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
- Outgoing federation bug fixes.
- Lemmy can now receive reports sent from Mastodon and Kbin.
- Added the ability for admins to view votes, to prevent downvote trolling. Demo. #4088
- Various bug fixes and minor enhancements.
Upgrade instructions
Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.
If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.
Thanks to everyone
We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.
Support development
We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.
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. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive.
Lemmy is one of the few ones platforms that attempts to preserve vote and mod action privacy, to prevent harassment, and encourage ppl to vote honestly. Several other platforms just let any user see who voted, which isn't the best idea since it's been shown that ppl are less likely to be honest if they know that their votes are public.
The main reason I added it for admins, is bc a lot of ppl have been understandably upset by downvote-stalkers, or those who downvote with multiple accounts.
Like anything, there's the possibility for abuse, but at least by limiting it to admins only, we can prevent a lot of potential harassment that other platforms are currently allowing.
Admins had the ability to see the votes if they really wanted to anyway by looking at the database, you just made it a lot easier.
Thank you for the explanation. I admittedly am a bit cautious about this feature. But I can see how it can be a powerful tool to prevent bullying.
Hopefully we can trust our admins. But theoretically a bad actor could make an instance that federates with everyone and then takes this info and posts all the vote counts publicly for every post and every comment. And if we don't know which instance is the one responsible, we wouldn't be able to defederate from them to stop them from getting this info.
Not that this feature is the cause of that. Admins could already do this with a db query. And I don't think there is any way around that without making votes completely uncrackable. Just kind of thinking out loud.