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Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy (wedistribute.org)

submitted 9 months ago by deadsuperhero@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy's Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.

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[-] spaduf@slrpnk.net 58 points 9 months ago

I think how quickly this project has gotten to near feature parity is a testament to how slow Lemmy development has been. Think about scaled sort (a feature that has been hotly requested since the migration) and how long that took to get merged in. A sort should not by any means be slow to implement.

[-] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 31 points 9 months ago

IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I like that there was a two month period for apps to adopt the new login mechanism and that they smoke test releases for a fair bit on lemmy.ml before releasing to the world.

That said, a few months ago I wanted to do a light fork of Lemmy to proof out a few very minor things on my mental wishlist but just haven’t had the free time to meddle with Rust.

[-] spaduf@slrpnk.net 25 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Sure but even just recently there was the example of breaking federation over Christmas. Some of those issues persist through 0.19.3 which came out today

Similarly scaled sort would have made a huge difference for small communities in the period directly after the migration.

[-] cosmic_slate@dmv.social 11 points 9 months ago

Yeah, that was definitely annoying. I would’ve preferred to have some kind of official workaround but I figured something out that got me through until the updates.

I probably lean too hard into forgiveness on this stuff but I know a number of open source devs who have burned out for various reasons this past year and would much rather see slow development than risking a rush towards burnout.

[-] Carighan@lemmy.world 5 points 9 months ago

IMO slow development isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Quite the opposite, often it's a benefit as you don't end up wasting time and changing code for features where you don't actually know yet whether your current usage demands or supports them. There's a lot of genefit in not moving fast and not breaking things. Mostly that, well, you don't constantly break things.

[-] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 4 points 9 months ago

A sort should not by any means be slow to implement.

Sure, if the sort key is something readily available. But for scaled sort they have to compute relative size/activity of the communities the specific user is in. The cost isn't the sort, it's computing the metric.