18.1-rc1 was tagged half an hour ago, but there is no release built yet for that version. I don't know if Ruud would deploy the first release candidate though.

This is normally a pretty healthy attitude, but I'm not sure it particularly applies in this case because we know there are serious bugs associated with not releasing:

• We're in the middle of a massive bot registration wave that admins are reporting captchas address.
• The biggest instance, representing 40%+ of the active userbase of the lemmyverse is blocking their upgrade on that feature.
• Jerboa v0.34/0.35 and Lemmy v0.17/0.18 are not cross compatible, leading to many daily confused questions about bug and error messages.
• lemmy.world is also experiencing replication lag that is poorly understood and people think might be addressed by an upgrade, and again this issue affects nearly half the active userbase of the lemmyverse.
• The ONLY feature that needs to be in v0.18.1 is captcha.

Given that we know there are serious ongoing bugs associated delaying the release, and that a release with a very small scope (a single squashed commit) would address those bugs, it's possible to cherry-pick just the captcha commit, test just that change manually, and craft a release whose reasonable bad-case bugs are considerably better than the delay case.

Obviously it's possible that the devs are considering priorities I'm not aware of, but I'm tracking a wide array of support channels and find it hard to imagine that a single-fix release is going to leave us in a worse position than we're in now.