I really appreciate the work that you're doing but...
Captchas are not available in this version, as they need to be reimplemented in a different way. They will be back in 0.18.1, so wait with upgrading if you rely on them.
What the hell? Another bad default where newbies will continue to launch instances attracting 10k+ bot signups per day and new users will keep getting disgusted by Lemmy if they land on one of those spammy instances. Making captchas a default should have been a priority and I'm sure no one would have complained if the 0.18 release was postponed to make that happen.