Around June 9th I found that I could no longer display images in comments & posts. The specific problem seemed to stem from some broken code that was being auto-added
This is most likely due to the imgur rate limiter which is blocking our server (Basically our server is trying to request too many images from imgur). I have a plan to bypass our image proxying for a handful of known image-hosts, such as imgur, but haven't been able to implement this yet. But it's coming soon!
In general I intend to keep image proxying enabled for most other sites, though, because it allows protecting the privacy of lemm.ee users, as well as ensures slightly faster page load times compared to always making users fetch images directly from their original host.
But sadly, there’s more. Namely, it seems that lemm.ee communities are no longer showing up in one of the significant FV search engines, i.e. “lemmyverse.net.”
This requires fixing on the lemmyverse.net side - they currently only have support for older Lemmy versions, but I believe it's only a matter of time before this gets fixed.
I think there are two separate things I want to address here:
First, agile isn't a project management methodology, it's just a set of 4 abstract priorities and 12 abstract principles. It's very short, you can check it out here:
Nothing here says that you're not allowed to write documentation, write down requirements, etc. In fact, the principles encourage you yourself as a software team to create the exact processes and documentation that you need in order to meet your goals.
"Working software over comprehensive documentation" does not mean you aren't allowed to have documentation, it just means that you should only write documentation if it helps you build working software, rather than writing documentation for the sake of bureaucracy.
"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" does not mean that you should have no processes, it just means that the individuals in your team should be empowered to collaboratively create whatever processes you need to deliver good software.
Secondly, in terms of practical advice:
Talk about this problem with your team. Is it hard for others to figure out where requirements came from? Maybe they already have a good method and can share it with you. If it's hard for everybody, then propose improvements to your process, for example, propose some type of design document process as part of building any new features
There are no perfect answers to the question of "how do I safely make non-trivial changes to systems", but the general approach is to ensure that:
a. You have metrics about how your system is used.
b. You have automated tests covering any requirements, so that you can feel confident when making changes to one part of the system that it isn't violating any unrelated requirements.
c. You actually document any confusing parts in the code itself using comments. The most important thing to cover in comments is "why is this logic necessary?" - whenever something is confusing, you need to answer this question with a comment. Otherwise, the system becomes very annoying to change later on.
If you are missing any of the above, then propose to your team that you start doing it ASAP
At the end of the day, somebody is responsible for making product decisions. Is it your team? Or maybe some separate product owner? Sometimes, you just need to communicate with whoever is responsible to figure out if any requirements are still relevant, or if they are now safe to change.
To be honest, neither Hexbear nor Lemmygrad has caused any noticable issues for lemm.ee. I recently compiled some stats for lemm.ee rule breakers by home instance, and as you can see in this post (in the "Administration" section), neither of those instances even made the top 10.
In general, mods haven't complained about those two instances either, and the stats for community bans by independent community mods are more or less very similar. If any users creates issues in a lemm.ee community, then the community mods are free to just ban those users, regardless of what instance their account is hosted on.
if fact I wouldn’t even be able to as my home instance is defederated from these instances and thus such posts would be invisible to me
Preventing such situations for lemm.ee mods is actually one of the many reasons we don't want to use defederation as a moderation tool on lemm.ee - we rather use site bans etc. Too much collateral damage with defederation, especially when dealing with larger instances which probably have vastly more innocent users than problematic ones. We reserve defederation for more extreme cases, like spam instances & CSAM.
It's not really a bug, it's just a case where app developers need to update their code to support a small change in the Lemmy API. More details here: https://lemm.ee/post/34259050/12479585
It's occasionally breaking for us due to imgur rate limiting the lemm.ee server. I am planning to disable proxying for a few well known image hosting sites (including imgur) soon - it requires some additional development, but I think I'll be able to do it in the next few days. Sorry for the inconvenience!
That's definitely not intentional - it's a custom error message which we have just for lemm.ee, not a standard Lemmy error, and it seems I need to tweak it a bit for it to work correctly in 0.19.4. Thanks for reporting this!
Does lemm.ee support the “mark post as read” feature?
Yes, lemm.ee has all the standard Lemmy features. However, the format for this request has changed, and it seems the app has not been updated yet.
For technical context: your app is trying to use the singular post_id field when marking posts as read. This field was marked as deprecated several releases ago, as it was replaced by a post_ids array field, in order to enable marking multiple posts as read at the same time. The deprecated post_id field has been removed in Lemmy 0.19.4.
Lemmy federation basically works by copying stuff from their source instance to all other federated instances. So if I write a comment on lemm.ee, other federated instances will get their own copy of my comment. They will also all know that the "authority" for this comment is lemm.ee.
If an admin on another instance decides to delete their local copy of my comment on lemm.ee, then they are always free to do so (for example, some instances might want to moderate more strictly), but any actions they take like this are limited to their own instance - for the rest of Lemmy, lemm.ee remains the authority for this comment, so individual remote instance admins taking actions won't have any effect on any other instances.
As for the original topic of modlog federation, basically it just boils down to this: just like with the comment example above, Lemmy instances also save a local copy of incoming federated mod logs. The Lemmy software does not yet have 100% coverage in terms of federating mod logs (for example, there are no federated logs yet for instance admins banning remote users), but this coverage has been increasing, and I expect this will eventually get to 100% (just needs more dev time really).
Also, if some instance admins try to tamper with their mod logs, then other instances can still see the real history, because there is no way for an instance admin to delete copies of their mod log from other instances.
I've made some experimental changes, please let me know if you notice any difference