Here is our regular update that explains what we have been working on for the past two weeks. This should allow average users to keep up with development, without reading Github comments or knowing how to program.
Last Friday we finally released Lemmy 0.19.0, after a long development time and extensive bug fixing. Read the announcement to find out about the major changes. A few days later on Wednesday we had to publish 0.19.1 to fix a few more bugs that slipped through.
This is our last update for 2023. It was a very busy year for Lemmy, and it looks like 2024 might have even more changes in store. So lets enjoy these holidays, have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Support development
@dessalines and @nutomic are working full-time on Lemmy to integrate community contributions, fix bugs, optimize performance and much more. This work is funded exclusively through donations.
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. Recurring donations are ideal because they allow for long-term planning. But also one-time donations of any amount help us.
Support the Lemmy development team if you can afford it. The funding at the moment is enough to fund a single developer. The core team is comprised of 2 developers and their goal is to be able to fund 3. They're asking for €4.16K/mo per person in order to be able to do this full-time, which is not a lot. If you're not struggling yourself, you're enjoying Lemmy and you want to see it grow into a sustainable alternative, spare a coffee or two per month for these folks.
Not mentioning Lemmy.ca because it's much cheaper to fund for now, and its current funding isn't short AFAIK. :)
I don't know if this is something that can be set server side, but I'd recommend Scaled as the default sort for all new lemmy.ca users. It's so much better at showing content from the smaller communities. In particular, city communities don't get buried this way.