We have a test instance of Lemmy 0.18.2 running with our patches on top ready for testing:

https://test.hexbear.net

Lemmy has been seeing a lot of activity recently, so this release brings with it a lot of changes (some of which we are hoping are going to fix some of the jank y'all have probably been experiencing). You can see the full list of changes here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/releases. This is also the release that removes websockets!

Disclaimer: Anything you post will be nuked after we're done testing, nothing is being saved from the test instance.

If you encounter a bug please let us know what happened, how we can reproduce it, and your OS & browser in the comments below. The more detail, the more likely we can fix things!

  • makotech222 [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Noting here, we dropped a decent amount of hexbear-specific code/styling, as upstream lemmy is starting to get better and maintaining it is quite difficult. So expect some things to look better, some things to look worse.

    • W_Hexa_W
      ·
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

      • makotech222 [he/him]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Lots of the custom mobile styling is gone. that's the biggest difference. Cant remember what else right now

  • makotech222 [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    also, test your 3rd party clients on it like jerboa, should be working now.

      • geese_feces [comrade/them, love/loves]
        ·
        1 year ago

        It looks like the issue occurs because Hexbear is full-width while default lemmy has padding on the sides. And on current Hexbear the formatting toolbar is right-aligned so it doesn't happen here.

        One fix would be to edit line 265 of styles.css where .emoji-picker-container is defined and change transform: translateX(-50%); to transform: translateX(-33%);

  • Thordros [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Creating new posts and uploading images are smooth as butter on Firefox mobile. Can't wait til this hits prod so I can shitpost faster and harder than ever before. party-sicko

  • volcel_olive_oil [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    it's a bit annoying having to press the tiny + button to inline expand text-only posts on the thread list instead of the big square (and it's extra annoying on mobile) but assuming that's lemmy stuff and will get rectified

  • macabrett
    ·
    1 year ago

    thank you layla and the devs!!!!

  • Infamousblt [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Is this the federation release? I know the last one was but we didn't federate after it because reasons. Is this the one we do federate on?

    • layla
      ·
      1 year ago

      No - turns out we still have some other (smaller) changes we need to make before we federate.

  • jackmarxist [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I think that posts should show some text on the feed by default instead of having to use the + button.

    • makotech222 [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      i agree but maintaining it has been a pain, lemmy upstream does like a huge refactor every update so we end up having to reimplement it every time. We are compatible with third party clients now, i think they may have better UIs especially on mobile.

  • GaveUp [she/her]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I'm curious, what's the motivation behind removing websockets? I looked at the PR and don't get it

    • makotech222 [he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      they take up a lot of computer resources to maintain, which ends up slowing the site down significantly once we hit > 1000 users at a time. They also cause a bunch of other random bugs that you might run into, like the 'Report Created' popup

      • GaveUp [she/her]
        ·
        1 year ago

        True I forgot this is run on a tiny resource constrained box. Bless the devs for making this site work this well

        Do you know if that was a motivation behind Lemmy choosing Rust? Knowing that its purpose is for small owned instances that probably don't have a big budget for infra?

        • makotech222 [he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          i think its just the lemmy dev's favorite language or something. probably not any technical reason.

          Also, our server is pretty beefy, esp compared to most other lemmy instances

        • PorkrollPosadist [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Like Mako said, it was probably just preference, but it was also a good choice IMO. A lot of web platforms are programmed in interpreted languages like PHP, Ruby and Javascript (on the server side, via Node.js). Rust is a compiled systems programming language. As a result, the Lemmy back-end runs as native machine code, with no need for a virtual machine or interpreter. It runs faster, and it scales better.

          This makes development more complicated, but I think the pay-off is worth it. It is also worth noting that Rust was originally developed by Mozilla for use in the Firefox browser, and had a vibrant selection of libraries for web development from the very early days. It is particularly suited for web-facing applications thanks to unique features like the "borrow checker," which prohibits entire categories of memory access and concurrency errors which are typically exploited by malicious inputs. It still doesn't prevent you from shooting your own foot off though.

          Based on anecdotal experience, Lemmy is at least an order of magnitude more efficient than Mastodon, which is programmed in Ruby.

  • space_comrade [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    I can't login because the password textbox requires a 10 character password and my password is only 8 characters.

    Besides that the new version definitely feels snappier.

  • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    A few decodes are missing from the sort options for sorting a comm:

    Show

    To reproduce, go to any comm (or the All feed) and open the sort posts combo box

    • OS: Android 13
    • Browser: Fennec 115.0.0