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.
I would also imagine some tooling to make it easier to remove spam accounts might be helpful, especially if they start acting up.
Additionally, even once spam bot users have been banned or bounced by failed email verification or whatever, they continue toward the user count of the instance. Not really a functional problem, but the growth of lemmy is garnering some attention, and with the bot account explosion, this growth looks astounding.
It may become a rather bad look once lemmy’s user count is basically seen to be all spam bots.
So maybe some way to adjust user counts? I’ve seen something like this in the GitHub issues I think.