The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
I know these are early-adopter pain points, but I think if Lemmy is really gonna take off, the devs need to get serious about backward compatibility and ensuring backend upgrades don’t completely break major instances/clients. IMO switching from websocket to HTTP should have been treated as a breaking change with a new major version release and a more controlled rollout period for this exact reason.
Major version zero (0.y.z) is for initial development. Anything MAY change at any time. The public API SHOULD NOT be considered stable.
“Semver proper” only starts at version 1.0.0:
Version 1.0.0 defines the public API. The way in which the version number is incremented after this release is dependent on this public API and how it changes.
This is important. Many people (and news outlets for that matter) consider Lemmy a product, when it really is very much an on-going early stage development effort.
It’s amazing how well everything works already, but nothing should be considered stable at this point.
Ok so guys, I appreciate the devs of Jerboa for doing what they do, but I am absolutely switching to another app immediately when something else decent shows up.
How does it compare to wefwef.app ? I’ve been using it a couple of days and it’s been pretty sweet so far. Found it on r/apolloapp.
I just checked this out. Until a better native app is created, I feel like this is by far the best choice for using the site on mobile. Good find 👍
I’m trying them all. As of today, Connect for Lemmy seems to be working the best
Connect for Lemmy is the best thus far.
Liftoff has no way to change font size yet. I find the text too small for easy reading. Trying all the apps at moment. Jerboa is fine, but currently cannot login until lemmy.world is updated. Connect seems to work ok. Basically they are all still a work in progress, but usable.
The latest version of Liftoff let you change font size.
The Dev’s stubbornness about captchas is a little baffling. Yes, they’re not 100% foolproof but they help.
It’s like arguing that we shouldn’t have locks on or our doors because a skilled lock picker can get past them.
They agreed to add them back. You can read their comments in OPs link
That only happened recently, though. For weeks they were replying to instance admins requests to reinstate captchas with things like “bots have beaten captchas, so they’re useless.”
What are you talking about? The issue to bring back captchas was only opened
4 days ago!Captchas were only removed 2 weeks ago, no one spoke up then: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2922
The developers have nothing against captchas. They were the ones who originally built and added the feature: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/1027
My mistake, I understood admins had been asking for the return of captchas as soon as they were removed.
Still, it took a few days for the devs to agree to reinstate them, which, combined with the general tone seem in that second link, is what gave me the impression that they were reluctant to do so.
In open-source projects and communities, it’s often a bad idea to go around looking for (or inventing) conflicts among contributors. It can come across as drama-seeking or trolling.
In software engineering in general, a common reason that a desirable feature has not been written yet is that the people who know & work on the code only have so many hands, and so many hours in the day, and there are other things that also need doing.
This service is undergoing rapid development. Spam & abuse problems are things that folks who have run Internet services before are well aware of. It’s not like anyone is going to give up and let spam bots ruin the thing they’re building.
I doubt anyone wants to build a service that becomes 95+% spam & abuse, ya know?
My very first post on Lemmy was a (admittedly out-of-date) rant about the devs stubbornness about the hardcoded bad words filter and their behavior in the relevant GitHub issues. And I had people jumping in the comments defending them, telling me that it was fixed years ago, they’re better now, surely that couldn’t possibly happen again.
I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.
ETA: and yeah, I know about kbin, I’ve tried both, kinda waiting to see all the new Android native apps before completely moving over there. Seeing how all this shakes out.
I just updated and it gave me an error on jerboa but it still seems to be working fine
Yep. Got the warning but works just fine.
Should’ve read this first. I was getting that instance outdated popup on jerboa app, thought a logout and re-login would resolve it. Now I can’t login, my mistake…
You can use this fork: https://lemmy.ml/post/1498929
Thanks
Jerboa just quit when I tried using it on Android - Pixel 5 w/Android 12. Wouldn’t open at all, so I quit on it. Trying out Summit now
Also have that problem. V0.0.34 crashes, and V0.0.35 doesn’t work with Lemmy.world, so I had to switch to Liftoff
Liftoff is awesome! So far, I really love that app
So that’s why Jerboa crashes as soon as I log in.
Moved to Connect, happy with that.
What is Connect?
Is it not open source? I can’t find the source code anywhere.
ELI5?
there’s a couple of points here
- current website is version 0.17.4 (you can check this at the very bottom)
- version 0.18 is ready, but there’s no captcha yet (the thing where you have to identify objects on squares, or click a box that’ll turn into checkmark)
- without captcha, bot accounts (not real users) can register to the site too easily
- so we’re gonna wait for version 0.18.1, the one with captcha active.
- the Jerboa app, the android app for browsing Lemmy has also recently updated, and will only work for Lemmy version 0.18 up, thus it’s advised to use another app or just the web for now
note : the site version 0.18 is already out for the main Lemmy instance, which is lemmy.ml, but lemmy.world (where we are now) is gonna wait for version 0.18.1
I’m using Jerboa and everything seems to be working fine. Edit: Jerboa started playing up mainly crashing on opening it. Binned it off and now using Connect
I first thought my Jerboa was fine (despite the popup warning about version), since I could browse a bit without it obviously exploding. But no, it crashes regularly now (closes, no warning or messages).
I don’t understand why a Lemmy update would be considered for release that removes security features like captcha support. (Especially during this time of high rates of signups, and well known bot wave in some instances.)
Combined with Jerboa update that needs the Lemmy update, and popularity of instances that need captcha, it’s unfortunately causing a mess for many users.
Edit: After a few more hours of use, I must say it’s worse than I thought. Jerboa crashes every time within a few minutes, while simply scrolling or voting. Hopefully Lemmy gets captcha re-implemented very soon, and lessons are learned.
yeah i agree. This setup is really dumb. I just joined and this took way too much fiddling already for new ‘simple’ reddit users. Helps i’m used to linux.
