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.mlM
      ·
      7 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.ml
        ·
        7 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.

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlM
      ·
      7 months ago

      Thanks! Here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate . Liberapay is preferred if possible.

    • CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml
      ·
      7 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.ml
        ·
        7 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.

      • HornyOnMain
        ·
        7 months ago

        Controversial sort

        this one sounds like an awful idea ngl

          • HornyOnMain
            ·
            7 months ago

            it seems like the sort of thing that's purposely geared towards people finding the dumbest possible comments so they can start an argument with them

        • shrugal@lemm.ee
          ·
          7 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 for posting things that aren't unpopular at all, and the few comments that are actually worth discussing get just as many down as up votes.

    • Die4Ever@programming.dev
      ·
      7 months ago

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

  • Raccoonn@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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.mlM
      ·
      7 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.ml
      ·
      7 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.mlM
          ·
          7 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.ml
            ·
            7 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....

  • Elsie@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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.ml
        ·
        7 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@lemmy.ml
          ·
          7 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.

  • nar@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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.ml
      ·
      7 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...

  • SlicingBot@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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.

  • Neil@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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!

      • OSH@lemmy.ml
        ·
        7 months ago

        Same issue here.

        I think it would be good practice, that verifying app support should take a front seat in the future before upgrading. The way it is currently handled, is not a good practice to retain users, but rather drive them away.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
    ·
    7 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.

      • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
        ·
        7 months ago

        Awesome, glad to hear those issues are aware of! Best of luck with fixing them, it does sound like a challenging bug.

        For the new comments having yellow being poor contrast, is that something that could still be fixed? It seems to be really poor contrast and hard on the eyes, a couple of my friends noticed this too.

        For the pageCursor not using page number, is that intentional or could it be fixed to use page number again?

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
          ·
          7 months ago

          I opened an issue about it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2264

          The change to cursor is intentional, it improves server performance: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3872