Version 0.19.X Deployment

Hello world!

I’m sure many of you fine folks have been wondering why we have not upgraded to version 0.19.X yet.

The whole team here has been getting asked this question quite a bit, from both members of the community and other instance admins. We want everyone to know, YES, we will upgrade to version 0.19.

We do not have a hard date set for when we will be upgrading as of yet, as we have about 7 associated task items that go along with this upgrade for things we need to double-check and confirm there will be no breakage.

Another big reason why we have not upgraded is due to reports from other instance admins that the front-end GUI can have performance issues. While a large portion of folks access our site using apps on their phones, we would rather not degrade the user experience for the rest of everyone else.

Worst case in terms of UI slowness, we would ask everyone to use either Alexandrite () or Photon () to mitigate the potential performance issues.

One final point to mention to address the delay is that we usually wait 1-2 weeks after a new release before applying it to production. This was complicated by the fact that there were multiple releases right after each other, with each new release having issues we hoped would be patched in the NEXT version. A new version would come up, and we would have to evaluate the stability and performance of it, which would take about 2 weeks, and then ANOTHER version would come out, which we would need to test. This was further complicated by the fact this was during the holiday season.

Version Release Date
0.19.0 2023-12-15
0.19.1 2023-12-20
0.19.2 2024-01-10
0.19.3 2024-01-24

For us, stability is paramount, as we care very much about keeping everyone happy here.

While we can appreciate the rapid release of patches on 0.19, I hope everyone can now understand the delay. If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

-jelloeater85

  • Krafting@lemmy.world
    84·
    11 months ago

    Thanks for all this info, I knew running the largest Lemmy instance would be challenging in term of version upgrade, and I’m happy you keep us posted on all your plans! Keep up the good work!

  • deafboy@lemmy.world
    481·
    11 months ago

    I’ve talked a lot of shit about the whole fediverse before, but I appreciate your stance towards stability. It’s what users crave! Thank you!

    • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
      71·
      11 months ago

      Just don’t be too excited since it only blocks communities on instances, not the users on it.

      Excerpt from Join-Lemmy.org

      Users can now block instances. Similar to community blocks, it means that any posts from communities which are hosted on that instance are hidden. However the block doesn’t affect users from the blocked instance, their posts and comments can still be seen normally in other communities.

      It’s still definitely useful, but it’s not as great as it’s been hyped, and won’t solve the spam problems from specific instances.

      • Xabis@lemmy.world
        10·
        11 months ago

        I am more interested in cleaning up All than the user brigade at this point.

        I turned off nsfw due to all the porn and yiff, and I really would like to filter out instances that are in a language I don’t speak.

        • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
          2·
          11 months ago

          Yeah I just want to make sure people know so they don’t get their hopes up and get disappointed or frustrated that it doesn’t act like personal defederation.

          That is very likely what I’ll use it for as well, since I basically stopped browsing all due to the NSFW communities who’s posts would pop-up randomly in it, sometimes even unflaired 😬.

          filter out instances that are in a language I don’t speak.

          I’d avoid that as it’s a bit overkill and many of those instances may also have English-speaking communities. A better solution is to exclude the languages you don’t speak from your settings so the posts and comments won’t appear for you.

          • Xabis@lemmy.world
            2·
            11 months ago

            exclude the languages you don’t speak from your settings

            Thanks for the tip. This option is not surfaced in voyager, so I had no idea of its existence.

            There is a warning that deselecting “unspecified” will remove most posts, so it remains to be seen how much this will help.

            • Draconic NEO@lemmy.world
              2·
              11 months ago

              Yeah it would be good if more communities and instances chose to enforce setting a language, they can do that by excluding unspecified from their community which will disallow people to make posts there that don’t have the language set. Obviously nothing can be really done for posts that don’t set the language, as well as for most apps which don’t set the language whatsoever, or have really weird ways of doing it.

  • sunaurus@lemm.ee
    36·
    11 months ago

    Good luck with the update! One great thing about 0.19 is that it allows users to check federation status between instances, will be awesome to get that for lemmy.world as well.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      allows users to check federation status between instances

      Wait … what’s this?! Never heard of this as a user feature? Any guidance?

  • Desistance@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    11 months ago

    No need to rush it if the software is in heavy churn. Just pick a date when the dust settles.

  • QaspR@lemmy.world
    19·
    11 months ago

    I for one am thankful for the admins’ continued dedication to platform stability.

  • DudeDudenson@lemmy.world
    182·
    11 months ago

    Hey ever since the update boost won’t show my subscriptions and my post/comment history, I can only browse in all

    Is this a known issue that I should bring up with the boost people?

    Edit: I logged in to the wrong instance lol

  • AnAustralianPhotographer@lemmy.world
    English
    15·
    11 months ago

    Thanks for the update. I appreciate the transparency and honesty.

    No pressure from me, I know all too well about upgrading to the newest version and finding out it has a showstopper bug for the features i was planning to use.

    Thankyou for running the server and helping build the community and fediverse.

    • steventhedev@lemmy.world
      71·
      11 months ago

      @[email protected] released v0.0.51 in mid December, but I think it only reached Google Play on Dec 18th. I’m not sure when/if it was pushed up to f-Droid.

      There are some minor issues, but largely it works fine for me on instances running 0.19

        • steventhedev@lemmy.world
          51·
          11 months ago

          Did you install from Google Play?

          Open the Play Store link on your phone - the automatic update process has been thoroughly broken for at least a year.

          If you installed from f-Droid I have no clue - I use stock android without any alternate stores set up.

          • PutangInaMo@lemmy.world
            1·
            11 months ago

            Play store updates being broken would make sense. I don’t think I’ve had a single app updated automatically in that time frame… Holy shit lol