The 0.18 version of Lemmy was announced. This will solve many issues.
But we can’t upgrade yet because the captcha was removed, and captcha relied on Websockets, which are removed in 0.18 so despite the devs agreeing on my request to add captcha back, this will not be until 0.18.1. Without captcha we will be overrun by bots.
Hopefully this 0.18.1 will be released soon, because another issue is that the newest version of the Jerboa app won’t work with servers older than 0.18. So if you’re on Lemmy.world, please (temporarily) use another app or the web version.
My phone came with Android 6, the vendor shipped an upgrade to Android 7, and I installed that. They didn’t release any more upgrades. The phone hardware itself is still perfectly good so I really don’t want to take part in a hardware upgrade treadmill just because the vendors like to play Wintel. I’m typing this on a laptop from 2011 (Thinkpad X220) that also still works (hasn’t fallen apart yet), running Debian 11. It won’t run the latest Windows but I don’t care.
I still haven’t heard any type of explanation what of what stops Jerboa from working with older Androids. If it would take a total rewrite then I can understand the devs not wanting to do that. If it means changing a #define then I’d say change the #define. As a general matter I find Lemmy’s web design to be bloatier and more annoying than old.reddit so I’m not sure I would like Jerboa anyway (I haven’t seen it). New Reddit is of course too horrible to think about.
I appreciate the work that the devs and ops have put into Lemmy but I frankly preferred the keyboard based UI’s of 40 year old Usenet readers to these Javascript pages that squirm all over the screen. So I want to keep persuing text based viewers like RedReader and Gnus. I’d try Jerboa if it was convenient for me to do so, but I’m not going to buy a new phone to run a program that I have doubts about to begin with.