My understanding is the current version of lem.ee, hiding red posts on my feed doesn’t work properly, but allegedly the last version does. how do I tell boost to use the old version instead?

  • @4z01235English
    2•5 months ago
    1. Boost has a certain app version. You can install the latest or find some older APK version to install, but older versions will only support a certain range of server versions.
    2. The Lemmy instance you register with and use will be running a particular server version. There is nothing you can do about this, it’s up to the instance admins, but most instances are going to stay relatively up to date because lagging too far behind could cause federation/interoperability issues.

    So even if making a new account on another instance running an older version works, it will only work for some period of time until that instance updates.

    I’m not sure what bug you’re experiencing exactly, but it sounds like it could be either server side or app side. Either way, just sit tight and wait for a fix to be published.

    • VictorEnglish
      2•5 months ago

      Is it because Lemmy is still very young (is it?) that versions will be so incompatible? I feel like servers would usually have a /api/v1/ or similar to stay backwards compatible, but I don’t really know what causes the incompatibilities, so…

      • @[email protected]English
        3•5 months ago

        Yes. The latest version is 0.9.13, iirc, and most instances have upgraded by now, but during the migration, some servers had features that others didn’t.

        For most, this means the extra data gets dropped or ignored, and there weren’t particularly problematic differences in the last big upgrade (most that I saw were database migration issues on the instances themselves). However, if Lemmy has an update that fundamentally changes how federation works, how votes are counted, how security is handled, etc., we may see bigger breaks if people don’t update. The API might be forced to change to such a degree that the original function isn’t even the same.

        Devs may try to mitigate migration breakages like that by backporting some of the changes into a patch for older versions, but they may decide not to, either to force people to upgrade (to have a better base upon which to upgrade, for example), or because it would involve an unreasonable amount of work to implement or maintain multiple versions.