[Done] Lemmy world was upgraded to 0.18.3 today (2023-07-30)

Ruud@lemmy.worldmod to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 1316 points –

Update The upgrade was done, DB migrations took around 5 minutes. We'll keep an eye out for (new) issues but for now it seems to be OK.

Original message We will upgrade lemmy.world to 0.18.3 today at 20:00 UTC+2 (Check what this isn in your timezone). Expect the site to be down for a few minutes. ""Edit"" I was warned it could be more than a few minutes. The database update might even take 30 minutes or longer.

Release notes for 0.18.3 can be found here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md

(This is unrelated to the downtimes we experienced lately, those are caused by attacks that we're still looking into mitigating. Sorry for those)

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Sorry for those

It's not your fault :) We know you admins are working really hard to keep the server as stable as possible.

Don't humanize them, they'll expect us to always treat them with respect! /s (obvs 🙄)

  • Add controversial ranking
  • Change logic for determining comment default language
  • Add infinite scroll user option

Neat. I hope the comment language logic change means the default won't be "Undetermined" anymore.

I'm sure the attacks are just as annoying for you guys as they are to us, if not more. Appreciate the update.

Edit: Loving the endless scroll for the front page! I've been eagerly awaiting that. Such a small change, but such a big impact.

see what time this is in your time zone

Thanks, will put this in the post

Fwiw, it can be helpful to call out the date for such changes. Preferably in YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601).

While it's helpful to link to an off-site timezone converter tool (thanks for that, btw), "today" can be a different date, depending on where in the world you are. For example, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Good point

Even better is "when this post is N hours old" :)

As someone who has had to grind through heaps of logs over the years, from systems in various timezones, from products that disagreed on the 'best' datetime format, I've become a fan of adopting ISO 8601 as much as possible. For personal systems such as a laptop, that's a different story. But if I'm spinning up an EC2 instance in us-west-2 or a VM in Central Europe, I avoid the whole "err, what TZ is this in, or should even be in?" decision-making process and just run with WHO CARES IT'S SET TO UTC NOW LET'S MOVE ON ALREADY 😀

And not that anyone here is likely to care, but here's a quick shout out to lnav - The Logfile Navigator for grinding on system logs (for systems where something like Prometheus or whatever hasn't been proactively set up).

Great! Thanks for keeping things up to date and running!

Minor suggestion: write your time zones like UTC+2 and not CEST. I'm pretty sure most people outside Europe don't know what the time zone CEST is. Yes, you provided a link that helpfully converts the time to the users' local time zone, but sometimes it's nicer to be able to know something without having to click into a link.

OK, updating the post

Wow, you actually changed it! I was kind of shocked when I came back to my feed seeing UTC+2 in the title. Thanks! :D

Yep, I like good tips like these. :-) Thanks

Super nitpick. Can we just use 1800 utc? Then everyone can convert to their zone directly. *signed me in a CEST zone.

I keep one of my spare clocks set to UTC for exactly this.

yeh, the actual utc time is much more straightforward than +2

it would be nice if Lemmy had support for formatting Unix timestamps in whatever timezone whoever is looking at it is in, like discord

That could be fixed in the apps and UI:s as a cosmetical improvement based on a timezone entered in the user settings. UTC is... universal.

The problem with open-source for me is reading ideas like this and having to deal with the frustration of not knowing how to write it myself.

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%.

Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane? Are there any benchmarks to see how fast this has become versus say Lemmy 0.18.2 on a very large instance?

Is it me or is the 80% figure just insane?

Not really, you'd be surprised how often systems are bloated all because of a single option, character, etc. Most developers don't start optimizing until much later in the software's lifecycle. Often enough, it is easily overlooked. That's why code reviews are needed often with fresh pair of eyes.

Just to set the expectations, reducing database size or CPU usage does not necessarily mean it is faster but it does mean there's more free capacity on the servers to handle more users at the same performance.

More importantly; they may help reduce costs on the smaller indie instances that doesn't need to buy larger server instances.

Hopefully, we'll continue to see more of these optimizations.

I believe if the backend doesn't have to write as much data then you'll have less I/O operations so it should IMO have an impact on the overall speed of Lemmy (unless all of those operations are done asynchronously). Same for the reduced CPU usage, it could allow for more stuff in parallel.

Speed/pref and capacity are two separate things. I/O has nothing to do with the size of the database. You can write 100TB per second into the database and choose to only store 1TB of content. That does not mean the app is writing 1TB per second, it is still writing 100TBps.

They said they changed how the activities data is stored, which reduced the size by 80%; here's one of the changes they made: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3103

As you can see, the issue here is that they were storing a lot of data in the activities table that is not needed, it was only meant for debug purposes. So, they split up the data into two and not store the other data as it isn't needed; they're still writing these data the same as before. One part is used to ensure they don't re-process the same data but this is the same thing they were doing before this change.

In addition, they've limited how long the data is retained for 3 months, which is a separate job they run to remove data.

All of this has zero impact on the users using the app right now. The main benefit is for instance admins with limited storage. One might say the system slows down if there's not enough space but that is still the same case here with this MR, it will still slow down.

Wait does that mean posts older than 3 months gets automatically deleted? Isn't that kinda bad? Being able to find years old posts is an important part of Reddit and pretty much all social media.

Nobody said anything about posts. Activities could mean extra metadata like "someone joined", "someone changed", posted, edited, etc.

Most of the time, these isn't required after a short while.

Funnily enough, this is the feature that can speed up the performance by doing less calls:

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

How do you turn on endless scrolling? I'm still seeing page numbers

Number 1 thing I miss from reddit w/ RES. 😫

Infinite scroll and word filtering. If I see one more post about "AI", Musk, Twitter, or fake superconductors, I might have to get off the computer for 10 whole minutes.

I want to be able to ban/hide entire servers. Regularly seeing lemmynsfw celebrity communities pop up in All/Hot :| (I have nsfw disabled, so it's just generic photos of random women.)

Also an option would be nice to hide downvoted posts, I had that on in RES.

Block the user "madness", its literally one guy posting that shit.

maybe now, but if Lemmy grows that will be a good feature to have.

The Connect app ( !lemmyconnect@lemmy.ca) has both word filters and instance-blocking, I believe.

Ah, I hid celebrities, 196, and a bunch of other communities so I wouldn't have to scroll through it. But certainly I see where ignoring an entire federated host would be helpful.

Scroll down to the bottom of your user settings and untick the box next to "Show Read Posts". Any posts you've voted on, up or down, will stop showing up.

Word filtering is fairly easy to do if you know your way around uBlock filters.

Yeah, but I don't

Fair. It's not too hard, but most lemmy UIs make it a bit harder than it needs to be because they want to be a fancy JavaScript-ridden mess of html tags.

On old.lemmy.world it is supremely easy, you just use the element picker tool of uBlock to select all posts, add the 'magic' command :contains(reddit) to filter out the word you don't want (in this case reddit), and you've got your filter. This would result in old.lemmy.world##.post:contains(reddit).

On lemmy.world it is trickier because it is the kind of HTML no sane person would write. Doing the above you end up with lemmy.world##div.mt-2.post-listing:contains(reddit) which is messy, and misses a line that is used to divide the posts. With some manual tuning you can first simplify the first part to ##.post-listing:contains(reddit) and then add :xpath(.|following::hr[1]) to get rid of the annoying line. This results in ##.post-listing:contains(reddit):xpath(.|following::hr[1]).

Oh is it literally just css selectors, but with a slightly different syntax? Fuck me, I never looked into it and assumed it was nonsense.

The extra syntax is just to add some features that aren't in CSS. Not quite sure where this came from, I think it's from the Adblock Plus era, but Gorhill perfected it for uBlock origin, which makes it a very powerful tool.

It's not limited to just hiding the elements either, if you want you can simply restyle them (I've used this to redact sports results until I hovered over them).

It's a bit confusing. The backend added support for infinite scrolling, but lemmy-ui(the front end) hasn't landed that change yet.

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Looks like the upgrade is done and was a quick and easy success, thank you Devs!

Smooth! Curious about the new DB size

Down from 12GB to 1.8GB....

Wow, thats awesome for the backups and scalability!!

Me too. Creating a db dump now..

Thank you for the heads up!!

2pm EST for us silly Freedum Unit folks.

Why are these announcements the only place I am finding out the Lemmy has an update? I figured there would be more top level discussions about it on Lemmy. Maybe I am just not following the correct communities.

If announcements of Lemmy releases are what you're after, !announcements@lemmy.ml is a place for you. But in broader picture, subsequent updates are usually just not that big of a deal.

Each server admin decides how to publish announcements, some have a mastodon account, some have a separate website, some might post on a different Lemmy server, like !Fediverse@lemmy.ml, someone would likely post up there after the fact if the server is down for a while without apparent explanation.

Awesome! It’s great to see thing become snappier and better since I joined Lemmy.

Reddit would almost never update unless it was a pants on fire situation or they would force feed features that no one wanted or even was tested properly.

A big thank you to everyone involved, FROM those taking the time to submit bug descriptions in a reproducible manner and those making feature requests or those simply upvoting and pointing out the most needed patch/updates TO simultaneously amateur, newly minted coders and veteran developpers pushing small and big patches to fix anything from typos, reformatting old code, cleaning almost unnoticeable UI object, transition less performing backend modules or secure/harden of all these moving parts.

I am glad to witness and be a part of the perpetual progress of the fediverse.

Thanks to you and all the dev team behind this ❤🙇🏻‍♂️

Will it change the behaviour of sorting by hot? seeing post from years ago is funny

Maybe I’m missing it, but I don’t see the option for infinite scroll anywhere. How do I add that?

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Any idea who might be launching the ddos attacks?

Haters. Groups paid by Steve Huffman. Script kiddies. Any rich trust fund pissant with a couple hundo to spend on the dark web.

Groups paid by Steve Huffman

Any basis for this conspiracy theory?

Not too much, just that it would be incredibly tempting of an option for a millionaire. Anonymously destroy your competition by paying some dark web site in Monero? Sure why not?

If that were the case, I think he would have paid a bit more and make sure it would have stayed down. No competition was destroyed here.

I think it's Far more likely that it's just a bunch of scriptkiddies saying "when I press button, error page goes brrrrrrr".

EDIT: App closed, cache cleared - back to normal.

This is odd. ALL only has 9 posts. Subscriptions has 1. Refreshing makes no change.

Android, Thunder app. API issue?

I just checked via Firefox - all OK so I will post to the Thunder app community. Any other apps having issues?

Any idea if 18.3 will be able to provide more security?

in some ways: they now sanitize input so things like the xss attack a while ago is much much harder.

will it solve the ddos attacks they're experiencing? nope.

Doesn't it drastically improve performance? I'd say that will help with ddos, more requests can slip through before it affects performance

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/RELEASES.md#major-changes

This version brings major optimizations to the database queries, which significantly reduces CPU usage. There is also a change to the way federation activities are stored, which reduces database size by around 80%. Special thanks to @phiresky for their work on DB optimizations.

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

In terms of security, Lemmy now performs HTML sanitization on all messages which are submitted through the API or received via federation. Together with the tightened content-security-policy from 0.18.2, cross-site scripting attacks are now much more difficult.

Thanks so much for all you do, man. I’ll get those stickers up ASAP <3

Will calckey.world be renamed as well, as upstream abandoned the calckey name?

Not renamed. A new server will be started where ppl can migrate to. Yet to determine a new name as firefish.world is taken..

I'm curious about this as well. I've looked into Firefish a bit and it looks interesting, but I can't seem to follow Lemmy communities from the flagship instance Firefish.Social.

Works on calckey.world, though.

Calckey.world also runs Firefish 1.0

Firefish.social was upgraded to 1.0.something yesterday I believe. Maybe something broke? On Firefish.Social trying to follow a Lemmy community ends up in just an endless spinning wheel and "processing" while it works normally on calckey.world.

Curious.

Good to know, I'll skip this update for now..

Where is the best place to report this to the Devs? I don't have a GitHub account.

I'm in contact with him, I'll let him know.

Great! It's a very interesting project, I'm much more excited by it than Mastodon.

It looks much nicer to be honest

It does, and the Antenna feature is really clever and useful.

Thanks for the notice, I've upgraded my instance as well.

Great work. I prefer some downtime to twAtter anyday.

I hope this isn't what brought down lemmy.one, I'm seeking refugee status from them. :)

Good luck!

Is that why I got cloudflare banned last night? All I did was click my Local Top Day bookmark.

It's just Cloudflare being sensitive lately because of the ongoing attacks. Check out status.lemmy.world.

Nice! Just updated my own self-hosted instance, went super smooth and quick.

Did you change the site's database management system?

No, it's just the tables/indexes and application were changed by the Lemmy developers.

Is there way to finally fix the bug causing user stats to reset every time?

Those stats are not a Lemmy feature, they are a feature of the app you use. (If I understand correctly).

I can't tell if this is a new liftoff bug, or related to the recent migration.. it's when trying to open the list of places I'm subscribed to

Very fast update and congrats on the reduction of the db size!

Cool, now defederate from lemmygrad.ml

All the 10s of posts about this already and you think he's going to say "oh, didn't think about this, good idea". Or you know it's something that they have already made a call on and you're just badgering and harassing them over it?

I cannot stand the tankies, but I prefer them to folk like you. I'm yet to see anothing from lemmygrad in a month on lemmy, so get over it and block it if you see it and don't want to.