Could be a multitude of reasons. Some people just really enjoy sysadmin work, some maybe want to play around with the software. Places like Beehaw have a goal of creating what they consider to be an open and welcoming community. Some even have nefarious reasons for hosting (luckily we have defederation).

Logins are returning non found errors. It’s a bug. If you had a previous session that’s as already logged in, you should be able to access it.

You should be prompted when opening after updating to the latest version.

I’ve found from hopping around some other instances that have upgraded to 0.18 that it is still pretty buggy. It does seem to be giving more information about the errors, instead of just failing like in 0.17, but spend any time browsing on those instances and you’re bound to be inundated with JSON and query errors. It also seems to get worse the longer you browse.

The UI changes are nice, and I do appreciate not having my feed auto-updating constantly, but I think you’d be making the right choice to hold off on upgrading until they can iron 0.18.1 out all the way. I’m not super knowledgeable about TS and Rust, but as a user it seems that switching from WebSocket created/shined a light on Lemmy’s issues with caching in general.