New Users

eviltoast.org is still welcoming to new members. If you're looking to sign up, please feel free to create an account! If you already have an account on another instance or were referred by someone, mentioning that in the application box would be helpful.

What changed

For a few days now, the signup process for new accounts at eviltoast.org now require a small application process.

It's a simple text field, but means there is a manual step to approve new users. New users aren't expected to write an essay or anything rediculous, just prove their human and whether they have a connection with someone already here.

This is a measure to prevent spammers from launching attacks from our instance and being able to easily re-create new accounts to continue attacks from.

Future

If lemmy doesn't improve its mod and admin tools, I may end up making a sort of invite system so that existing members can invite new users instantly. And then the application process would be only for completely new users without an invite.

eviltoast.org is now running Lemmy and Lemmy-ui 0.19.3. It was a relatively minor upgrade, but details are at the bottom of this post.

More importantly, I wanted to share that eviltoast.org has had a sizable upgrade. Specifically the database server is much larger than before and should be able to handle the load with less stress. Overall things should feel snappier.

I have some other ideas for improving the site's responsiveness in the near future, but this should be a good start. Please let me know if you do (or don't!) notice a difference in the meantime.

Thanks!

2024-01-22 - Lemmy Release v0.19.3 - A Few Bugfixes

Major Changes

• Fixed lemmy-ui error page bug by @Sleepless in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2302
• Fix bug with Mastodon undo follow activities by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4364
• Count chars, not bytes for max title length (fixes #4366) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4367
• Mark instance as alive after successful activity send (fixes #4039) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4377
• Dont allow caching captcha response by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4381
• Revert “Dont ignore errors during login (fixes #4319) (#4321)” by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4380
• Removing group from woodpecker, as its deprecated. by @dessalines in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4387
• Add secondary sort by published date for post view (fixes #4383) by @Nutomic in https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4384

Related post: https://eviltoast.org/post/833202

The current plan is to entirely defederate from Meta's Threads.

Does anyone on eviltoast.org (or anyone who uses it for browsing) have any objections to defederating from Threads?

A few of the reasons to defederate:

• Exponentially more users compared to the current lemmyverse
• Expected reduction in quality of content, but dramatic increase in quantity
• Federation Traffic from Threads may overwhelm smaller instances, including ours
• Lemmy still has a lack of good mod tools
• Future possibility of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" whether intentional or not
• Many people view lemmy and other federated platforms as a way to get away from giant coorporations

IMO the biggest reason to defederate is the amount of users and content that will be added to the network, I don't think Lemmy/Mastodon/etc as a whole is prepared for that yet.

Edit 2023-12-22: threads.net is now on the blocked list. Please do leave a comment if you disagree with this decision!

Hello!

Apologies for the lack of updates. I just wanted to put up a quick message about this instance. Over the past month or so, there have been times where the site appeared either slow or altogether unresponsive.

Lemmy itself was always running but external monitoring tools would report brief outages and clients would be unable to connect. Usually only for a few seconds at a time.

This ended up being caused by stale DNS records. The infrastructure eviltoast.org is hosted on has multiple public-facing servers which act as load balancers for eviltoast and several other services. Occasionally the load balancers are moved to other servers and the DNS that points to them should get updated automatically.

At some point in the last month or so, the script that updates the DNS added the new records but never deleted the old ones. So depending on which server was used, the instance could appear unresponsive.

This script is fixed now and I tested a couple updates to make sure the same issue doesn't happen again. I'll work on improving the external monitoring and maybe setting up a public status page as well.

For reference, all of these red lines are brief "outages" and you can see when the issue was fixed.

Due to personal reasons (getting married and going on vacation), I didn't really have time to dig into this until recently, so sorry for the delay in getting it fixed and hopefully it didn't cause too much frustration for anyone.

There's been a lot of talk related to lemmy.world banning certain communities recently. It made me realize there's nothing explicitly saying "don't do anything illegal" here, and spurred a couple updates:

• Guidelines: Added two new items, one basically saying not to do anything illegal and the other a reminder that content is federated and public. Specifically these two new points:
  • Don't spread the illegal jams - Ensure content adheres to the law and doesn't endanger the community.
  • Public Toasting Grounds - Remember, everything you post is as public as a toast popping up! Content is shared with other instances, so once it's out, consider it part of the digital breakfast table forever.
• Disclaimer: We've made some tweaks to the wording on our legal page for clarity around content responsibility and liability. The core message remains the same.

To reiterate, this update doesn't indicate any impending actions to block or defederate with anyone. It's more about being proactive and ensuring we have a framework in place to protect our community.

Rest assured, barring emergencies, evident malicious intent, or harm to our users, we don't intend to defederate from instances without proper notification and dialogue.

Please feel free to message me directly or comment here if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions.

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.4.

Release notes copied below.

Lemmy Release v0.18.4

Changes

Lemmy

• Fix fetch instance software version from nodeinfo (#3772)
• Correct logic to meet join-lemmy requirement, don’t have closed signups. Allows Open and Applications. (#3761)
• Fix ordering when doing a comment_parent type list_comments (#3823)

Lemmy-UI

• Mark post as read when clicking “Expand here” on the preview image on the post listing page (#1600) (#1978)
• Update translation submodule (#2023)
• Fix comment insertion from context views. Fixes #2030 (#2031)
• Fix password autocomplete (#2033)
• Fix suggested title " " spaces (#2037)
• Expanded the RegEx to check if the title contains new line caracters. Should fix issue #1962 (#1965)
• ES-Lint tweak (#2001)
• Upgrading deps, running prettier. (#1987)
• Fix document title of admin settings being overwritten by tagline and emoji forms (#2003)
• Use proper modifier key in markdown text input on macOS (#1995)

This is also a test. Plz ignore.

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to lemmy and lemmy-ui 0.18.3. For 0.18.1 and 0.18.2 we were using a custom patched build to fix some security issues, but now we are back on the officially released builds.

This release has a few performance improvements too.

Release notes copied below.

lemmy/RELEASES.md at main · LemmyNet/lemmy

Changes

Lemmy

• Restore markdown quotes after sanitize (#3708) (#3749)
• remove performance-problematic and buggy duplicate site aggregates (#3732)
• remove n^2 part of person triggers, improve community aggregate trigger (#3739)
• Revert "Add controversial ranking (#3205)"
• Omit local instance from federated instances list (#3712)
• add trigram index to search (#3719)
• Federation tests replication round1 - demonstrate absent replication of comment deletes (#3657)
• Make resolve_object not require auth #3685 (#3716)
• Sanitize html (#3708)
• Add controversial ranking (#3205)
• Skip fragile API tests (#3723)
• Enable gzip for reqwest (#3696)
• Dont authenticate user after successful password reset #3714 (#3715)
• Bump version of dependency "webmention" (#3711)
• prevent ordering by comment path without post filter (#3717)
• Update Dockerfile to run process as non-privileged user. (#3709)
• Dont show removed comments to unauthenticated users (release branch) (#3689)
• Add dev profile to strip symbols and disable debug info (ref #3610) (#3611)
• Dont publish releases to crates.io (fixes #3272) (#3664)
• Change logic for determining comment default language (fixes #3451) (#3672)
• Post remove delete federation outbound fix0 (#3613)
• disable rustfmt feature on rosetta-build (#3679)
• Make sure comments are sorted by hot_rank, then score. (#3667)
• Ignore errors when fetching community mods (fixes #3460) (#3674)
• Upgrade activitypub library to 0.4.6 (fixes #3222) (#3675)
• Denormalize community_id into post_aggregates for a 1000x speed-up when loading posts (#3653)
• Fixing hot_ranks and scores to append a published sort. (#3618)
• Use local_site.default_post_listing_type as the initial default listing type for new users (#3666)
• Don't panic when scheduled tasks can't connect to database (#3634)
• Add http cache for webfingers (#3317)
• Optimize hot rank updates (#3617)
• Split activity table into sent and received parts (fixes #3103) (#3583)
• work around race condition on community fetch (#3414)
• Make lemmy_api_common wasm-compatible (#3587)
• Check for dead federated instances (fixes #2221) (#3427)
• Fix wrong SMTP port when TLS is being used (fixes #3574) (#3607)
• Add infinite scroll user option (#3572)
• Shrink capacity in RateLimitStorage::remove_older_than (#3536)
• Fix #3501 - Fix aggregation counts for elements removed and deleted (#3543)

Lemmy-UI

• Fixing comment report showing dot. (#1989)
• Make sure comment score color matches your vote. (#1988)
• Allow limited set of markdown in title rendering (#1977)
• Allow selecting from all languages in person settings (fixes #1971) (#1985)
• Separate final comment row + add classes (#1982)
• Fix CSP in dev mode (#1918)
• Fix base.output (see #1911) (#1943)
• Add show/hide button to password fields (#1861)
• Fix start_url and scope (#1931)
• Remove lodash.merge dependency (#1911)
• Set person_id to myId in handleLeaveModTeam (#1929)
• Remove invalid default option from language list (#1919)
• Comment border tweak (#1820)
• Add Toast Messages for Bad Logins (#1874)

eviltoast.org is now discovering new communities automatically as long as they meet these criteria:

• At least 15 subscribers
• At least ~~50~~ 20 comments
• At least ~~50~~ 20 posts

This means any remote community that matches the above criteria should show up when searching for communities.

I'm hoping this will help with discovering useful communities without needing 3rd party tools.

Due to the way lemmy works, the above communities are only "discovered" and we will not start getting federated posts/comments/updates for them until at least one account subscribes to the community.

In addition to the above criteria, any remote communities with over ~~500~~ 100 active subscribers in the last month will also automatically be followed by a bot account.

These changes are already in place. After a few days, the above numbers might get changed to start pulling in more communities.

https://lemmyverse.net is the source being used for filtering remote communities.

Update 2023-08-06: Reduced the requirements to 20 comments, 20 posts, and 100 active users.

Thanks for joining the eviltoast.org lemmy instance!

We're still figuring out how all of this works, but lemmy itself should be relatively stable for now. I plan on also launching a new Matrix server in the next week or so as well, using the same domain.

If you're new to lemmy, I recommend checking out this post from lemmy.world to get started:

Lemmy.world starting guide

For mobile clients, Jerboa and Liftoff have both been good so far. Jerboa is the official client, but Liftoff felt a little more friendly. Mllem seems to be a decent ios client, but I haven't not used it much yet.

There isn't really any content locally on eviltoast.org right now, so I'd recommend setting your default view to either All or Subscribed so that you actually see something in your feed. That said, you're more than welcome to create communities and post locally as well as to other lemmy instances from here.