## What is Lemmy? Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion
platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company.
This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content
is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are
interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting
items to the top. ## Major Changes This release includes major improvements to
performance, specifically optimizations of database queries. Special thanks to
@phiresky, @ruud, @sunaurus and many others for investigating these.
Additionally this version includes a fix for another cross-site scripting
vulnerability. For these reasons instance admins should upgrade as soon as
possible. As promised, captchas are supported again. And as usual there are
countless bug fixes and minor improvements, many of them contributed by
community members. ## Upgrade instructions Follow the upgrade instructions for
ansible [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ansible#upgrading] or docker
[https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/install_docker.html#updating]. If
you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum
[https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support] or on the Matrix Chat
[https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-admin-support-topics:discuss.online]. ## Support
development We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy
for almost three years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation
[https://nlnet.nl/]. If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will
always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support
its development [https://join-lemmy.org/donate]. No one likes recurring
donations, but they’ve proven to be the only way that open-source software like
Lemmy can stay independent and alive.
Lemmy 0.18.1 dropped yesterday and seems to bring a lot of performance improvements. I have already updated the sandbox instance to it and am noticing that things are indeed loading quicker.
I’m planning to upgrade this instance sometime tomorrow evening (8/9 around 6-7pm EST). Based on the update in sandbox, I expect a couple minutes of downtime while the database migrations run.
Should be around 10pm UK time. Good luck Jon