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.
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.
The devs aren’t pushing back against captchas, but they’re desperately trying to get 0.18 out to resolve a ton of issues. Captchas need to be redone in the code level and no one has done it yet.
someone has done it, there’s a PR here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3289
That looks promising, hopefully we’ll have an 0.18.1 release later next week
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.
Lemmy has a hardcoded profanity/vulgarity filter?
Kbin needs to sort out their API and get an app before I’m going to try using it directly.
Agreed. This is the main thing preventing me from using kbin more. There is a developer trying to write an app (Artemis), but she said it’s difficult without an API.
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.
Sync for Lemmy can’t come quick enough
Yep, I’ll be sticking to Jerboa until Infinity for Lemmy is a thing.
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.
Been using it for a while now. Feels great for being a WIP app but there are still some hiccups (can’t suscribe to communities that aren’t on the same instance as my account as an example). Prob will use both Jerboa and Liftoff
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.
deleted by creator
thanks for the rec! connect is working great for me
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 👍
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.
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.
I’m currently using the app called lemmy connect without issues.
Yeah it’s not bad, I prefer jerboa (really I’m waiting for sync) but connect works fine
Lemmy.world is running Lemmy version 0.17.4 right now (check the bottom of any Lemmy instance and it’ll tell you what version is running). The new version fixes a lot of things, but lemmy.world can’t upgrade to that new version yet because it’ll be overrun by bot accounts. We have to wait for the next version and skip this update because that has the protections for bot accounts.
Biggest concern for me is the broken auto scrolling/updating. I can’t use this site properly as long as the list of topics doesn’t stay in place long enough for me to finish reading the headline.
Hopefully after this is fixed I’ll start contributing.
Try changing the 1 at the end of the url to 0 as a workaround.
This works! Thank you!
This will go away with dropping websockets
Live updates to the page is a great feature, but instead of fixing it, they just turned it off for 0.18.0. Gotta start making pull requests…
Jerboa asks for 0.18 to be installed, but works with 0.17.4 mostly without issues.
it crashes constantly for me now.
Thanks for keeping the bots out! I’m still successfully using Jerboa, btw.
you’re probably not using the latest version from the GitHub repo then
I am. It gives me the warning and crashes a lot, but it works a little.
It crashes far too much without 0.18 for me; resorted to using the web view.
Successfully using the latest Jerboa and posting here from a different instance :)
Probably because you’re already logged in from the previous version? On a clean install it won’t be able to login, it will literally tell you that the instance needs to be at 0.18.0.
Ahh. That’s really not good. In a time where we are expanding we have broken captcha resorting in instances protecting themselves from bots breaking the best Android app. Wonderful.
Appreciate you waiting for the 18.1 upgrade
I just updated and it gave me an error on jerboa but it still seems to be working fine
As long as you keep logged in.
As a new user it won’t let me login to this server
Likewise, hopefully it continues to work!
For now i made a shortcut on my phone’s home screen to this lemmy instance to act as a quasi lemmy client, works pretty well for the time being.
Lemmy is a progressive web app and can be installed directly
Heres a link to the instructions to install pwas from google Install pwa
… so i read the instructions and its not too helpful. Open lemmy in chrome on android then hit the 3 dots in the top right and near/above the option to open the desktop site you should see an install lemmy button
Can confirm that this does not work with Chrome on Android.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
Sad that firefox seemingly cant do that ;(
Thanks, worked for me with firefox android.
Here is a link to the current state of captcha re-implementation: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3289
This request was reopened after it was merged prematurely. You can read the preceding discussion here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3249
Lemmy Devs have agreed to add it back, so I dont thing it will be long.
If you already Jerboa installed and set up and working then upgraded it in place, it seems to continue working fine with the ‘outdated’ version of lemmy.
That fact indicates that Jerboa is needlessly and overly sensitive with its startup checks when installing fresh and attempting to connect to a lemmy instance. I consider this a flaw with Jerboa.
Unfortunately, on my phone, the previous version of Jerboa always just crashed instantly on startup. That bug was fixed in the newest version of Jerboa, but I was never able to get Jerboa running enough previously to set it with a user account and preferred Lemmy instance.
Yeah, mine complained about the server version but from what I can see everything still works ok.
deleted by creator
Damn, that sucks. Is manual approving + email not enough for the time being?
EDIT: I see that in the GitHub issue you linked, you answer this question. TLDR: No, it is not enough it seems.
manual approving
this won’t scale, captchas are a low-hanging fruit that should have never been removed
They were removed because they don’t work with the new system, not because someone felt like removing it. If someone volunteers to add them back, they’ll be back
What I mean is why couldn’t they postpone the 0.18.0 release then?
Because it addresses a number of critical bugs. Why is nobody in this thread reading the update announcement? They explain themselves well there.
@ruud@lemmy.world maybe link to it in this post as it’d probably clear up a lot of confusion.
The first link in my post is to the release blog.
I understand. It would only be until captchas are back in the release (i.e. 0.18.1). I only suggested this because 0.18 fixed some nasty annoyances.
After installing Jerboa from the Play Store I encountered the crashing issue everyone is mentioning. I was able to seemingly fix the issue by going into the App Info -> Storage and hit Clear Storage. After it cleared it’s been working fine for me. Hopefully this works for you folks unless I’m missing something about the issue.
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.
@ruud@lemmy.world Dodged bullet anyway, v18 2FA doesn’t make people confirm that their app is configured correctly by asking for a code, as is tradition. It just gives them their QR/Key and locks them into 2FA immediately. If they botch adding it to their app they are locked out. And I hear the code currently being generated is silently incompatible with Authy, so those people end up SOL even if they do everything right.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3309 / https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3325
Whoa. That’s not ideal.
