We've successfully upgraded Lemmy from v0.19.3 to v0.19.5 and have a bunch of changes to share!

Bug Fixes

• Previously users were reporting that the web client kept logging them out. This was suspected to be due to a misconfiguration of the cookie storing the session information and should be fixed.

• Some communities were slow to load. Federation changes in v0.19.4 and v0.19.5 should rectify some federation issues. Additionally, we increased the number of database connections for Lemmy and will gradually increase this if we identify any further slowdowns.

(Longer term, we're planning to upgrade the database hardware which should improve the performance for all services)

Local Only Communities

When creating or editing your communities, you'll now see a "Visibility" option that allows you to choose between "Public" and "Local Only".

The "Public" setting will continue to operate as normal and federate your community to all other instances we federate with.

"Local Only" will disable federation for your community and restrict the community to being viewed by local logged in users only; Logged out users may not be able to see your community until they log in.

Image Proxying

Once we've established that the database is no longer under substantial load and the performance issues previously experienced are fixed, we'll be enabling an image proxying mode which will allow us to locally cache images from remote instances rather than serving them directly.

This will allow us to improve the performance of loading images without applying additional load to other instances, and prevent remote bad actors from trying to scrape IP addresses.

Other changes

There are a handful of other miscellaneous changes that you can view in the full change logs:

• https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4_-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements

• https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-19_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.5_-_A_Few_Bugfixes