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Lemmy.ml v0.19 upgrade issues and downtime.

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.

204 comments

  • 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.

  • 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.ml is 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...

  • Thank you for your hard work!!

    I appreciate that you going through this test period. I hope it all goes smoothly and that at least a few hairs remain on your heads by the end of this week. Good luck!

  • I got randomly signed out this morning, maybe this has something to do with that.

  • Thank you for the heads up and for all the work you do. Im proud to be a part of the O.G. server!

  • Thought I'd mention a problem (re: Apps will likely break (only for lemmy.ml)) I am developing an app and this one request stopped working:

    https://lemmy.ml/api/v3/community/list?type_=Subscribed&auth=[MY_AUTH]&username=[MY_USERNAME]&limit=50

    Any other type_ works. This one used to return only a users Subscribed communities but it just returns an empty array {"communities":[]}. When you load it up in a browser it works. I'm driving myself crazy

  • One problem is that a few communities, while they do show up in my subscriptions list, do not indicate that I am subscribed to them when I am on the community page (for example, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml is one of those communities where I noticed that issue, it mostly fluctuates between me being subscribed to the community or not). If it needs to be marked as an issue on GitHub, you can let me know.

    • Its probably due to a server-side-rendering related bug we're working through rn.

  • Is it normal that opening comments now completely refreshes the page instead of automatically loading the page semi-dynamically? if I click the comments button on beehaw the whole page doesn't have to reload, and it's actually faster. This seems like an annoying regression, is there a technical advantage to this?

    edit: on further analysis, it doesn't do a full page load when you go to your username > profile

    or when you click on comments from the link, so, I think this is actually a bug.

204 comments