We’ve been hard at work updating and refining the site since we came online about five weeks ago. If you’re a regular user of the site, you should notice significant speed and stability improvements, as well as a lot more content. Here’s a quick recap of the changes we’ve made over the last month.

• Site Rules Refined: We’ve relaxed some of the rules, especially those surrounding NSFW content. We are not and probably will never be a host for dedicated NSFW communities, but our intent is not to prevent you from participating in NSFW communities on other instances. The new rules should make that clearer. We’ll continue to refine and hopefully condense our site policies as time goes on.
• Defederation: As a general rule, Lemmy.ninja does not want to defederate from other Fediverse sites. Even so, we have chosen to block a couple of sites after repeated abuses of our site policies. We may also temporarily block sites who have fallen victim to spambot infestations and are imperiling our server. Rest assured that this is a last resort, and that we re-evaluate our block list very frequently in an effort to get sites off of it.
• Security and Site Enhancements: We are continually monitoring server load and taking steps to optimize and improve the server. While we have so far chosen only to deploy official releases of Lemmy software, we may deploy a release candidate if we feel the security enhancements provided by that release candidate are critical to the operation of the site. Long story short, we value stability over the bleeding edge, except when there’s an imminent threat.
• New Users and Communities: As our user base has grown, so has our list of local communities. We would very much like to add more moderators to our communities. If you are interested, please reach out to the moderator(s) of the community you wish to volunteer for.

As always, if you have recommendations for the site, or questions about the rules or how we operate, or if you just want to be social and talk about how god-awful the heat is, please feel free to post in our town square, the Ninja Tea Room. Until next time, stay smoky, ninjas!