Hi all, I got in touch with the admin and he's alive but snowed under. As you may know, there's been a few update attempts that have failed, which is why we're still on v0.17.4.
I am aware of the concerns rightfully raised by the community on lemmyrs, I'm at a loss to be honest since I cannot dedicate the time and resource to upgrade the instance to the latest version without a) significant down time b) potential loss/corruption of the existing database.
I'm not sure if I've made you admin but I'd appreciate if you could relay this information to the community on lemmyrs. My personal (and professional) life have been...chaotic to say the least which is why I haven't been able to make any thoughtful update on lemmyrs.
I'm going to try again this coming weekend to upgrade lemmyrs over to whatever is the latest version of lemmy is (I'm not hopeful though since many of my attempts have ended in failure to do so).
a) significant down time b) potential loss/corruption of the existing database
Maybe the benefit of a timely update would outweigh cost of prolonged (e.g. a day) downtime and a database reset, as the instance if currently barely active and amount of accumulated content is currently small.
Obviously, it does not mean further updates should be disruptive.
Without knowing much about how Lemmy works, I'd assume that if an update isn't working, export+fresh install+import would be the best way forward. I don't know how custom the setup here is, but perhaps changing to something more standard might reduce problems in the future.
I wouldn't love having all my submissions being lost, although it seems I only have ~200 on this instance.
There was talk of having Nivenly/Hackyderm run LemmyRS but I don't know where that got to. I'd definitely feel safer having more than one admin running things, but sadly I don't have the Lemmy ops knowledge to be useful myself.