Greetings, programs -- er, ninjas:

Server Upgrades

We've been hard at work analyzing our analytics and tuning the site. If you've been watching our user growth, you would have noticed a dramatic increase in users last month corresponding to the Reddit exodus. Well, we certainly noticed. We started watching the server very closely and tuning it to give you the best experience. I won't go into too much boring detail, but I will say that the server has substantially more resources. We hope this will help speed up your Lemmy-browsing experience.

Software Updates

We continue to keep Lemmy as up-to-date as possible. We're now on Lemmy 0.18.4, which is the latest stable release. We work hard to upgrade to the newest versions as quickly as we can. If the inconceivable happens and we miss a major release, you can help by letting us know about it in this community.

Admin Actions

We've also been hard at work monitoring our connec

Update to our earlier announcement of kbin.social being temporarily blocked:

Unfortunately, the porn posts have continued to appear in our new feed for over 12 hours now. It's clear that we can't user-ban our way out of this.

Blocking kbin.social was a temporary measure that allowed us to stop the flow of spam posts, wait a while to see if kbin.social had gotten the problem under control, and then re-open the gates to check to see if more bots were posting links. Every time we checked, they were. However, they were studiously keeping to the !random@kbin.social community, never once posting in any other community.

For now we have decided to remove the community and leave access to the rest of kbin.social open. This is a little risky, but leaves us connected to the rest of Kbin.social's content. If you were a subscriber to that community, you won't see any past or future posts in it. Nobody will be able to search for that community from lemmy.ninja,

For the last three hours, kbin.social has been under attack by a group of bot accounts. They've been posting hundreds of porn links to the random@kbin.social magazine. These posts have been flooding across to lemmy.ninja this morning. So far we've been able to remove the content and ban the bot users, but we're unable to keep up with the rate of posting.

We've decided to temporarily block kbin.social until the admins there can get the problem under control. We'll monitor the situation and restore connection to kbin.social once the attack has ceased.

Thanks for your understanding.

We've been hard at work updating and refining the site since we came online about five weeks ago. If you're a regular user of the site, you should notice significant speed and stability improvements, as well as a lot more content. Here's a quick recap of the changes we've made over the last month.

• Site Rules Refined: We've relaxed some of the rules, especially those surrounding NSFW content. We are not and probably will never be a host for dedicated NSFW communities, but our intent is not to prevent you from participating in NSFW communities on other instances. The new rules should make that clearer. We'll continue to refine and hopefully condense our site policies as time goes on.
• Defederation: As a general rule, Lemmy.ninja does not want to defederate from other Fediverse sites. Even so, we have chosen to block a couple of sites after repeated abuses of our site policies. We may also temporarily block sites who have fallen victim to spambot infestations and are imperil

If you or a friend are looking for a set of directions that can help you find a lemmy instance to call home, this video walks you through the process step by step.

Summary

We started a Lemmy instance on June 13 during the Reddit blackout. While we were configuring the site, we accumulated a few thousand bot accounts, leading some sites to defederate with us. Read on to see how we cleaned up the mess.

Introduction

Like many of you, we came to Lemmy during the Great Reddit Blackout. @MrEUser started Lemmy.ninja on the 13th, and the rest of us on the site got to work populating some initial rules and content, learning how Lemmy worked, and finding workarounds for bugs and issues in the software. Unfortunately for us, one of the challenges to getting the site up turned out to be getting the email validation to work. So, assuming we were small and beneath notice, we opened our registration for a few days until we could figure out if the problems we were experiencing were configuration related or software bugs.

In that brief time, we were discovered by malicious actors and hundreds of new bot users were being created on the site. Of course

Lemmy.ninja has been updated to the latest version of Lemmy. There are a whole lot of bug fixes in this release. You should notice some UI fixes as well.

As a user, you'll notice a lot fewer situations where you just see a spinning ring. New users will have to validate their email address (that's finally working!).

We recommend that you enable two-factor authentication for your account as well. This will make your account more secure and ensure that you don't lose it to a bad actor.

Q. What is Lemmy.ninja?

A. Lemmy.ninja is your portal to Lemmy, a social media network similar to Reddit. Unlike Reddit, there's no monolithic central server where everyone posts their content. Instead, content is organized under Lemmy communities on various different Lemmy sites. A community is like a subreddit -- it contains posts organized around the community's theme. At the time of this writing, there are around 13,000 communities hosted on just under 1,000 separate Lemmy sites. There are a few communities hosted on Lemmy.ninja, but the vast majority of communities you will subscribe to and participate in reside on other Lemmy sites. You can view all of the content, regardless of where it's hosted, at Lemmy.ninja.

Q. I created an account, but I can't find my validation email

A. It probably went to your spam folder. We've investigated reports of missing validation emails, and every one of them ended up in the spam folder.

Q. How do I subscribe to content?

A. Go

Site rules for Lemmy.ninja have been posted. Please familiarize yourself with these rules.

Lemmy.ninja Instance Rules

• Be respectful: Treat other users with respect and kindness. Personal attacks, harassment, or any form of hate speech will not be tolerated.
• Stay on topic: Keep discussions relevant to the respective community or post. Avoid going off-topic or derailing conversations.
• No spam or self-promotion: Do not use Lemmy.ninja solely for self-promotion or excessive advertising. Promote your content or products in designated areas, such as the appropriate community or specific promotion threads.
• No illegal content: Do not post or share any content that is illegal, promotes illegal activities, or violates intellectual property rights. This includes sharing copyrighted material without permission.
• Provide accurate information: Share reliable and fact-checked information. Misinformation or deliberate spreading of false information is strongly disco

After a brief period of testing, Lemmy.ninja has transitioned to the use of a block list for instances. This means that all Lemmy instances (and their communities) are accessible at Lemmy.ninja. Admins reserve the right to ban a Lemmy instance in the future, but as of right now there are no instances on the block list. This should give you unfettered access to all Lemmy content regardless of server.

That said, Lemmy.ninja still has site rules, which you can see on the sidebar after you log in. If a Lemmy instance is discovered to violate those rules, admins reserve the right to block that instance at their sole discretion.