Hi all, welcome to Lemmy 0.19.8!

We had about 10 mins of downtime starting from 1:17 this afternoon as the database migrations ran. Apollogies if this interrupted your lunchtime scrolling, this was needed because the Controversial scores needed to be re-calculated as detailed below.

We have skipped a few versions, we were on 0.19.5, and so we have .6, .7, and .8 updates. A brief summary follows, with links to the Lemmy announcements.

Lemmy 0.19.6 changes:

• This version introduces parallel sending, which should solve our issues with Lemmy.world and remove the need for the extra VPS in Finland. Unfortunately Lemmy.world needs to update for this to work, so it will be a while longer.
• Changed sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax - I think this should help the issue where you are logged out from the browser a lot (especially in Firefox)
• There's a change in how "Controversial" is calculated, to use exponents instead of multiplication, to match how Reddit does it. Unfortunately the Lemmy documentation page seems not to list Controversial ranking among the other explanations, but there is some discussion here.
• Removed the "Trending" box from the home page. I kinda liked how it worked for us to find our local communities but oh well.
• This was a reasonably big release but mostly backend stuff - see link above for more info.

Lemmy 0.19.7 and Lemmy 0.19.8 are small bugfix releases, some of which fix issues introduced by 0.19.6 so we didn't see them. I don't see anything of interest to an average user but if you're interested take a look at the announcement posts linked.

Let me know if you see any issues, or have any questions.