This release fixes a security vulnerability which allows an attacker to delete images uploaded by other users. You can read the details in the security advisory. Thanks to @Nothing4You for discovering and fixing it.
A new donation dialog is shown to users once per year, to help fund Lemmy development.
There are also various backports from the development branch. Importantly the “Private instance” setting can now be used with federation enabled. This way only logged-in users can browse posts and comments, which stops AI crawlers from overloading the server. Also moderators can now view votes in the post/comment options.
There has been some vote manipulation recently: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/41724398
Giving mods the option to see votes allows them to help the admins in this kind of scenarios.