In anticipation of Lemmy’s upcoming 0.19 release, and to work out any final issues, we’re going to deploy a test release on lemmy.ml within the next few days.

We’re doing this testing on lemmy.ml only, so that we can encounter any issues before the release, and to make sure the upgrade process is smooth for other production servers.

Some of the following will happen during the process:

  • Apps will likely break (only for lemmy.ml)
  • Lemmy.ml may experience some downtime for the upgrade to complete (ideally no more than an hour).
  • If anything goes wrong, we may have to restore from a database backup, meaning content made in between backups may be lost.

If all goes well, we’ll have an official announcement for the release after this testing period.

I apologize for the difficulties this might cause. At most this will be a week of hair-pulling, but its vital that we catch any issues before telling other servers to upgrade.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      38·
      10 months ago

      haha, we appreciate the patience. We’re not a massive company with teams of people, just a couple of FOSS programmers.

      • Wes_Dev@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Thanks everyone for the server and service. It’s appreciated. If I wasn’t broke and jobless at the moment, I’d be happy to kick over some monthly money on Patreon or Kofi or whatever people are using these days.

      • Joliflower@lemmy.mlEnglish
        22·
        9 months ago

        Start monetizing with features and donations. Being Foss doesn’t exclude this

  • Raccoonn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    9 months ago

    The update has broken a bunch of things for me…
    On my desktop using firefox, I cannot get images to display & everything is slow to load. On my android phone, boost was showing me a ton of stuff that I do not follow & wasn’t showing me any info about my profile (profile tab would not load or something). Boost eventually logged me out & I have been unable to log back in…

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlMEnglish
      81·
      9 months ago

      Images were temporarily broken due to authentication problems, but thats fixed now. If you encounter problems in apps, please them to the developers so they can fix them.

    • jamiehs@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      9 months ago

      I have experienced the same login bug on the Mlem app as well. One of my devices stayed logged in and is working perfectly; my other device logged me out of lemmy.ml and I have not been able to log back in on that device.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          4·
          9 months ago

          This is our fault, not the fault of app devs. The post text explains it, but we’re working out a few bugs on a large instance, running an unreleased version of lemmy.

          • Raccoonn@lemmy.mlEnglish
            3·
            9 months ago

            Again I’d just like to thank you for all the hard work you & all the other devs are putting into working on fixing everything that broke with this upgrade…

  • nar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8·
    9 months ago

    I was just wondering: Instead of testing these potentially disruptive changes on the main website, why wouldn’t you make some testing instances where people can try everything out, like voyager, enterprise, and ds9 were back in the day?

    • 7heo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      53·
      9 months ago

      Yep, I’ve been enraged by this decision from day one. This is depressingly amateur. Let people join, let other developers make very cool apps, and then introduce a deeply breaking change in a minor version, and deploy it on the most active instance, with mere days of warning. Or “How to destroy all the progress made by Lemmy, in one small change”.

      I get it if the devs and admins of Lemmy.ml are paying too much out of their own pocket, and if they want users to literally go away, to mitigate that cost.

      But doing it in such an in such an insidious, demoralizing way, as opposed to being transparent with the costs and announcing (drastic) measures to mitigate that cost, is literally destroying most of the progress made so far, and driving most users back to reddit.

      As of today, the list of most active servers of the fediverse has only one Lemmy server (Lemmy.world), in ninth position, and that is the only Lemmy server in that list, over four pages… The Lemmy instances used to be in the middle of the first first 10 instances, with Lemmy.ml leading the way.

      Now, I guess the devs didn’t want to take those drastic measures, and tell people to they would be closing down their accounts, ordered by creation date, until the costs become bearable again. Because that would mean “admitting the Lemmy.ml experiment to show the world that people are, when given the opportunity, rising to the challenge, and putting in the effort, in true communist fashion, is actually a failure”. People aren’t ready for communism. Communism requires education, intelligence, and empathy/compassion. Our western societies are fostering the opposite traits. When we become educated, intelligent, and empathic or compassionate, it is in spite of our societies, not thanks to them.

      Now, a few people opened instances, but it wasn’t enough, and fast enough, when the “reddit migration” happened, to absorb the insane influx of users to Lemmy.ml.

      So I guess it is what it is, but it’s still sad and depressing…

  • Elsie@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    10 months ago

    Can somebody explain what this scaling sort thing is to me? I’ve heard it a lot, but I don’t know exactly what it does.

  • SlicingBot@lemmy.mlEnglish
    71·
    9 months ago

    How much longer will it be before I can finally log in and use boost or liftoff. Is there a timeline for a fix? Both have been broken since the update.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    Honestly, I have some problems with this update (and some things I’m super happy about too of course), I hope my feedback is seen so the problems can be made aware:

    1. I’m not a fan of new comments having yellow, the contrast is poor at least on darkly-compact and it just looks weird and out of place. I’d suggest maybe making them a slightly lighter or darker shade of the existing color to make them stand out, not an entirely different color.
    2. It seems the main page/posts pagination uses pageCursor instead of page number now, whereas profiles still use page number. Using pageCursor is an SEO downgrade and usability downgrade, it’s a weird decision IMO if that was intentional and not a bug.
    3. I think I might have run into a bug, Lemmy no longer seems to save my upvotes or something. When I upvote some posts on the main page/posts list, even if I wait a few seconds, or 10 seconds or even 30 seconds, when I refresh my upvotes are gone. This one seems fixed now? Nevermind, it’s broken again, very weird.
    4. With “Top Day” sorting, there used to be multiple pages of posts, now sometimes I don’t even get a full page of posts: https://i.imgur.com/4LiZzJG.png (it looks like it’s showing posts from only one community, I have it set to subscribed communities but I’m literally subscribed to like 50 different communities) but other times I get one full page of posts plus multiple other posts which is how it always behaved before 0.19. Since it seems to be inconsistent, I’m thinking that’s a bug.

    I would probably suggest on holding off on releasing 0.19 for now, it does seem like a really large release so it might be better to make sure it’s fully polished and ready to go.

    I’m super glad upvoting comments doesn’t discard the comment you’re writing, that’s a huge improvement. I also see import/export settings, that’s super awesome, I absolutely love features like this!

    Thank you for your hard work, Lemmy is such a cool platform.

  • Neil@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    Thank you for the heads up and for all the work you do. Im proud to be a part of the O.G. server!