Things are going well with the bot port, though we discovered a 10k limit on markdown in Lemmy that is causing some headaches. We're also hitting some data format issues here and there that we're fixing as we go.
I'm doing a bunch of debugging / restarting the bot, so I'm going to limit bot updates to the community at fanaticus.social for now.
Yes, but as you say, it is unclear if both the backend and frontend updates will make it in to 0.18. Also, we'll need to be careful to wait until a good number of instances are updated, because the post will probably just be rejected by instances running 0.17