Fedigrow

Hello everyone,

If you look at https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy?version=0.19.3, you see a few instances that host alternatives to LW communities

• !linux@programming.dev
• !android@lemdro.id
• !privacyguides@lemmy.one

Lemmy 0.19.5, has been released on 19 June, we are now three months later.

I've been reaching out to a few of them

• https://programming.dev/post/17587331, and further on the instance Matrix: no planned schedule for updates
• For Lemdro.id, I reached out to their Matrix a first time in August, then another time this week, they told me they have no real schedule for the update, but that it might be done in November
• for Lemmy.one, there is this thread I posted there in early June (https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/we-re-giving-lemmy-a-try-welcome-to-privacyguides-lemmy-one-x-post/12734/7). I have been since then in contact with one of their mods in June, I offered to have more mods for their community (suggesting @otter@lemmy.ca as they already mod !privacy@lemmy.ca ), but they have never answered.

Now, important disclaimer

I am personally very thankful for those admins to manage those instances. I have been posting to those communities a lot to try to better decentralization,, and it's very generous of them to give their time, energy and infrastructure to run those instances.

On the other hand, having such long times between updates releases and the instance actually updating concerns me a bit, because it seems to show that those instances are relying on one single admin which could disappear overnight, and might also have trouble with reacting in case of incident.

I guess the opposite view is that it doesn't matter so much, they'll update when they update, and they probably don't prioritize those updates as much compared to an actual incident (which we saw back in the days with the federation issues between LW and Australia / New Zealand servers).

For people curious about LW (still running 0.19.3 as well), they told me they wanted to skip 0.19.5 due to this one issue https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/2629 which if fixed in 0.19.6. It makes sense due the high number of mods they sometimes have per community).

That's it for me, curious to hear what you all think.