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
      611·
      11 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·
        11 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·
        11 months ago

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

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      493·
      11 months ago

      The release? 🤞 not more than a week, as long as we don’t run into major issues.

    • 🔻Sleepless One🔻@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      37·
      11 months ago

      Some that come to mind:

      • Scaled sort, which takes community size into consideration when looking for top posts
      • User will be able to block instances without the need for their home instance to defederate
      • The new flow for enabling 2FA makes it harder for users to accidentally lock themselves out of their accounts
      • There will be a feed option to just see posts in communities you moderate (as opposed to subscribed, local, and all)
      • Controversial sort
      • You can import and export account settings as JSON, making switching instances easier
      • squeakycat@lemmy.mlEnglish
        17·
        11 months ago

        User will be able to block instances without the need for their home instance to defederate

        Ooohhhhh so good. I have been wanting that.

        • shrugal@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          There are some topics where this sorting mechanism is the only one that will give you good comments, like asking for unpopular or controversial opinions. 1000 people will get upvoted because they post things that aren’t unpopular at all, and the few comments that are actually worth discussing get just as many down as up votes.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          Naming other instances (especially those two instances) is illegal now I guess 🤣

          But I am pretty sure everyone knows what “those two” instances are, anyways.

          • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
            71·
            11 months ago

            Blatant displays of anticommunism are not allowed on lemmy ml

            It’s the bare minimum they do to ensure it doesn’t just become another nazi bar instance.

            • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlEnglish
              32·
              11 months ago

              If those two instances are seen as problematic by the mods of an official community I wonder why lemmy.ml is not defederated from them. lemmy.ml is defederated from so many weird/extremist instances, why not from those two?

              But this is the announcement community, we should not discuss this here since it’s off topic.

              • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
                41·
                11 months ago

                ml is basically the omni-instance, the only places it’s defederated from are those which outright should not exist on the federation. I’m talking unmoderated, hate speech galore, and CSAM posted on the daily. The only thing ml defederates from outside that are porn instances. I joined a NSFW instance and tbh not missing out on much, it’s mostly commercial spam and a lot of… questionable stuff.

      • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        If I remember correctly it doesn’t block comments from instance users, only posts which could already be archived by using apps.

        A shame but better than nothing I guess.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mlEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          it doesn’t block comments from instance users, only posts

          Which is enough for me.

          which could already be archived by using apps

          And that’s the thing here: You don’t need any apps anymore because it is implemented serverside. I am also not a fan of apps in general (they don’t fit my “workflow”).

    • Die4Ever@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      11 months ago

      I think scaled sort and instance blocking are the biggest new features, lots of little tweaks and bug fixes too

  • aeharding@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    11 months ago

    This is good to hear! Have you considered releasing more often with smaller sets of changes, for future releases? It seems like this will be quite the upgrade.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      38·
      11 months ago

      Yep, we’d def prefer to do smaller releases, and we’ll try to make them more frequent and smaller in the future. The main reason this one was so delayed, is because of the large number of breaking changes, esp. w/ respect to authentication.

  • Elsie@lemmy.mlEnglish
    12·
    11 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.

      • Elsie@lemmy.mlEnglish
        7·
        11 months ago

        One feature I’m hearing about it this algorithm called scaling sort and apparently it’s supposed to boost smaller community posts up more. I was just curious as to how it works internally.

        • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
          8·
          11 months ago

          I had a little bit of a look at it a while ago.

          From memory it’s not really sophisticated. I think it divides a post’s score by the number of users its community has. So it’s not so different from upvotes / user.

          It may use monthly active users rather than absolute, I’m not sure.

    • CharlesMangione@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      11 months ago

      It’s like the other sort options, except it prioritizes communities with fewer subs, so that you’ll see content from smaller communities more often.

  • Raccoonn@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    11 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
      91·
      11 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·
      11 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.

      • skizzles@lemmy.mlEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        +1 for Connect app on Android. Got booted out and unable to log back in.

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          4·
          11 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
            5·
            11 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…