We finally upgraded from v0.18.5 to the new point release, and are now on latest v0.19.3!

The major changes that come with v19 are:

• Instance blocking for users! I think this one was requested for a long time by many users but now you can block instances yourself in user settings. If you block an instance, any posts from communities on that instance are hidden for you.

• Better 2-factor authentication. We’ve had this turned off because it was just broken previously but I’ll be testing this today and if it’s working, will enable it.

• Better remote following. You can subscribe to communities on other instances from those communities in a more natural way. This is now similar to what Mastodon does.

• User data export/import. You can export your data! If you ever want to leave your account at mtgzone.com we’ll be sad but you can not import community follows, blocklists, and profile settings into a new account somewhere else.

There are some other server improvements too but these ones are the most relevant for y’all.

As always, please let @andrew or @mike know of any issues or bugs or suggestions!

Happy Friday and have a great weekend!

Unnecessarily detailed dev ops notes:

If you noticed some hiccups this morning it was because the first upgrade failed on mtgzone.com after working smoothly on our stage environment. I had to roll it back and try again shortly after.

I think in retrospect, it was a database migration that was just taking a very long time and should have perhaps just waited longer. I did inadvertently wait about 5 minutes the second time while checking the logs and lemmy reported no errors then 👍