submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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

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[-] Mereo@lemmy.ca 158 points 9 months ago

I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become. They went from having stability issues to being extremely stable. I love our Lemmy community.

Keep up the good work!

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 33 points 9 months ago

I just love how professional the Lemmy instances have become.

Too bad upstream Lemmy development didn't adapt. The early 0.19 releases left several big instances hanging with severe bugs leaving them practically unusable.

[-] jimbo@lemmy.world 64 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In the developers defense, there are some bugs that don't appear until a a certain workload threshold is crossed. It's entirely possible for code to pass all tests and yet break when under heavy load in the real world (which can be difficult to simulate).

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 16 points 9 months ago

Yeah many bugs are difficult to catch, but the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.

[-] woelkchen@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

the federation and timestamp issue, was something different and almost like a joke that got out of hand.

YOLO-driven development

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

The testing in production development

[-] Tanoh@lemmy.world 10 points 9 months ago

Everyone has a test enviroment, some are lucky to have a separate production enviroment

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[-] tal@lemmy.today 61 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Speaking as someone who is on an instance (lemmy.today) that ran into a bunch of breakage from the 0.19.X releases, and which still isn't fully resolved, and where the instance admin said that he wished that he could downgrade to 0.18.X but couldn't due to schema changes, I strongly endorse a conservative approach. The releases have not really met the bar that one might want for stability.

That's especially true for lemmy.world, since it hosts a large chunk of the Fediverse communities, and if it has serious problems, there are gonna be spillover effects even on users elsewhere. I'd wait until less-critical instances have been the guinea pig for a bit on releases.

[-] ItsMeSpez@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago

Well said. I will happily forgo some new features for a while if it means that the overall experience is more consistent.

[-] grue@lemmy.world 59 points 9 months ago

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 23 points 9 months ago

Literally what we as admins feel like.

[-] LazaroFilm@lemmy.world 6 points 9 months ago

“Now it’s gonna take longer because you asked”

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[-] 65gmexl3@lemmy.world 15 points 9 months ago

are we there yet

[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 55 points 9 months ago

Thank you for all your hard work!

[-] deafboy@lemmy.world 48 points 9 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!

[-] tpihkal@lemmy.world 17 points 9 months ago

Leave the Gatorade for the plants...

[-] Krafting@lemmy.world 47 points 9 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!

[-] BackOnMyBS@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Yeah, I think the transparency and inclusivity of this instance serves as a model. I love knowing that places like this can exist.

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

Thank you!

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[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 32 points 9 months ago

Slow and steady wins the race

[-] Kase@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

[-] jivandabeast@lemmy.browntown.dev 22 points 9 months ago

Hey just FYI, I've been experiencing a postgres memory leak issue on my instance since the upgrade to 0.19.2. Theres a GitHub issue open about it (#4406), not sure if it's something that will affect you but probably worth keeping in mind

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

Hi,

thanks for the tip, we will look into this issue and check if it affects anything on our scale.

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[-] QaspR@lemmy.world 19 points 9 months ago

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

[-] m3t00@lemmy.world 19 points 8 months ago

no rush. most don't notice minor changes. thanks

[-] 1luv8008135@lemmy.world 19 points 9 months ago

Thank you for looking out for us mobile/desktop web browser peasants. ❤️

[-] DudeDudenson@lemmy.world 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 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

[-] T156@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago

Edit: I logged in to the wrong instance lol

That'll do it.

[-] sunaurus@lemm.ee 16 points 9 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.

[-] Dave@lemmy.nz 11 points 9 months ago

And one thing bad is that logged in users are logged out and can't log back in, getting errors when loggin in or worse, the site showing them a server error and they think the site is down! All fixed by clearing cookies. Or in apps, logging out then back in.

It looks like 0.19.3 may have a fix for this, which is great. IMO it's good that the largest lemmy instance hasn't updated to 0.19 yet, because a bunch of users may have disappeared thinking the site was dead. And you'd never know, because 0.19 counts active users in a different way.

Hopefully this is the one, though!

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[-] AnAustralianPhotographer@lemmy.world 15 points 9 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.

[-] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 14 points 9 months ago

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.

Are there tickets open for these tasks so we can see what you're waiting for? Genuinely wondering

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

We dont have a public Roadmap yet, but we will have to test it in multiple steps. And we dont want to get suprised with bugs ( like those in 0.19.0/1/2 )

[-] urda@lebowski.social 14 points 8 months ago

Lebowski.Social has also held back with the 0.19 upgrade. We are monitoring lemmy.world for now and will make our upgrade after that most likely.

[-] WhiteOakBayou@lemmy.world 13 points 9 months ago

Thanks for the update. I am looking forward to instance blocking!

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[-] PutangInaMo@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

0.19 breaks jerboa and idk if/ when that is getting updated

[-] steventhedev@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

@dessalines@lemmy.ml 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

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[-] SVcross@lemmy.world 12 points 9 months ago

Thank you for your hard work. Much appreciated.

[-] CrypticCoffee@lemmy.world 11 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

"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."

The issue here was never that decision, which on the whole seems sensible. It was the lack of comms. If there had been an announcement of that plan or delayed after say a week or 2, you'd probably have less of those questions. Users are stakeholders, and talking only to devs and other instance runners while ignoring users shows the level of respect you have for the users of the instance...

The ironic thing, is the communication and openness at the start was the best thing about Lemmy.World, and then later down the line, it just became an after event to communicate to users. "Decided to defederate x, y and z on Discord.". Silence on attacks for months, and silence on upgrade plans.

There is many roles on Lemmy.World, and communications probably needs more focus...

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago

We understand your frustration, but we had in the last few weeks a team restructuring and that was at that point out of our sight.

We had some mixed signals from the devs and admins at that point too, so we were unsure if we want to upgrade or wait for a another week, then those bugs struck, with federation, Timestamp incompatibilities and some other bugs. But earlier the week we had the courage to say, we could see 0.19.3 as a upgrade candidate, we did not want to announce "Hey, we upgrade to 0.19" then quickly go "Sorry no upgrade because of a critical bug" and then after new version "Hey guys upgrade time" and so on.

and announcing defederation is something to do adhoc most of the time, so it cant be like "Hey we will defederate x,y and z in a week" then, because then the reason why LW wanted to defederate that instnace floods the comments.

Please understand we all are just here on our freetime, no one here gets paid for this. So please consider this a hobby project. You can demand something like this on reddit or twitter, but not in a open source and volunteer driven Website.

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[-] avguser@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago

If all goes well, we will set a release day in the next week or two, most likely on a Saturday around 1800 UTC.

Any chance we get can get a status update?

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[-] 65gmexl3@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Wondering if future plan of LW admins is to switch to Sublinks once it becomes stable?

[-] Rooki@lemmy.world 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The possibility is there, its something good to have. And with it we dont need to annoy the lemmy devs for implementing stuff for "just the big instances" and do it by with our team of java developers. And because it is written in java, its prefered and known by many devs, it accelerates the development of any feature a lot.

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[-] hal_5700X@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

I don't blame you guys for waiting.

[-] aksdb@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

I for one am glad you take your time. I jumped ship from another instance that upgraded to 0.19 back in december and was almost unusable far into january. It's now on 0.19.3 and while federation seems to work again, it's still quite slow and unstable.

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