I scrolled to the bottom, saw there was 1 instance still running 0.16.6 lol, I clicked on it and saw it's actually still active, there are recent posts there. Amazing.
Edit: all from 1 user lol no upvotes, might even be a bot.
WordPress has automatic updates for core, plugins and themes. I've never had any problems with it, running a very basic WordPress site. Would something like that be possible for Lemmy?
I doubt it tbh. A static wordpress site is infinitely less complex than something that constantly needs to take in and distribute content from/to thousands of endpoints with potentially many different api versions on the other side.
Im not that deep into activitypub stuff but from my understanding, automatic updates are not really a good idea in this case.
Federation doesnt have many breaking changes anymore. The bigger problem is if a database migration goes wrong, then there should be an admin around to fix it manually. Im sure Wordpress has the resources for much more thorough testing so these things dont happen.
Do you know what “infinitely” means? Wordpress is slightly less complex and although I don’t like working with it, it is capable of a lot more than you give it credit for. I suppose I’m thankful you didn’t say “exponentially less complex”.
Yes, I could easily configure our Podman containers to auto-update, but given how there have been significant breaking bugs in Lemmy releases before, I think it's better to not automate it.
I'm surprised 0.18.4 has more instances than 0.18.5, considering 0.18.5 was the simplest update ever with just a small hotfix for federating moderation actions (which is a really important bugfix) and it didn't have any changes to the database or configuration or dependencies
Having a look, the only instance with more than 250 monthly active users on 18.4 is Beehaw. They decided to not update after their disagreement with the Lemmy devs.
"Easy" might just be relevant to your experience. You can follow along with the Ansible instructions, or go your own way with Docker and Docker Compose.
Both methods require a bit of work to get spun up, but it's not too bad.
I have mine hosted on elest.io. As easy as it gets. Just choose your software enter some initial domain setup and deploy. Can't beat it for 18 bucks a month.