Not sure why this one sticks in my head for days.
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.
This release significantly reduces memory usage for the Lemmy backend. Metrics on production instances show a reduction up to 10 times. Here you can see the statistics from a few different instances. Read on for a technical explanation below. Note that the change only affects x86, there is no difference on ARM (e.g. Raspberry Pi), see here for details.
lemmy.ml (overall RAM usage including OS, Docker, PostgreSQL etc):
leminal.space (backend container only)
lemmy.world (backend API containers)
lemmy.world (backend federation and scheduled tasks)
How was such a major improvement possible? Memory usage in languages like Rust or C is managed by a so-called memory allocator. It requests large chunks of RAM from the operating system, and provides smaller chunks when needed in the program. For example, every string (such as post titles or markdown text) require chunks of memory to store them. When processing the data is completed, the memory should be freed and released, or reused.
Until version 0.19.19 Lemmy used the mimalloc memory allocator, which is supposedly better than the default glibc allocator. Yet a recent blog post points out that mimalloc does not play well with the tokio async runtime. It suggests to use jemalloc instead. Changing memory allocators is very simple in Rust, it only requires a single line of code. So we tried that, deployed the change on lemmy.ml and it immediately proved effective.
There are no breaking changes with this release.
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.
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.
We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five 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, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.
First two months of 2026: The US kidnaps one country's leader, murders another, and kills hundreds of civilians in two failed regime change attempts.
Death to the burger empire.
Please report any pro-US-empire comments so we can ban them ASAP.
We aren't going to let people come into this space and justify US crimes like kidnapping heads of state, murdering innocent people, and starting wars based on lies.
This sounds like a written confession or statement to the police, after he's already in police custody. Not a "manifesto", which is something justifying your actions to the public and done before carrying out whatever it is.
I'm not buying any of this. Someone who went to so much trouble planning, executing, and getting away without a trace, isn't going to go out in public with a bunch of incriminating items on their person. The NYPD probably just picked this tip out of the thousands they got, and are making things fit after the fact.
I've been tagged here, so to answer some of the questions I saw below:
We already have a way to permanently delete / overwrite your comments when you delete your account. That's been done for a long time., and is easily visible in lemmy-UI when you go to delete your account.
We do federate that removal, but there's nothing that stops a malicious server from ignoring that request. Activitypub is ultimately like email; there is no unsend email button.
That ticket is more about image removals, which gets tricky. We recently added a table that makes sure to attach image uploads to the local user, and now what's needed is to build out an interface for handling those also, in addition to handling the removals properly. Issue for that is here.
Data privacy will always be an ongoing issue, and we have to handle new problems as they arise. That's nothing new for us.
The main issue in that ticket is that there are 2-4 of us devs working on software that is now used by over 40k ppl daily, and we're spread extremely thin. So my personal patience for people making demands, while refusing to do anything to help out themselves, is very thin. We are not a multi-million dollar corporation with hundreds of developers. If someone wants a feature that we don't have time to work on atm, they can help out by adding it.
I think maltfield is well-intentioned, but they've also shown no interest in helping out with any of these GDPR-related requests. We have no legal expertise about the GDPR, and lemmy is not european software, it's international software.
I'm personally a hard copyleft developer, so I'd prefer that people making apps and tools for the lemmy eco-system, open source them, to benefit the community as a whole. Nearly all lemmy projects have adopted that standard, and are using the GPL and other hard copy-left licenses, and sharing their code freely with the community.
One example: various devs of lemmy apps have asked me how we build comment trees. Because lemmy's source code is open, I was able to share the exact code from lemmy-ui (typescript) and jerboa (kotlin). This is not something closed source developers are able / willing to share.
So I continue to recommend that developers heed calls to open source their applications. I developed my ThumbKey android keyboard, specifically because my requests to the MessageEase developers to open-source their codebase, after development had stopped, went unheeded for years.
Side note, but I've seen a lot of the discourse around Sync confuse FOSS, with making money. Of course developers deserve to get paid for their labor time! The thing is, FOSS makes no demands on how you monetize your software: "free as in freedom, not free as in beer", is the saying. So its entirely possible to open source your app, and still charge for it if you like. And If someone wants your app for free (say via an unlocked APK), they'll get it, whether its closed source, or not.
And yes, if an instance decided to insert ads, or becomes full of blog/cryptospam, I'd def recommend other instances defederate from them. I'd rather not lemmy become the ad-machine that other social media has become.
Lemmy-ui supports SEO, and also has opengraph tags. If there's anything else needs to be added, we're open to PRs.
Side note: For me personally, as @FrostySpectacles@lemmy.ml suggested, SEO shouldn't be a focus. SEO is such a gamed system, catering to a few giant search companies, and results are increasingly becoming unusable, especially in the past few years. I can barely find the things I want to search for, and almost always have better luck using internal sites search engines. So I'd rather focus on improving lemmy's search capabalities and filtering, than catering to google.
Its a problem, and at the same time a feature. For example, you can have two communities named !news, that pertain to completely different topics based on their instance:
This also isn't unique to lemmy, since reddit too had tons of duplicate communities for the same topics.
Just like on reddit, the network effect will run its course here: unavoidably there will be a lot of cross-posting on duplicated communities, until people center around their favorites, based on quality of content.
There are a few tools out there too, like https://lemmyverse.net/communities , that can help people find communities to subscribe to.
Overall tho, I'm against the concept of "combining / merging communities" that are run on different sites by different people. These should be curated and controlled by the people who created them.
One I didn't see mentioned yet: a rice cooker.
Put in rice, add water, push start button, and you get perfect rice every time. I'm usually against single-purpose kitchen tools but a rice cooker is soo worth it.
Oddly enough, people are pretty adamant about demanding that we add a lot of addictive features into lemmy, just because they exist on reddit and on other big tech platforms. I usually push back, but I'm always downvoted to oblivion. I conciously wanted to avoid putting these addictive, psychologically harmful things into lemmy-ui.
So its great to see posts like this one. Social media doesn't have to be a negative experience, or addictive. The time we spend here should be short, and positive.
We're probably hitting close to the all-time high of unread notifications on github... I'm at 1752 rn, only watching lemmy projects.
It does feel like I've become the personal issue tracker for a few thousand people all the sudden. 99% of ppl are nice, but there's always someone demanding free labor to fix their pet issue, while offering to do none of the work themselves, and making ultimatums that they won't use your software until it gets added.
It's like okay then???? I'm not selling a product, so I don't care. I've essentially set up a free cookie stand and they're complaining at me that I don't have rainbow sprinkles.
This ones my fave: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint
It shows the percentages of people who use your same browser features (called similarity ratios), and can determine whether you're unique in their dataset. Can help for tweaking browser settings to try to make yourself not unique.