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.

  • sub_ubiEnglish
    634·
    8 months ago

    Proud to be on the official test server 🥲

    • DessalinesOPMAEnglish
      641·
      8 months ago

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

      • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
        14·
        8 months ago

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

      • Wes_DevEnglish
        3·
        8 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.

      • JoliflowerEnglish
        22·
        8 months ago

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

  • RaccoonnEnglish
    374·
    8 months ago

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

    • DessalinesOPMAEnglish
      503·
      8 months ago

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

  • GrayoxEnglish
    263·
    8 months ago

    Thank you for your service o7

    • CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      38·
      8 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
      • squeakycatEnglish
        18·
        8 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.

        • murmeladeEnglish
          9·
          8 months ago

          Unblocking would be pretty damn awesome too.

        • shrugal@lemm.eeEnglish
          3·
          8 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.

      • Omega_HaxorsEnglish
        31·
        8 months ago

        Removed by mod? This really is a revolutionary new feature.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
          1·
          8 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_HaxorsEnglish
            81·
            8 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.

            • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
              42·
              8 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_HaxorsEnglish
                51·
                8 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.

      • authEnglish
        2·
        8 months ago

        Can we see a list of instances that are blocked?

      • lud@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        8 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.

        • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬English
          1·
          8 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·
      8 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·
    8 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.

    • DessalinesOPMAEnglish
      38·
      8 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.

  • Lettuce eat lettuceEnglish
    172·
    8 months ago

    Thank you so much for your work on this instance.

    How best to donate to help support?

  • ElsieEnglish
    12·
    8 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.

    • DessalinesOPMAEnglish
      30·
      8 months ago

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

      • ElsieEnglish
        7·
        8 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.

        • maegulEnglish
          8·
          8 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·
      8 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.

  • ipkpjersiEnglish
    10·
    8 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.