There have been some requests to make it possible for Mastodon users to create threads on Lemmy. At the moment this is not possible because Mastodon cant set the title field which is mandatory in Lemmy. The same problem affects other projects like Pleroma or Friendica (where title is optional). It is unlikely that Mastodon would make any change in this regard, so a workaround in Lemmy would be necessary. I implemented such a workaround which makes the title optional when receiving a federated post, and uses the first line of the content instead. This workaround could also be made configurable per instance or per community. But to be honest I am not sure the workaround is a good idea in general, as it could result in bad titles, and generally more low-quality posts. Thats why I want to know what the community thinks about it.

https://ds9.lemmy.ml/post/1717/comment/2202 https://greenish.red/notice/ACr3wLTInIOMRAoO1o

This week we were mainly busy to prepare Lemmy version 0.9.0, which we plan to release on Monday. That version will include the database rewrite which @dessalines worked for over a month, as well as some breaking API changes. We will also provide ARM builds which many people have asked for. @nutomic: - Moved most Rust code into `crates/` subfolder to clean up the repo - Made some benchmarks to compare build time between Lemmy v0.8.11 and v0.9.0 - Wrote a blog post which explains how to optimise build times in Rust (to be published soon) - Reviewed @dessalines' API changes - Opened a number of issues for enhancements that we can implement later @dessalines: - Helped prepare the v0.9.0 release. - Made a few API v2 fixes based on @nutomic's suggestions. - Fixed an issue with site counts using total users / posts / comments, and not local. - Removed an external css link from join.lemmy.ml - Fixed an issue in lemmy-ui with initial site setup.

We forgot to write a development update last week, so we are including last week's work in this update as well. [@dessalines@lemmy.ml](/u/dessalines): Worked a lot these last two weeks on readying [Moving SQL views to diesel](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1275) for production, including pushing a [v0.9.0 release candidate](https://lemmy.ml/post/47520) to our federation test servers, to make sure everything works. We're looking to deploy this within 1-2 weeks. Its been about a month and a half of work, and touched nearly every part of lemmy and its UI. - Did lots of query performance testing, and added a lot of SQL indexes to get performance of every major query down to < 30ms. - Fixed site counts to only count local users, communities, and posts. - Added API docs for the Lemmy API v2, opened an issue on lemmur to support API v2. - Fixed an issue with nodeinfo openRegistration field - Fixed some issues with drone, including our tagged docker release process. - Fixed a stack-overflow bug having to do with post url searching. - Lots of fixes to lemmy-ui to get websocket notifs, mentions, private messages, and comment replies working correctly. - Fixed sidebar icon link wrapping [@nutomic@lemmy.ml](/u/nutomic): I didn't get a lot of coding done because of some personal stuff, and because I was hesitant to make major changes with the database rewrite underway. For those reasons I focused on smaller bug fixes, and other areas such as documentation. - Various tasks towards compliance with the ActivityPub standard: - Posts, comments etc from another community are now marked as deleted on fetch, even when we didn't receive the delete activity - Thought about how to improve our error handling, so a database error `NotFound` correctly returns HTTP 404 (so far I didn't find a good solution) - Debugged and finished a PR which ensures that comments are always delivered to the author of the parent comment/post (with help from @dessalines) - Moved documentation into separate repo, and setup a way to translate it - Simplified the slur filter, removing some terms which were giving false positives in different languages, and others that were really uncommon - Added a flag to Cargo.toml to speed up builds (`debug=0`) - Wrote a script to measure Lemmy compilation time, so that I can make a comparison between Lemmy v0.8.10 and v0.9.0 (the new version should be a lot faster)

Dessalines: I've been putting everything else on hold for a few weeks while I work on [Moving the SQL views to diesel](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1275). This is basically a spinal replacement for much of how lemmy works, and it will necessitate a `v2` of the API. I'm maybe 1/3rd done with it: most of the coding is done but it will require a lot of testing. I also added Danish as a language option, as well as fixed some site loading errors related to logged-in users. Nutomic: At the beginning of this week we saw the news that [Travis CI is going to stop supporting open source projects](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/k8v6u2/travis_ci_is_no_longer_providing_ci_minutes_for/) (continuous integration is used to automatically build and test all changes in Lemmy code). We already had problems with the platform, because builds were extremely slow, and its all proprietary. So we decided to switch to [Drone](https://cloud.drone.io/) instead. It is completely open source, and also provides free builds for open source projects (much faster than Travis). I have been spending the last days moving our checks and tests to the new platform, which takes a lot of trial and error. Besides faster checks, it also allows us to add more checks which we couldn't do before (like code formatting), and most importantly, we can self-host the CI very easily if needed.

We are federating 🙂🙂🙂