Lemmy.ml `v0.19` upgrade issues and downtime.

Dessalines@lemmy.mlmod to Announcements@lemmy.ml – 467 points –

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.

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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...