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.
Proud to be on the official test server 🥲
haha, we appreciate the patience. We’re not a massive company with teams of people, just a couple of FOSS programmers.
This is why this instance is so well. Thank you for all the hard work in reliberating the web!
♥️
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.
Start monetizing with features and donations. Being Foss doesn’t exclude this
I there a changelog available?
There will be when we do the release. Its a big one.
I’m excited!
Cheers for all of the work you Devs have put in…
Thx!
“Upcoming”? Are we talking hours, days, or weeks?
The release? 🤞 not more than a week, as long as we don’t run into major issues.
❤
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Ah crap I got another account there, I guess I’m cheering from both lol
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Thank you for your service o7
o7
Let’s gooo!! Lemmy 0.19 ftw!
I’m excited for the scaling sort.
that has been workinf well on my instance 👍
can anyone tldr all big features coming in the new release?
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
User will be able to block instances without the need for their home instance to defederate
Ooohhhhh so good. I have been wanting that.
Unblocking would be pretty damn awesome too.
Controversial sort
this one sounds like an awful idea ngl
Why?
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
Yeah, it could be fun.
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.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod? This really is a revolutionary new feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thats so cool. I think this update will be the death of reddit
Can we see a list of instances that are blocked?
For lemmy.ml you can see all federated and defederated instances here: https://lemmy.ml/instances
You can see the account-based blocks in your profile settings: https://lemmy.ml/settings
In theory you could also set account-based instance blocks there but currently tyhis is broken on the front-end: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2245
I just made that issue, what a coincidence lol
It’s you! Thanks! :)
It’s been fixed. Now we just need to wait for the next version to be deployed :)
The fix is live
Glorious!
Huh, kind of wish there was a column with a few words on why each one was blocked. Kind of curious about them, but don’t want to get myself put on a list by visiting the wrong server, you know?
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.
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”).
It’s nice, but it could be better.
I think scaled sort and instance blocking are the biggest new features, lots of little tweaks and bug fixes too
What’s scaled sort?
Scaled: Like hot, but gives a boost to less active communities
Removed by mod
They’ll post a changelog with the release but for now you can look at this post.
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.
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.
Thank you so much for your work on this instance.
How best to donate to help support?
Thanks! Here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate . Liberapay is preferred if possible.
Great idea. Hope all is fairly smooth!
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.
It’s like hot sort, but gives a boost to inactive communities.
scaling sort thing? do you have a link describing what you mean?
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.
oh interesting. I wasn’t aware of that. thanks!
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.
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.
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?
I don’t think this is a bad suggestion, but it’s worth noting that
lemmy.mlis explicitly intended not to be the “main” Lemmy, or even a major one: What is lemmy.ml?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…
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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. - 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.
3 and 4 are most likely caused by problems with server-side rendering.
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?
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
Oh that’s good to know, thanks.
About the first part, earlier version, I think 0.19.0-rc.4 used to have light gray highlight.
Well that’s good to know, that sounds like that would have been better.
