That’s the whole thing. It’s not about the software per say, it’s about the users and the whole concept of a federated internet. We all really believe in bringing back the best of the old internet.

The idea that programming languages make code suddenly good or bad is pretty silly.

I generally agree, you can write good and bad code in any language.

However, I also think it is equally naive to think that the tool you use has no influence on the end result. It does have an influence. In my experience, exception-based error handling like that used by Java and many other older languages just doesn’t work that well. It’s too easy to forget to catch them and make mistakes. And there’s a host of other stuff that Rust improves on.

This really shouldn’t be surprising. Rust is a newer language, of course it would try to improve the status quo with the experience we’ve gained from previous languages like Java. It even went and invented whole new concepts like ownership and the borrow checker to make it work. I imagine that future languages will have similar concepts, just like many languages today have garbage collectors or other common functionality.

So yes, programming language choice is a tenuous thing… But I don’t think it’s correct to say it doesn’t matter.

Also if we do entertain the notion that it doesn’t matter, the reasoning for Sublinks get even weirder, as the argument that Java is a better choice falls out the window.

I don’t see why the moderation tools couldn’t just be improved on Lemmy.

There is no reason it couldn’t. The main problem seems to be that the Sublinks devs don’t like the Lemmy devs and they don’t want to bother learning Rust either and would rather rewrite the whole thing in Java.

They are of course totally free to do that, but it does seem easier to just improve Lemmy instead of building a whole new Fediverse service just to improve mod tools.

Hi,

thanks for your ideas, moderation isnt just a community, its the whole instance. The moderation lacks for instance admins the most. For example reports, with the current setup it is impossible to search for one specific report or sort by community,person,reporter,types. The sort order is currently somewhere else where it should be, it sorts on the server by old => new and client side new => old. I dont know if this was wanted but it just creates additionally to the lack of sort or filter options a issue for instance admins, that want to look for urgent reports at the top of the reports.

The programming language is just a preference, i already said this to mutliple people, this was a choice of convinience and it is still a valid option for a rest api.

I really hope there will be an option in Lemmy and Sublinks (and bin,mbin etc) to move communities between instances. But I think that’s not very easy. I agree that having a few large instances isn’t how the fediverse is meant to be. Ideally there would be a separate instance for each community.

Additionally I think that having a single huge lemmy instance is not great for the architecture of the fediverse as a whole and even if there were no changes planned or being considered. I think that many instances hosting communities is preferable to having large ones like lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

May I ask why you didn’t move to another generalist instance? It’s a two clicks operation now to export and import settings from the settings menu

Personally, I don’t give a shit about all this weird BS and infighting. I moved to Lemmy simply because my Reddit client was killed. I could give less of a shit about FOSS and finding 10,000 different platforms that everyone and their mother is now creating. I hope that lemmy.world doesn’t end up going away. All I want is a community to interact with, not a constantly fracturing platform with weird political infighting.

To be fair, they can’t see the future. People can change their minds. Better to write something like this than say “we will definitely always support Lemmy” and then in 5 years say “lol that was a lie”.

Is it?

I was under the impression that Sublinks was basically a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, just with better mod tools. If Lemmy.world switched to it, would normal users (not mods) even notice or care?

I don’t know. I’m not beholden to a single platform. I use Lemmy with like three different clients too (Tesseract is by far my favourite for Desktop) so the “Lemmy” I care about is essentially just an API. The link above says

It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users.

The way I read that is “you can use the existing Lemmy clients to connect to a Subkey instance.” Further it says

Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms.

Meaning we’ll likely be able to at least view Sublinks content via lemmy, if not interact with it like any other Lemmy community/post. In that case, who cares if it’s not Lemmy? To the end-user it might as well be.

My main concern is that a lot of jumping around would mean we’d lose users each jump. Eventually we’d just have empty halls with no content. Knowing that Subkey is out there as an alternative in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug, or something else happens with it, is heartening.

Yes the 0.19.3 upgrade happened.

We wanted to give their survey more reach, as a sort of collaboration.

edit: version typo

Thanks for your feedback, sadly lemmy is not in that stage and is not build for plugins in mind.

The sublinks team didnt meant to be too specific on some questions, i will give your idea to the sublinks team for any further surveys.

Sublinks is already heading there where you can listen to events, trigger events etc. but yeah instance plugins would be very cool and could be easier used by third party developers improving the current platform they support.

Thanks Rooki

I setup https://github.com/deck9/input on polls.sublinks.org. We’ll use this next time.

Is there a better form service to be used? We used it because it comes free with our email.

To your tips:

1. We dont know rust
2. We dont know rust

We dont want “just” to rewrite lemmy to java, we want to improve the code and thus we ALL dont know and want to understand rust, we chose to use java, as it is good old programming language where structure is already known.

Both languages are good, its just depends on what developer you ask. Both are valid options for a rest api.

Sublinks just wants to add a wider spectrum to the fediverse!

The thing with sublinks tho Idk about right now but they are aiming for feature parity And if done right it should be possible to do it in such a way that it’s unnoticeable by the average user

We would never just drop a whole platform with 1000’s of users. Any huge changes like that would 100% have community involvement.

1. We are only hostile if you are hostile to us
2. This was again, sry for this a misscommunication, but to be fair in a legal way, first act then announce it is a common approach.
3. They just wanted a (indirect) test dummy to test their software on a big scale, and we are sick of it, we are always the first that goes head first into their untested, experimental features, that they probably even didnt started in their test environment and not even mark it as experimental.
4. The .world “scraper” bot?! is a verificiaton bot for our discord server to reduce trolls, that just uses simple api calls to verify through a dm that it is you and btw, this isnt created by me it is created by someone on the sublinks team.
5. This will be discussed, so no idea.
6. Probably, if the users toxicity reduces here, probably yes, we are sorry for that, we hope to improve.

I am sorry but the FHF / Lemmy instance admins are just humans. And yeah there is a feature now to export your blocks, community subscriptions and we are not blocking you to use it if you are really sick of us.

This is by far the worst instance for user communication and we deserve to know if that will continue.

Just want to point out that the lemmy.world admins don’t owe you anything (unless perhaps you are an active donator, but even then it is a donation, not payment for anything) so you don’t “deserve” anything from them.

If you are unhappy with your admins, move to another instance. With 0.19.3, you can export your user settings and import them elsewhere, so moving is quite easy and thankfully there are plenty of other instances.

What the HECK man?

There’s an underlying problem IMO with all Fediverse software and instances, in that because it’s made available for free, people get entitled, moderators and admins are obligated to sort of do volunteer work on behalf of people who haven’t earned it in order for any of the thing to work, which naturally leads to a inexhaustible wellspring of negative energy because the whole thing isn’t right.

I saw the posts of Ruud asking for people to basically interview for a part time admin position and do a job which for skills and time investment is worth from $50k/yr-$200k/yr (calibrating for the fact that it’s “only” 5-10 hours per week), and all I could think was whoa no no no this isn’t the way. Not saying there’s anything wrong with people volunteering their time to make available this great thing, but I think undervaluing them when they decide to do that is almost inevitable, which has follow-on effects that manifest in all kinds of ways and lead to things not being the way they should be. Occasional prickly or unfair behavior by mods or admins represent one example of that; comments like this one represent another.

What on earth is hostile about the OP post in any way?

We will be looking into that after the current form is over.

Thank you for your great idea! This could give sublinks just a little bit better understanding on the overall situation.

This will be done automatically, with a migration script. The user doesnt need to do anything.

Nothing should be lost, we will have a announcement up when it comes up. But this will be still at least few months to that day.

Comments like this are why that survey was created in the first place. Needing info on how to do things better.

I expect real performance issues with Java at some point

FWIW I think the performance is probably not the biggest of deals. Java isn’t like Python, it’s not super slow or anything.

That said, there are other reasons to favour Rust. It’s a newer language that has learned from the mistakes of the past, such as overzealous OOP with inheritance and the billion dollar mistake, null pointers. Add to that a host of problems many programs run into with concurrency and shared memory and you’ve got a whole lot of potential bugs.

Potential bugs that are quite impossible in Rust (assuming you don’t use unsafe Rust but you definitely don’t need that for a web server).

We chose that, as we already saw the things that can be done wrongly with rust. And no one of the sublinks team can do rust really, so it was just a matter of what languages can be learned faster and/or have already good knowledge about a programming language.

If you really want performance, please write your code in binary, then you have no compiler, no runtime just plain binary code, it will be fast but unreadable ( like rust if wrongly done ). Java is just a good old and known programming language. There are already some techniques to improve performance and / or cluster your application up. With an load balancers. Something like lemmy tried, but a little bit easier and extendable.