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.

4 comments

eviltoast.org

brbposting

•

Massive spammer at it again

@ThuleanPerspective - eviltoast

https://eviltoast.org/u/ThuleanPerspective

4 comments

eviltoast.org

lemmyadmin

•

Server upgrades and Lemmy 0.19.3

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

0 comments

eviltoast.org

lemmyadmin

•

Eviltoast.org successfully upgraded to 0.19.2

Hello all,

eviltoast.org has been upgraded to the latest lemmy and lemmy-ui releases (0.19.2).

We held off on the 0.19.0 and 0.19.1 releases due to some federation issues they had. These appear to be resolved with 0.19.2.

Release notes are below, but please reach out if you run into any issues!

Important note: There were changes to how auth works in lemmy. Some mobile clients (like liftoff) may no longer work. And on the browser, you may have to clear your cookies for eviltoast.org if you aren't able to log in.

Thanks!

2024-01-10 - Lemmy Release v0.19.2 - More Federation Fixes

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.

2023-12-20 - Lemmy Release v0.19.1 - Outgoing Federation fix

Major Changes

0.19.0 has a critical bug where sending outgoing activities can stop working. The bug is fixed in this version. It also fixes the “hide read posts” user setting, fixes a problem with invalid comment paths, and another fix for private message reports.

2023-12-15 - Lemmy Release v0.19.0 - Instance blocking, Scaled sort, and Federation Queue

Major Changes

This release is very large with almost 400 commits since 0.18.5. As such we can only give a general overview of the major changes in this post, and without going into detail. For more information, read the full changelog and linked issues at the bottom of this post.

Improved Post Ranking

There is a new scaled sort which takes into account the number of active users in a community, and boosts posts from less-active communities to the top. Additionally there is a new controversial sort which brings posts and comments to the top that have similar amounts of upvotes and downvotes. Lemmy’s sorts are detailed here.

Instance Blocks for Users

Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

Two-Factor-Auth Rework

Previously 2FA was enabled in a single step which made it easy to lock yourself out. This is now fixed by using a two-step process, where the secret is generated first, and then 2FA is enabled by entering a valid 2FA token. It also fixes the problem where 2FA can be disabled without passing any 2FA token. As part of this change, 2FA is disabled for all users. This allows users who are locked out to get into their account again.

New Federation Queue

Outgoing federation actions are processed through a new persistent queue. This means that actions don’t get lost if Lemmy is restarted. It is also much more performant, with separate senders for each target instance. This avoids problems when instances are unreachable. Additionally it supports horizontal scaling across different servers. The endpoint /api/v3/federated_instances contains details about federation state of each remote instance.

Remote Follow

Another new feature is support for remote follow. When browsing another instance where you don’t have an account, you can click the subscribe button and enter the domain of your home instance in the popup dialog. It will automatically redirect you to your home instance where it fetches the community and presents a subscribe button. Here is a video showing how it works.

Authentication via Header or Cookie

Previous Lemmy versions used to send authentication tokens as part of the parameters. This was a leftover from websocket, which doesn’t have any separate fields for this purpose. Now that we are using HTTP, authentication can finally be passed via jwt cookie or via header Authorization: Bearer <jwt>. The old authentication method is not supported anymore to simplify maintenance. A major benefit of this change is that Lemmy can now send cache-control headers depending on authentication state. API responses with login have cache-control: private, those without have cache-control: public, max-age=60. This means that responses can be cached in Nginx which reduces server load.

Moderation

Reports are now resolved automatically when the associated post/comment is marked as deleted. This reduces the amount of work for moderators. There is a new log for image uploads which stores uploader. For now it is used to delete all user uploads when an account is purged. Later the list can be used for other purposes and made available through the API.

Cursor based pagination

0.19 adds support for cursor based pagination on the /api/v3/post/list endpoint. This is more efficient for the database. Instead of a query parameter ?page=3, listing responses now include a field "next_page": "Pa46c" which needs to be passed as ?page_cursor=Pa46c. The existing pagination method is still supported for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in the next version.

User data export/import

Users can now export their data (community follows, blocklists, profile settings), and import it again on another instance. This can be used for account migrations and also as a form of backup. The export format is designed to remain unchanged for a long time. You can make regular exports, and if the instance becomes unavailable, register a new account and import the data. This way you can continue using Lemmy seamlessly.

Time zone handling

Lemmy didn’t have any support for timezones, which led to bugs when federating with other platforms. This is now fixed by using UTC timezone for all timestamps.

ARM64 Support

Thanks to help from @raskyld and @kroese, there are now offical Lemmy releases for ARM64 available.

Activity now includes voters

Previously, site and community activity counts were only based on people who commented, or posted. Those counts now include anyone who voted on a comment or post as well. Thanks to @Ategon for this change.

0 comments

eviltoast.org

Nusm

•

Update to 19.0?

I'm new here, and I was wondering if there is a plan to update to Lemmy 19.0 to get all the new features?

6 comments

eviltoast.org

lemmyadmin

•

Defederating from Threads - Any objections?

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!

2 comments

eviltoast.org

lemmyadmin

•

Poor performance and sporadic downtime

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.

2 comments

eviltoast.org

lemmyadmin

•

Updated community guidelines and legal disclaimer

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.

0 comments