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.

    • DessalinesOPMEnglish
      51•2 years ago

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

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
        13•2 years ago

        This is why this instance is so well. Thank you for all the hard work in reliberating the web!

      • @Wes_Dev@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3•2 years 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.

      • JoliflowerEnglish
        0•2 years ago

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

    • DessalinesOPMEnglish
      58•2 years ago

      There will be when we do the release. Its a big one.

  • RaccoonnEnglish
    25•2 years ago

    Cheers for all of the work you Devs have put in…

    • DessalinesOPMEnglish
      35•2 years ago

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

  • @aeharding@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12•2 years 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.

    • DessalinesOPMEnglish
      28•2 years 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.

  • ElsieEnglish
    9•2 years 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.

    • DessalinesOPMEnglish
      20•2 years ago

      It’s like hot sort, but gives a boost to inactive communities.

    • @CharlesMangione@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6•2 years 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.

  • RaccoonnEnglish
    8•2 years 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…

    • NutomicMEnglish
      7•2 years 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
      3•2 years 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.

        • DessalinesOPMEnglish
          4•2 years 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.

          • RaccoonnEnglish
            5•2 years 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…

            • DessalinesOPMEnglish
              1•2 years ago

              Thx! It turned out to be a lot more than we expected 😭

  • @nar@lemmy.mlEnglish
    8•2 years 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?

    • davel [he/him]English
      6•2 years ago

      I don’t think this is a bad suggestion, but it’s worth noting that lemmy.ml is explicitly intended not to be the “main” Lemmy, or even a major one: What is lemmy.ml?

    • 7heoEnglish
      1•2 years 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…

  • SalamanderEnglish
    7•2 years ago

    Thank you for your hard work!!

    I appreciate that you going through this test period. I hope it all goes smoothly and that at least a few hairs remain on your heads by the end of this week. Good luck!