There was downtime over the past 24 hours. You might not have noticed if you use an app, since the API stayed up the whole time.

We were getting swamped by a botnet. Tens of thousands of different IP addresses, each making only a couple of requests, crawling deep into old posts. That makes normal rate limiting useless. Anubis was challenging them, but at the difficulty we had it set to, the bots were solving those challenges cheap enough that it didn't slow them down.

So Anubis now raises its difficulty automatically when the server is struggling. That still wasn't quite enough on its own, so there's one more layer now. If load spikes badly, the site temporarily goes private, meaning only logged-in users can read it. Bots get nothing to scrape, and it switches itself back off once things calm down. If you're logged out when that happens you'll get sent to the login page.

Fair warning that the private mode part hasn't faced a real attack yet. It works in testing, but the real test comes next time we get hit. Considering we've been attacked almost daily, we will probably see soon enough. Here's to hoping it holds.

Edit: Got attacked for a few hours again at ~18:30 UTC and it worked. Site went private on its own, stayed up, switched back when it calmed down. Federation unaffected. Hopefully this will hold any and all future attacks.

Hi,

A little while back we introduced old.retrolemmy.com. This is not really interesting on its own, but I wondered if we could also get it running on Retrofed. And this was successful by way of a proxy. The cool side effect the proxy had is that lemmy-only apps now also work if you enter old.retrofed.com in your preferred app.

This made the idea of preservation come up, and @Die4Ever@retrolemmy.com wondered if the proxy could be modified to also work on lemmybb and translate to older API versions. And after a while I got forum.retrolemmy.com to work with lemmybb - an old software for lemmy last updated 3 years ago - that makes the fediverse look and work like an old phpbb forum of older days. Most functions are working and functioning as intended, but there can still be some bugs here and there. Some we could probably fix, but some can also be attributed to the older software and it's quirks.

If you notice any bugs, you can message me, or reply here.

Also, this project got pretty big, but if you want to use it yourself, its at Github. It has full 0.17, limited 0.18 and full 0.19 support for the frontend, and lemmy(current) or piefed for the backend.

This thread is posted via forum.retrolemmy.com

Edit: Known limitations:

• No 2fa. As this was only added in lemmy version 0.18.x
• No last reply date/time. This can be enabled, but will call a ton of API calls for every page load, making the site unusable.
• 500: Internal Server Error -There is a real, pre-existing bug in lemmyBB's own code, where it makes a direct fetch, but doesnt handle a missing header gracefully. Unfortunately unfixable without changing the lemmyBB code (and that's against the idea of this project)
• Old posts are at the top instead of new ones - This is because the posts are stickied in the community, making them always be on top. This is especially visible in the "General" community. The new posts are under the stickied posts.

Hello everyone! We are proud to announce that the next Farwoods test period will begin on August 18th, 2026 at 8pm EDT. We have a huge amount of new content, features, and polish for you on an all-new client rewritten in Godot. Save the date, we hope to see you there!

What is Farwoods?

Farwoods is a “graphical MUD,” an older style of MMO that mixes sandbox game mechanics with a roleplay community to create an immersive living world inspired by Redwall. It’s similar to a big, always-running D&D game that people drop in and out of. We have been working on the game since 2020 and next month, we will be bringing it back for people to try out and help us test all the changes we’ve made.

Farwoods is designed as a prosocial game where other people’s characters are part of the experience, as opposed to the antisocial theme park MMO style where there is a set story in which you are the protagonist in a largely on-rails experience, and forming connections with anyone else playing the game is purely optional.

What does it have to do with retro tech?

We are big fans of the older style of MMO epitomized in games like EverQuest, as well as old BYOND games like SS13, and we set out to create a modern game in the "graphical MUD" tradition. This is much more of a MUD than an MMO; we even intend to implement a text-only version which you can connect to via a MUD client after full release which will be fully cross-play with the UI client.

If the idea of creating characters to play in a fantasy, Redwall-inspired world of magic and intrigue excites you, come check us out!

• https://farwoods.net/
• View our roadmap: https://farwoods.net/forums/thread?id=737
• Mastodon: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@Farwoods
• Itch.io: https://farwoods.itch.io/farwoods
• Wishlist us on Steam (not necessary to play): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1678570/Farwoods/

Hi!

With all the tesseract drama going around, I thought I'd look into different frontend myself. And the only one that made immediate sense was mlmym - basically old reddit but for lemmy.

This is now available for everyone to use. And if you have any requests for other frontends let me know, and we'll look in to it.

This is our 3 year anniversary! And without you guys this wouldn't have happened. I'm glad we have all these passionate people all over the fediverse willing to post the most amazing retro content.

Thankfully it was another pretty quiet year for us as admins of this site. But this is business as usual for us by now, as our site usually doesn't attract a lot of rowdy people.

This was the year that we launched our other retro inspired fedi-place called Retrofed, a PieFed based instance. This software has also proved to be great, and this is my preferred home for browsing myself (but, don't worry, retrolemmy will remain to exist as long as we physically can). We have added topics and feeds there, that can make subscribing and/or following content much easier. Hopefully these feeds will also work on lemmy if and when lemmy 1.0 gets here.

I'm glad you people are here. It's always amazing seeing a retrolemmy account in the wild, and it's great seeing all the active communities and posts here too! Thanks for another fun year!

Cheers!

Earlier this month I created a new community devoted to retro mobile phones. I specifically chose RetroLemmy as host instance for reasons that should be obvious: focus on retro technologies. But I am very new to the fediverse (refugee from Reddit), and back on that other site I never owned or moderated a sub - hence I am new to the realities of community management as well. So far I am the only one who has posted in my newly started community, others have only commented - but no problem, everyone has to start somewhere.

Because of federation, and because Lemmy UI appears to always show /all by default (as opposed to just those communities which you are subscribed to, which was my experience on Reddit), the posts which I've been making in my niche community, devoted to a highly specialized and niche topic, have been showing up in feeds of people who have absolutely no interest in the topic at hand - or worse, have an extremely negative, hostile view regarding the retro technology I am passionate about. These non-participants have been heavily downvoting my retro community posts, and one particularly nasty person came into my 2G-centric community to make comments about how much they hate 2G and want it to die. So now I am thinking that it may be necessary to resort to use of moderation powers, perhaps even bans if gentler means fail, to keep haters out and control their damage. But before I do anything along those lines, I need to ask instance admins and fediverse elders in general for their guidance - hence this post.

First question to admins of this instance: would it be acceptable if I set rules in my community that prohibit bashing comments and malicious downvotes? Bashing here means a comment by someone with no interest in the topic at hand who came to comment only to tell us how much our retro tech sucks and how stupid we are to engage in this hobby etc. A malicious downvote means a downvote driven by the same motivation, dislike of the very topic that our community centers around. I would like to make a rule in retromobilephones community that bashing comments and downvotes are prohibited, and that repeat offenders will be subject to bans. Question to RetroLemmy instance admins: would such community rule be acceptable?

A second question is how to deal with hate that comes in the form of downvotes rather than comments. A hateful comment can be removed by a mod - but can a mod also remove malicious downvotes? If someone gets banned from a community, I assume the ban will make further downvotes impossible, but will it also wipe out already-made downvotes - or do those stay? And is there a gentler method that could be used before resorting to bans? With hateful comments, I reason I can remove the offending comment and let the commenter know that they broke the "no hate" rule, such that repeat offenses will result in a ban - but the first offense gets only comment deletion, not a ban. Is there any way to handle downvotes similarly, some way to remove a downvote without reaching for the ban hammer as first response?

Any advice or guidance would be appreciated - TIA!

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.18.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.17.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.16.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes. Also I've worked on stability issues, and it should be more stable now.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

Hi there, i am now a retro indie game developer for a long time (>15 years). Beside other things i developed a real-time browser game, a card game and more. I did it all without a contracts to publishers (which is pretty hard - and naturally without any monetary payoff).

For the last 6 years i worked on a fully libre-open-source textbased, sandbox-style, storydriven, retro-style cyberpunk network-sandbox game.

The game is text-based, so... there is no much to show, but i post a screeny below(https://retrolemmy.com/pictrs/image/c6442b29-988d-432f-8a9b-91706540aea5.png)

The game is ready for deployment and a real gem (i am very proud of it!). It just depends linux and some super-basic command-line tools.

It is 100% libre-open-source and very cleanly written and it has a tranparent build-system (means: the user builds an chroot-app on his/her computer) - which makes as safe, as your system. It runs in a isolated cgroup-enviroment via bwrap. It should build on any linux distro and run "on a toaster" (sbc is enough)

To host this, a git repo would be the best solution. (A static html-page would be enough for that - check the style of the suckless static git-pages: https://git.suckless.org/dmenu/log.html)

BUT... i have no phone (and i don't intend to get one) -> it looks like, that it is impossible to host a git repo without a phone.

I am searching for a hosting solution, without the need to have a phone.

Or better: I search for a partner that would host this project with me. The project itselft is (naturally) free of charge and libre-open-source. Could be part of a git-page-presence or a simple static html-subdomain.

I really think that this is a really cool underdog indie game which will bring some prestige to the hosting partner.

Pls. tell me your thoughts and suggestions.

PM me if you have interest in a cooperation.

thx in advance

edit: SOLVED (thx to /u/smeg@feddit.uk)

solution: https://codeberg.org/ennix/Jailbreak-Katana

Hello!

I updated the retrolemmy server to 0.19.15.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

A discussion here https://retrolemmy.com/comment/17259757 had me thinking about consolidating some dead communities.

!TheWalkingDeadGame@retrolemmy.com

• was deleted because there were no real posts, instead go to !adventuregames@retrolemmy.com

!retroarch@retrolemmy.com

• won't be deleted because it has posts in it, but we could make a pinned post to direct users to !emulation@sh.itjust.works

!sbcgaming@retrolemmy.com

• could either direct users to !emulation@sh.itjust.works or !retrogaming@lemmy.world

!retrostatus@retrolemmy.com

• could direct users to !retrogaming@lemmy.world

Hello!

There was some downtime today, so I took the chance to update the retrolemmy server to 0.19.13.

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here

My personal favorite new addition is the search in the sidebar for communities.

Not related to retrogaming, but related to gaming.

Another year has passed, and it's been a relatively quiet year for RetroLemmy. Since the last anniversary we had a few lemmy updates, we added a working email functionality (which helps for our response time for new registrations), not much downtime (with the exception of the huge downtime last April) and we added an "in case of emergency" communication line through Mastodon (@DosDude@mastodon.social). We also had the biggest influx of users this year, with the 2nd Reddit exodus, and have almost sextupled in users!

Admin-wise, it's not a lot of work (I'm sure some of you were wondering about that). We don't intend to interfere often, and we haven't done it much in the past. Sometimes we ban the random spam account, and the occasional rowdy person. But nothing too bad. For actual non-spam accounts we don't intend to perma ban, unless they keep breaking the few rules we have.

Now for my personal thanks:

I want to thank everyone for being here, making accounts and/or communities. We had a few new active communities this year, and it puts a smile on my face every time I see a new post in the local tab.

We also have some very active users that joined this year, and seeing local users in the wild is always fun. But all the lurkers are also very much appreciated, and you don't have to feel compelled to suddenly post and/or comment ;).

To another year of awesome retro fun!

Cheers.

Hello!

I’ve just updated the retrolemmy sever to 0.19.12

If you have trouble logging in, clear your cookies. If it doesn’t show up, force a refresh (with ctrl+F5 on PC)

The update went on without many problems, and only took a few minutes.

If you have any problems or questions, send me a message or reply to this thread.

Update thread with changelog here