Is there an option to be a beta tester? If yes, how can we sign up?
The whole software is currently considered alpha. If you want to test bleeding edge stuff, you could build the main branch locally and test that. Or you could use the app releases and report bugs on github (the devs would much prefer pull requests fixing bugs than just reports and they’re great at merging). I’m not a dev but I have contributed to the app.
The app is still an alpha, so you sort of already are? It’s all open source so you can explore the git repository, report bugs, or build it yourself if you really want to.
Click on the version in settings -> about. You’re already an alpha tester. If you want to get more bleeding edge, you can build your own binary from the GitHub sources and sideload it.
If there’s a daily build, I’m not aware of it. If there is one, I’d expect it to be considerably less stable than most beta programs though. It would be an unstable dev build rather than a stabilized beta invented for non-technical testers.
Would anyone be interested in nightly snapshots? I could probably make that happen if people are willing to test.
definitely, I see a lot of bugs being fixed that’d I’d like to take advantage of but have to wait for version releases 😭
Ok, but just so you know, it wouldn’t merely be a faster way to get new features, it would have a lot of downsides, such as:
- you’d have to update manually
- it would have a different app name
- it could blow your data away without warning (just for the testing app)
- you might not be able to use your favorite instance if there’s an upcoming lemmy backend upgrade
- there will probably be a ton of bugs
If that sounds good, I’ll discuss it with the other developers and see what we can do. I think we can rig up a nightly or weekly build somewhere.
Or you can do what I do and build it from source. Once it’s set up, it’s pretty quick.
