Lemmy / Site Discussions

Not sure if this topic fits in this community but recently my account on a lemmy instance with a .ml extension (lemmy.fmhy.ml) was rendered inaccessible.

While the instance works to a degree (I can set a dns overide to gain acess) due to the broken domain it effectivly renders my account (and the instance lost due to federation).

While bookworm is fine I worry about other instances like lemmy.ml which has the same domain prefix and hosts many communities.

Image from https://very.bignutty.xyz/notes/9hf13it1ced3b2za

Last night the instance lemmy.world suffered a JavaScript injection attack. The attack set out to steal login cookies of users upon visiting infected threads, primarily targeting admins.

Potentially Affected Data

• E-Mail address stolen and/or changed (if provided in user settings)
• Password changed

Mitigations

Malicious comments have been replaced by a removal message. I have deployed the UI hotfix and @ludrol@bookwormstory.social has deleted all Custom Emoji until it is clear whether those are safe to use. Additionally all login sessions have been invalidated as a safety precaution as well, any cookies that were stolen are now rendered useless.

Conclusion

So far it does not seem like this instance was affected.

If you are not using bookwormstory.social and your instance is not on UI Version 0.18.2-rc.1 please be aware that you are likely still at risk of the attack, please check for any announcements of your instance administrators.

Details of the vulnerability are here

I have decided to block Meta's Fediverse platform threads.net. The three reasons pushing me to do so are:

• Meta's known history of the Embrace-Extend-Extinguush playbook (XMPP)
• Meta's disturbing data collection practices when it comes to threads.
• I don't trust Meta to keep their platform properly moderated. Especially since large parts of the fediverse already defederated, reducing the number of independent moderators checking over their content.

Edit: This is preventitive, threads.net does not offer ActivityPub support currently but has announced plans to do so in the future.

I'm new to this service, but it looks like a promising replacement for Reddit. Hope it'll prosper!

What is bookwormstory.social

bookwormstory.social is a server that hosts Lemmy software that mimics behavior of reddit. It enables community to host Our own place for discussion about Ascendance of a Bookworm. But it is more than that, it also has protocol called ActivityPub that connects different servers and their communities. It provides ability to send massages, replays and posts between servers.

Technical Jargon

Instances - Servers hosted by individuals or groups

Communities - Subreddits or places where similar content gets posted

Fediverse - all the projects using ActivityPub protocol

What if I wanted to see other Communities or Instances?

If you wanted for example see other communities I would suggest going to lemmyverse.net/communities and searching for your community. For example we will search for Hermitcraft a minecraft SMP server.

Then we will copy a link to the community and put it into a search bar on bookwormstory.social. To access it press magnifying glass in the top right corner. After we will press the "Search" button we need to wait 3-10 seconds. Worth noting that results will be populated by comments mentioning that community.

After that we should see an icon with the name of community and subscriber count from our instance. When we click the link to the community and it will direct us to the community page. On the right side or hidden under the "Sidebar" button there will be "Subscribe" button that will enable us to see new posts.

Now we can comment, upvote and post in community that isn't hosted on bookwormstory.social. After subscribing to your community of choice, our instance will receive updates from subscribed communities and will display posts under subscribed tab on the front page. Please note that currently comments take a while to load (5-15 min).

Hey there's a bug!

Due to software being in practically alpha state there is a lot of bugs so please report them to @Neshura@bookwormstory.social or to @ludrol@bookwormstory.social

What if I have more questions?

You can ask them in the comments or in FAQ post

Does Lemmy implement a spoiler mode for images? Or perhaps it can be implemented with a custom CSS?

I'm writing is as an author who lost all her work after a hard disk failure. Please make sure to make a daily backup of the site on a USB!

Better safe than sorry.

General discussion for improvements that can be made here

Are there tags?

Sadly there aren't (yet), for now please put the tag in brackets with the text in caps like so: [ART]

I can't see comments in the posts when viewing the community on another lemmy instance

Federation currently does not fetch past comments only future ones if subscribed, the devs recently have decided to change that but there is no estimate on when

Can I post AI generated Art?

Yes but only if you clearly tag it as such. 1st occurence is a warning and an explanation, second occurence is a ban.

Currently known problematic:

• lemmy.ml
• beehaw.org

I'll look into possible causes for the problem, as of right now the most likely culprit is the excessive server load on these two instances preventing the federation actions from completing.