I have been deliberating on whether to update dormi.zone over the course of the week. Here’s why I do not want to update it to 0.18.0.

Last week, several Lemmy instances were hit by a wave of bot signups. Fortunately, dormi.zone and many other instances were largely unaffected thanks to having captchas enabled. While captchas are not bot-proof, they still act as a deterrent to more primitive bots.

Version 0.18.0 of Lemmy removes the captcha feature, leaving an instance potentially more vulnerable, which is why some instances such as lemmy.world or beehaw.org have also been holding back on updating. There’s a pre-release version of 0.18.1 which re-adds captchas, but that doesn’t appear stable enough for my liking.

dormi.zone will be skipping 0.18.0 and updating straight to 0.18.1 once that’s out. I’ve been told that Jerboa should continue to interface with dormi.zone mostly fine despite the warning, but in case it doesn’t, you can use the web UI or any of the other Lemmy apps that have already surfaced, like Liftoff.

I think there were a couple issues with 0.18, kbin users had issues connecting to it and I don’t think 0.18.1 was needed if they want captchas to prevent bot accounts although I’m not sure how much of an issue that is here. I’ve been using “Connect for Lemmy” for now but Jerboa felt easier to use for me out of the two.