Hey, folks! As the holiday season approaches, and time off work is granted unto some of us, I thought it’d be a good time to post a quick and informal “state of the instance” report.

First, the critical info: I’ve updated the instance to the latest version, and that has changed the way two-factor tokens are handled. If you’ve enabled two-factor previously, please check to ensure it’s still enabled. I posted this on our Discord, but realized I forgot to post here. Sigh.

Second, we’re still looking for a designer to create a custom theme that prioritizes accessibility. We promised this ages ago, I know, but nobody has had the time to drive the effort forward. If you’re a person with a disability, you have design experience, you’re comfortable with Lemmy themes, and you’re interested in helping out, let us know! You can post in the comments, or you can post in the lemmy-alpha-testing channel on Discord.

And that segways nicely to my third topic: when the heck are we getting out of Alpha? The answer is: who knows! The servers are stable, and the infrastructure is all working well, with one exception. However, I’m not willing to declare this a stable instance until we have a theme that’s fully accessible to everyone, and the accessible apps on mobile have matured a little bit.

Next! Email, the one exception I mentioned above. If you have email notifications turned on here, please note that our email deliverability is terrible. If you’re not getting emails from rblind.com, that’s why. We do have SPF configured, and we send email via IPV6 and TLS. However, I don’t pay for a service like SendGrid to ensure deliverability, and we send emails directly from our server. Paid email services are expensive, and I have no plans to pay for one. So check your spam folders, and whitelist our emails if you want them. Outlook usually accepts our emails, and Gmail does so when it’s in a good mood. This will probably not be getting better any time soon.

The last topic I guess I have to talk about: threads. We have no plans to block federation with threads at this time. However, threads currently isn’t federating directly with Lemmy, and federation is a per-account opt-in on the threads side. Should these things change, we will respond accordingly. In the interests of full transparency, because I don’t think this information is publicly visible anywhere, we currently defederate with the following instances:

  • lemmy.saik0.com: personal instance, user trolling
  • lemmygrad.ml: communism, genocide denial
  • invariant-marxism.red: more of the same
  • hexbear.net: abusive comments in multiple posts, no action taken by the moderators of hexbear.

We only add a server to that list less than once every three months or so, and only when we notice or get reports of abusive or spammy comments. We don’t use any automated blocklists. If this changes, we’ll update the community.

That’s everything! Happy holidays, everyone, however you celebrate!