Out of curiosity what changes occured that caused this issue? It may help others fix/allow Lemmy hosts to communicate better with client developers prior to a release
Yes that does mess things up. I wonder why the instance decided to move to.a beta release. I also wonder if the actual release of 0.19 will fix this bug and make it backwards compatible.
No, 0.19 will not be backwards compatible. This has been announced by the Lemmy devs weeks ago on !lemmy@lemmy.ml and !announcements@lemmy.ml which is the channel for app developers to look out for important developing announcements.
Now the devs wanted to put their own instance onto the beta and then release 0.19 . For some unknown reason some other instances updated to the beta versions as well.