[Done] New try at upgrading to 0.18.1 July 1st 20:00 CET

Good luck.

TFW you run a small server with an open source social platform for shits any giggles and one month it explodes a thousandfold because of one greedy pig boy.

You know, maybe I'm being overly dramatic, but I really feel like we're at the beginning of something special. I realize that Lemmy has existed for some years, but the whole Reddit thing is really pushing it into the limelight, and it's new to me (I joined just before the blackout).
Seeing all the developers and admins dealing with the inevitable bugs, working together to keep the federated instances operating together during a huge surge in users, like a flotilla of disparate ships lashed together facing a major storm - it makes me excited, nervous, and hopeful. I fully intend to support developers and instances financially, but also want to give a big "yay team" shout-out.
- Not dramatic at all. This feels like starting fresh, and the enthusiasm and excitement makes it feel like the early 2010s of the internet again. I love it 😍
- Totally agree. Alas, I'll need to find time to help with time/knowledge. (that's my best chance, cash is an issue)
  
  Time and knowledge are probably more important. A lot of well meaning people are copying over a bunch of Reddit content into communities here, but I think that's only useful in a small subset of them. If you're looking to scan through a bunch of memes, okay that's great. But a lot of people are looking for discussions and content to interact with, and a giant number of posts with no comments isn't helping that.
  So starting or contributing to real discussions (like this one!) is a big contribution.
- I think the solving the bugs and server issues is great to see, but I also think Lemmy is facing some deep issues about its design in the future, and it's going to take more than technical know-how to fix it.
  
  Yeah, I agree. I think they can be worked out, but I don't think they have been yet. I think there's a lot of potential in the distributed architecture, and am excited to see it progress.

This is like that scene in a sci-fi movie where they're trying to repair the ship mid-battle. Good luck!
- I used to work with a guy who was a sysadmin for a moderately sized webhost in the mid-2000s when things like containers and cluster orchestrators didn't exist and high availability/multi-master database systems were only really accessible to banks.
  He once described patching the servers "like trying to change all the tires on a car without being allowed to pull over".
  
  ...as an IT guy who started my career as containers starred to be a thing, some of the stories from the late 90's early 2000's are bonkers. We have it so much easier with things like k8s handling the orchestration.
- Watching lemmy react realtime is hella interesting, good luck y’all!
- Admins be like:

PSA from Admin Team: The update completed roughly two hours ago. Since that time, the Admin team (and other site admins) have been working on the noted performance issues. We believe we have found a solution, but we still need time to test this out. You may still see brief outages and differences in performance as we are testing different configurations. We are trying to prevent rolling back.
While I know this can be frustrating - especially today - please keep in mind we have a team of volunteer techies (from around the globe!) collaborating on this issue. It is an inspiring situation. Also keep in mind that lemmy.world is quite a bit larger (and more active than any other instance). As such, we are a bit of a ‘test instance’ in regards to high volume requests. This is just part of the growing pain. We appreciate your understanding.
@ruud@lemmy.world will provide a debrief once we have completed testing.

Godspeed. I really hope this is the one and the age of randomly redirecting to sports game threads will be over!
- Surprise MLB got you down? Too bad, we have orbital space lasers!
  zap!
- Yeah the random refreshes on desktop is almost unusable. Fingers crossed!
- the age of randomly redirecting to sports game threads
  Glad I wasn't the only one experiencing that.
- That should be a conspiracy.

Thank you for the heads-up. 🤙

Is it wise to do a big deployment on the day when you may receive a massive influx of new users from Reddit? The API changes take affect on the 1st.
- It's a bit of a lose lose situation tbh because if we don't upgrade then the first experience those new people are gonna have of Lemmy is an unusable All feed and a broken Jerboa.
  My other account is on lemm.ee and the admin there contributes a lot of fixes to the software (plus has been working with Ruud to figure out our federation issues). He upgraded us a couple days ago and it's been amazingly stable given that it was only a day after the rc1 disaster.
  Ultimately I trust that he and Ruud know what they're doing, but sometimes with an untestable situation like the size of .world you just have to pull the trigger and hope it works.
  
  Liftoff is working great. Jerboa should be held off on for now because it can't handle different server versions. Different server versions WILL always be an issue in a federated environment.
- Wise ? No. Useful ? Maybe. If the improvement can help with the load and the general experience, it's a good idea.
  And, hm, the "site is down sometimes" experience would not be that foreign to reddit user in the first place :D
- Probably not, but surprisingly some 3P apps still work. I can confirm that Joey for Reddit and Infinity for Reddit are still able to access reddit. Seems like they don't pull the plug in one go? Or cherry picking the most demanding apps first?
  For context, it's July 1st 16:27 p.m., GMT+9 where I am.
  There might be less users influx than expected, though we'll see in the next few hours or days.
  
  All of the apps will work until the devs pull the plug. Maybe those devs have decided to try to eat the cost and offset with subscriptions or something. I know the Apollo dev said it would cost him twenty million dollars per month to pay the API fees, so hopefully the devs of those other apps don't go bankrupt overnight.
- Well website crashing all the time and jerboa crash loops. Woop, at least I've found a working alternative client now
  
  Which one?

Server feels a lot better now than it did an hour ago. Comments are going through quickly and upvotes are working for me.

- With how unbelievably awful Reddit is without 3rd party apps, all Lemmy needs to thrive is content (and servers not blowing up).
  
  Yeah I'm fully prepared to stay here just based off how much effort has gone into making it more accessable. Hopefully the content will be able to get up to the reddit levels.
- I don't see the point in returning to reddit. The Spez has lost the thread and lost any trust from any user who isn't too young to care or the people who don't have a brain. So anyone left, isn't worth interacting with to me. If a miraculous recovery happens, maybe, but I don't see it as likely at all.
  
  I'm actually glad this has happened. Quality has been going down on average over time there as it got more popular. And I don't just mean the site itself.
- If we spray them with glue, quite a few.
- To say I will NEVER use reddit again would be a lie, but it will be very seldom, and only when I'm at a computer. Even that will only last as long as old.reddit does, which is basically guaranteed to be a short time.
  Otherwise, I'm here fully.
- Some of them will, some of them won't. I wouldn't worry too much about it.
- I'm down for a new social media addiction as long as there's a good app for it.
  
  Both Boost and Sync are coming to Lemmy, so you'll have at least two top tier apps to choose from.

Hey man if y'all have planning meetings or anything for this stuff I'm willing to jump on and read the source code. 15 years engineering and dev, willing to put time in for you guys.
- You might want to DM @ruud@lemmy.world
  
  Sent thanks
- 0 years of experience willing to do the same. Me basically this meme https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/446/009/d10.jpg
- The lemmy code is on github.
  https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Good luck. This is my favorite instance so I will be eagerly awaiting. Lemmy has been incredible and strangely what I needed. I would doom scroll reddit and see the same posts and the same comment chains and just redundancy hell.
Lemmy feels so different and the community is so welcoming. Thanks again everyone for making this lost Redditor a found lemming (is that the correct term lol).
- I would doom scroll reddit and see the same posts and the same comment chains and just redundancy hell.
  Ugh, so true. On Lemmy, it feels like it's actually worth it to qualitatively engage with people.
  
  Agreed. I think the user base is a big part of it. Almost by definition, this place is full of people that used to use third party Reddit apps. That group would have been dominated by people that signed up before Reddit launced their official app in 2016, so accounts that are at least seven years old, and in many cases, even older (my first Reddit account dates to 2011). That means (1) users who were teens or adults in 2016 that are now seven years older and hopefully seven years wiser, and (2) users that participated in Reddit when it was more discussion forum oriented rather than the current form of quick dopamine hit memes.
  I'm nearly 40, and I suspect a decent amount of the users over here are too (i.e., the group of twentysomethings that discovered Reddit shortly after the Digg situation). Children and teenagers that signed up for Reddit within the past two or three years would be on the official app without a reason to migrate, so hopefully, that means this place is mostly adults willing to have respectful conversations with one another. We'll see if it lasts, but that's the impression I get now. It's refreshing.

Can't you disable the post button within the upgrade progress? It's a shame to see posts to disappear due to it.

Fingers crossed. Would love for the auto refreshing to finally stop.
- FYI, you can mitigate this by specifying page zero in the URL. As an example, if you're looking at the "All" page on Lemmy.world, the URL looks like this:
  https://lemmy.world/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1
  Just change the 1 at the end to a 0 and hit Enter. No more refresh bug.

I can only wish you the best. You are an amazing person for signing up for all of this.

Thanks for all your hard work Ruud and team. This place is seriously shaping up well to completely replace my Reddit addiction.

Heyo! Small update from someone who is watching the upgrade live; it's ongoing still. Seems like they are still facing some performance issues. So grab your popcorn and wait! 🍿 (Btw, i am not a sysadmin, just a moderator)

Looking forward to it. The lag has been brutal.

Keeping my eyes crossed for you!

US people: This is 2p EDT today. I had to look it up, so I thought I'd save you the trouble.
EDIT: I'm assuming that Ruud means CEST (the summer daylight savings time version of the time zone that's currently being used there).

For those that were about to Google it... 20:00 CET is 12pm PDT and 3pm EDT
- 18:00 UTC would be a better time to report for an international server. (on the other hand, people who can fund us can DDG the timezones as well ;) )
- I'm pretty sure OP means CEST, since we're in summer. So that means you need to subtract one more hour.

Waiting for the update so I can sign into Jerboa.
Lemmy looks like it's shaping up nicely to take over my Reddit habit
- Same here. Thought I was doing something wrong, being a very fresh reddit-refugee.
  Meanwhile I'm trying out connect for lemmy. Seems pretty good so far, too, in case anyone wants to give it a try as well.
- Use liftoff for now

I hope it works! I'm so over posts just spawning into a page that is already loaded.

Performance is extremely uneven. Sometimes loads instantly, sometimes I get a timeout. Upvotes don't show up until reload. Still a lot better than the last attempt.
The server hamsters seem to be on fire, but I won't hold it against the service/community/individuals (except spez; fuck you spez). Lemmy is in the unfortunate position of being forced into a development model called "fuck it, we'll do it live!"
edit: commenting and editing seems to be fine.

Latest version of Jerboa on Google Play doesn't work with servers below 0.18;
For those who want to use Jerboa to access lemmy.world before the upgrade to 0.18.x happens, you can install a specific release from GitHub instead of Google Play. I found version 0.0.34-alpha to work (using it rn to post this). https://github.com/dessalines/jerboa/releases/tag/0.0.34
Edit: since the update is done, it's probably best to go back to latest version. Glad I helped someone!

Godspeed you absolute madlads.

o7

@ruud@lemmy.world Your energy is amazing and commendable! Your Fediverse hobby is like what most people call a job! Thank you so much for all the hard work and attentive management, and also thanks to those that are helping! I hope more folks take a moment to look into the options for donating to the cause via Patreon and the other options you have. Excellent work ethic!

And… we’re back!

Godspeed. I really hope this is the one and the age of randomly redirecting to sports game threads will be over!
- This should be some sort of conspiracy.

May the odds be ever in ~~your~~ our favor.

Good luck! Really looking forward to the new version

This is our home now. May the road rise to meet us. And FUCK Spez

Good luck! Posted 19:59 CET.

Y'all are so nice and transparent here. This place is lovely, unlike Reddit and their admins lol.

I sadly couldn't use the web version of lemmy.world at all cause of the websocket issues. 0.18+ is gonna be an amazing upgrade fore this instance! All the devs and staff who made this happen have my undying respect.

Bon courage mon ami with the upgrade. You guys rock.

Hopefully third time's the charm and the upgrade will be successful.
- Most issues were caused by browsers trying to access cached code. A recent change introduced changed paths for each new release, so browsers will fetch the new files. At least those issues should be a thing of the past.

o7

Thanks for giving me a new home.

It’s awesome to see some teamwork between server admins. Best of luck with the upgrade, hope it goes smoothly for you this time!

Nice work with everything so far, really liking it. What all is being changed/fixed in the new revision? Is it just more efficient code to support higher site traffic?

Good luck! 🍀
I’m going to begin supporting this instance on Patreon starting this month, I guess symbolic of the changing times and server demands.

I can't login on my lemmy.world account, neither on Jerboa nor in the browser, I'm getting "Incorrect login" :(
(I'm posting from Liftoff because I was already logged in)