.ee as it probably did on many other instances.

In any case, we are now again running on a completely unmodified version of Lemmy, and will continue to do so until there are performance or security reasons to run a custom patch again.

lemm.ee stance on hosting alternate Lemmy frontends

In the past few months, a lot of alternate web UIs for Lemmy have started cropping up. I've checked out a few of these and I think a few look really cool!

While such frontends generally provide ways to use them without being directly hosted on any specific instance, some instances have begun hosting such frontends on their own servers as well. I've also received a few dozen requests to host such frontends directly on lemm.ee. I would like to address these requests directly here.

For the time being, I am not planning to host any other frontends than the default lemmy-ui on lemm.ee. There are several reasons for this.

I am personally familiar with lemmy-ui code (to a reasonable extent). I know what it's doing overall, I know several of its pitfalls and I am able to quickly react in case of issues. As just one example, lemm.ee was the first instance in the world which fixed the weak script-src CSP in lemmy-ui that enabled the recent login session breach on some other instances - this is because I deployed the code on lemm.ee before I submitted a PR to the lemmy-ui repo with the fix.

The above would not be true for alternative frontends. I don't have the capacity to go through the implementation details of additional projects at the moment, so I have no idea what the code would be doing in any third party UI. I have no way to guarantee that it's not malicious to begin with. Even if the code is not malicious, I would not be able to quickly apply patches if problems crop up.

As a result of all this, I am not comfortable with hosting these third party frontends on lemm.ee for now. Note that this does not mean you're not able to use such frontends with lemm.ee - all the ones I've checked will work perfectly fine without being hosted on the same domain as the instance itself. But as with any 3rd party app, please be careful when using these frontends - by doing so, you are effectively sharing your username and password with anybody who is developing and hosting them.

Personal note

Some of you may have noticed that I have been a bit less active in the several Lemmy-related communication channels & GitHub for the past week or so. The reason for this is that I've had two stressful things happen: earlier this month, I found extensive water damage in my house which is not covered by insurance. Even worse, shortly after this discovery, I received news that my current place of work, a startup, is shutting down at the end of August (mostly due to changed market conditions).

As a result, I've been spending a fair bit of time trying to deal with the renovation of my house & now am also spending additional time trying to figure out where I can land in terms of employment in order to keep putting food on the table. Nevertheless, I am hoping to get back to more Lemmy contributions soon.

Sorry to use this space for selfish purposes, but I would like to take this chance to note that if anybody is looking for a remote software engineer, I am currently open to new opportunities! Just as a short overview about myself:

• I've been working as a software engineer for over a decade, about 5 years in technical leadership roles
• I have experience with end to end ownership of software platforms - everything from writing code to running it in production
• I'm based in the EU but happy to work in either EU or US timezones
• For the past few years, my main tech stack has been TypeScript (nodejs/react) + Postgres + Terraform, but I have extensive experience with a lot of other technologies and generally am quite adaptable
• I have experience running platforms at considerably bigger scale than Lemmy

I would of course happily go into much more details if you contact me directly, so if this is interesting to anybody then please feel free to reach out!

Also, please let me assure anybody who is worried: lemm.ee funding is not currently in jeopardy. For the next couple of months, lemm.ee is not even dependant on a single cent of my own financial contributions, as community support has provided enough money already to give us a nice buffer. I am planning to write a summary of our financials in the next few weeks, please keep an eye on the meta community if you're interested in seeing this!

That's all for now, thanks to anybody who has made it this far! As always, please feel free to leave comments below if you have any thoughts or questions.

Context

There have been a lot of posts and comments recently about Facebook entering the fediverse, and how different instances will handle it. Many people have asked me to commit to pre-emptively defederating from Threads before they even implement ActivityPub.

The lemm.ee federation policy states that it's not a goal for lemm.ee to curate content for our users, but we will certainly defederate any server which aims to systematically break our rules. I want to point out here that Facebook makes essentially all of its money from advertising, and lemm.ee has a no advertising rule - basically, Facebook has a built-in financial incentive to break our rules. ActivityPub has no protections against advertising, so it's likely we will end up having to eventually defederate from Threads just for this reason alone.

However, I would still like to get a feel for how many people in our instance are actually excited for potential federation with Threads. While personally I feel that any theoretical pros are by far outweighed by cons, I do want to use this opportunity to see how much of the community disagrees with me. I am not intending to run this instance as a democracy (sorry if anybody is disappointed by that), but I would still like to have a clear picture of user feedback for potentially major decisions such as this one. This is why I am asking every user who wants lemm.ee to federate with Facebook to please downvote this post.

Here are some reasons why I personally believe that Threads will have a negative effect on the fediverse

• As mentioned above, Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.
• Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.
• Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.
• In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

By the way, we're not really in any rush today with our decision regarding federation

• Threads does not have ActivityPub support yet today
• Even if they add ActivityPub support, their UX is geared towards Mastodon-like usage - it seems unlikely that there would ever be proper interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• We don't really know what to defederate from - it's completely possible that "threads.net" will not be their ActivityPub domain at all.

So go ahead and downvote if you feel defederation would be a mistake, and feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! It would be super helpful to me if folks who are in favor of federating with Threads could leave a comment explaining their reasoning.

Update:

By now, it's clear that there is a group of users who are in favor of federating with Threads. The breakdown is like this (based on downvotes):

• lemm.ee users: 136 in favor of federating with Threads
• Others: 288 in favor of federating with Threads

While it seems to be a minority, it's still quite a few users. There is no way to please all users in this situation - any decision I make will certainly inconvenience some of you, and I apologize for that.

A big thanks to everybody who has shared opinions and arguments in comments so far. I think there are several well written comments that have been unfairly downvoted, but I have personally read all comments and tried to respond to several as well. I will keep reading them as they come in.

The main facts I am working with right now are as follows:

• The majority of lemm.ee users are strongly opposed to immediately federating with Threads
• Facebook has a proven track record of exploiting users (and a built-in financial incentive to do so)
• We currently lack proper federation/moderation tools to allow us to properly handle rule breaking content from Facebook

Considering all of the above, I believe the initial approach for lemm.ee should be to defederate Threads, and then monitor the situation for a period of time to determine if federating with them in the future is a realistic option

In order to federate with them, the following conditions would need to be fulfilled:

• There needs to be actual interoperability between Threads and Lemmy
• Threads needs to prove that they are not flooding instances with rule-breaking content (mainly ads and bigotry for lemm.ee)
• There needs to be a mechanism to prevent feed manipulation by Threads algorithms (potentially this means discarding all incoming votes from Threads)

Note: this is an initial list, subject to change as we learn more about Threads.

Again, I realize this approach won't please everybody, but I really believe it's the best approach on a whole for now. Please feel free to keep adding comments and keep the discussion going if you think there is something I have not considered.

👋 to all the newcomers, let me know if you need any help getting settled in!

Welcome!

Due the recent high amount of users coming over from Reddit, many of the existing large Lemmy instances have been struggling to keep up. This instance was created to help spread out the load on the Lemmy network. Lemmy newbies are welcome here.

The goal for lemm.ee is to provide a home Lemmy instance for anybody that needs one. That means that you are more than welcome here even if you mostly intend to just interact with other instances rather than this one!

Note: if you want to start up a new community here, but the name is already taken by an inactive community, then don't worry! Inactive communities can be transferred to new moderators. Please follow the steps outlined in our FAQ under the "How can I take over an inactive community" section.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a federated link aggregator. This image explains it pretty well! In general, the fact that it's "federated" just means that it works much like e-mail - in the same way as a Gmail user can send e-mails to iCloud Mail users or Outlook users, a lemm.ee user is able to participate in communities on many different Lemmy instances. Regardless of which Lemmy instance your account lives on, you are a part of the federated network and can interact with other users from other instances, so this instance is as good of a place as any other to get started with Lemmy.

If you have any further questions about Lemmy, please check out our guide/FAQ!

About lemm.ee (this instance)

lemm.ee is intended to be a serious long-term instance, not just some random experiment.

You can always find the most up to date rules and general info about lemm.ee in the sidebar on our front page. If you want to know more about how this instance is run, you can check our administration and federation policy.

For some technical background, this instance is operated following industry best practices:

• Our infrastructure is robust and has been built up with redundancy and recoverability in mind
• The servers are running in the cloud (this is not some bedroom server situation!)
• All of the infrastructure is described declaratively as code, which allows relatively quick and safe changes to any part of our infrastructure whenever necessary
• Our entire database is backed up constantly, so in the worst case, we can always restore our data

A significant chunk of funding for this infrastructure comes directly from our amazing community. This support is essential to help secure our future. These supporters deserve the gratitude of all lemm.ee users!

You can read more details about how our instance is funded on this GitHub sponsorships page. There is also a Ko-Fi donations page as a back-up.

If it sounds like lemm.ee might be the right instance for you, then you are welcome to join us!