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.
Asking users to install custom roms to browse Lemmy doesn’t seem sound a good strategy for Lemmy to beat Reddit. What I’m wondering is whether Android 8 development is somehow easier than Android 7 development. I have not looked at the source code of RedReader. Someone mentioned the existence of Reddit API emulation for Lemmy. Maybe the easiest thing is run that, and point a copy of RedReader at it.
Lineage does sound nice, but it doesn’t support my phone.
I don’t ask anything of you. You’re the one asking volunteer app developers to support your insecure ancient Android version. Installing a new version of Android is a good idea in any case but if you want to continue “resisting” just deal with apps becoming incompatible with time.