The new major version of Lemmy is now ready, and we need your help with testing. Most importantly it uses HTTP for API requests now, which is much more efficient than websocket. Additionally Two-factor-auth is supported. There are also countless other improvements and bug fixes.
You can register on any of the following servers to start testing, no approval required. You can post to your hearts content to find out if anything is broken. The test instances only federate with each other to avoid affecting production instances with spam.
If you encounter any bugs that aren’t present in 0.17, open an issue and mention in the title that it happened with a release candicate version. Over the next days we will publish new RC versions to fix bugs that will invariably pop up.
Instance admins can try the new version by using Docker images dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.18.0-rc.2 and dessalines/lemmy:0.18.0-rc.1. Make sure that working backups are in place. For production instances its better to wait at least some days for the major issues to be fixed.
If you get a bad mod, you can always move to a community on another instance. That’s one of the advantages of federation.
I think this is something reddit users generally have a hard time grasping about lemmy, including myself.
One of the fundamentals of the fediverse is that there will be communities with the same name on different instances. Users can subscribe to good ones and / unsubscribe from bad ones as they wish.