!learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml

It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!

Not sure how true that is. Either way, from what I’ve seen, fediverse platforms move slowly compared to what people would prefer.

later than the exodus, probably earlier this year.

There’s a chance what you saw was in part the core devs being a bit cranky toward feature requests that come off a bit “demanding”. In my case I asked them how the felt about the idea.

Actually, I think you’re spreading some false-hoods here.

I’ve spoken to the core-devs about this here, and they acknowledged that being able to follow people/users would be a generally good idea, but felt that it was a lot of work and so not a priority at the moment.

I’m with you on the desire of a platform the fuses the two general mechanisms (groups and users), and I think a groups-first platform like lemmy can bring something valuable to how a user’s feed would work … but the reality is that this sort of thing is just not in the fediverse’s DNA at the moment. These aren’t for-profit companies that need to wheel out features constantly to keep their stock price up!

There’s an exception to that though … friendica, hubzilla and streams, the sort of alternative timeline or “ancient magic” for the fediverse that predates ActivityPub and mastodon by long margins. They have clunky UIs, but are quite feature full, and happily combine both groups and users.

interesting

Yea interesting. It really is the beef v cow thing entrenched directly in the culture.

I wonder if, in anglo-phonic culture, it has roots back to the french-aristocratic v anglo-serf divide in Norman England. Looking to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany as comparisons could be illuminating. I’ve certainly heard stories from non-anglo people about relatives raising, slaughtering and eating their own animals, but never anglo.

Yea, well it tracks with the deferred ethics of the whole dynamic/system.

My favourite was the opening, which set the tone and had me double take to make sure I read it correctly: “You can slice someone’s throat and still love them.” Of course you can, so long as you respect them and remain mindful of the circle of life.

I don’t engage in any vegan arguments at the moment … but I’d imagine the real razor would be whether anyone has actually killed the kind of animals they’re eating and would be happy to do that every time they ate (the corresponding amount of meat, just to be “fair”). I have, through scientific research seen and participated in animal killing, and watched how others digest the process. I’m pretty most moderately thoughtful people would not be up for it at all.

I hadn’t seen this before and it’s perfect! I saved it!

I believe you … gate-keeping types are all over the place really.

But vegans or the “vegan-curious” aren’t one thing or one kind of person, at least not any more. I personally have only ever had positive conversations with vegan types.

This instance, in being insistent on not entertaining any “harm reduction” or “compromises”, makes sense though … because it’s a space for people to talk about that sort of dedicated approach.

they drive away potential allies because the concept of harm reduction is anathema to their binary thinking. If you’re not ALL in, you’re the enemy.

I can resonate with that. But I come back to … “it’s totally ok for people to create their own spaces, especially on federated social media and especially for minority groups/ideas”.

There are likely plenty of other spaces for “potential allies” to engage and talk about veganism if they want to, or plenty they, or you, could make on their own.

Tacitly admitting that vegans are usually antisocial zealots. “It’s right in the name!”

Well, they’re running their own social media platform, so I’m not sure how anti-social they are.

Right. Well, I think the instance name “vegantheory.org” was doing that already, and I’m betting you drew your conclusion from the public description of the place too (and aren’t in the modlog or anything for challenging their ideas).

And what would a non-vegan want to do in there?

What’s wrong with minority views and practices creating their own spaces?

On which, is there any non-vegan/anti-vegan thought or idea that a vegan is likely to have not heard already? How many haven’t they heard relative to the amount of decent “pro-vegan” ideas they also haven’t heard of?

Maybe a specialised space, echo chamber even, makes sense in order to balance against the gravity of the mainstream?

I’ve peaked at that issue a couple of times, but I never worked out what the issue/feature got stuck on. Naively I would have thought it a relatively workable feature to add.

Every browser released since 2020 supports this

It’s a little paranoid of me, but I like the idea that a basic web app I make can be thrown onto any old out of date machine, where ~2015 or younger seems about right for me ATM.

You mean the Html template Element? I’ve never really got that to work, but I also never seriously tried.

Yea. From memory, it’s just an unrendered chunk of HTML that you can select and clone with a bit of JS. I always figured there’d be a pattern that isn’t too much of a cludge and gets you some useful amount of the way to components for basic “vanilla-js” pages, just never gave it a shot either.

Yea, I’m unclear on how you can take web components and still have widespread browser support (not knowing enough about their ins and outs).

Plain template elements are widely supported and have been for ~10 years (which ideologically matters to me along the same lines as the top post’s article) … perhaps a little bit of hacking together can get you close with just that?

But nah. These goobers got high off npm modules and did shots of JSX in the bathroom at lunch time.

Fucking LoL!

Anyone here have thoughts about doing basic interactive stuff with at most vanilla JS?

Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

Random thoughts:

• Is it obvious enough that one can contribute to the UI separately from the backend and that it’s a Typescript SPA style UI?
  • If not, maybe a bit of a “dev recruitment campaign” could help … let people people know and what sorts of issues could really do with new contributors lending a hand? Maybe even a bit of a “Inferno isn’t that different from all of the other SPA frameworks/libraries spiel?”
• Is the use of Inferno as oppose to one of the big 3 React/Vue/Svelte a repellent? (perhaps a downside to the “diversity” of frontend frameworks?)
• Are would-be UI contributors more inclined to make their own front-end or app than contribute to the default webUI?

More generally:

• Would a server side rendered webUI be welcome?
  • Then the contributions would mainly be on templates and their “simpler” logic, which might be more attractive or easier to get started on?
  • Plus, it might be more efficient? The current UI feels to me like it would suit server side rendering well.
  • Is this where the new leptos UI is heading … more server side rendering (I don’t know much about leptos)
• Do you have a sense of usage numbers for the different apps and frontends? Obviously you only run lemmy.ml, but do you have a sense of how much the front-end gets hit versus the API directly?
  • I ask, because If the default WebUI is really the main interface, then it makes sense to try to organise some more contributors (It’s certainly my main, nearly exclusive interface, as much as I’ve like some of the alt front ends or apps)

I hear you for sure on this.

I personally appreciate the push the core devs make for a “less demanding” relationship between users and open source devs. I think they have a point and it’s good for long term sustainability and I’ll probably find myself defending it.

But I like you’re framing, and in retrospect it seems (as is usually the case) that some people organising was what was missing just to get everyone helping each out as much and efficiently as possible. While any member of the community can (and should) do that, at some point it makes sense for the core devs to take on a task like that, I agree.

Should there be something like a lemmy admin’s community for talking about the ins and outs of running a lemmy instance? Something like that over time can be some sort of band-aid for missing documentation (it’s searchable etc).

I’m aware that there’s the matrix room and a lemmy support community … but maybe just opening things up to any chat about hosting lemmy in one place could actually help (in part because you can easily search specifically within one community).

but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.

This is a general issue I think, not just for lemmy but the whole fediverse (whatever one’s opinions might be on particular priorities).

It’s all non-profit and being run and built at a much smaller scale than many users would appreciate (I think). Sure there are plenty of people here, but not that many. Combined with no obvious revenue streams, such as ads or subscription fees, there really is only so much that can be done. Some time last year even the Mastodon team (by far the most successful fediverse platform) admitted that they didn’t have the capacity to work on new things for a while … they were just busy keeping things running. And they are (apparently) notorious at being slow to ship new features. Meanwhile platforms like firefish just straight up died last year.

So yea, it might be a critical point, for sure. But putting more on the core dev teams may not be the answer for the simple reason that it’s just not viable in the long run.

If we enjoy the bigger community focus and open and non-profit organisations that makeup the fediverse, the “answer” at this critical point might be to find a way to give back somehow … to organise, build communities, run fund-raising campaigns, think of ideas for more sustainable funding, find devs who can help etc etc. It’s perhaps onerous and annoying, even to read perhaps … but this is likely the tradeoff we have to make for a place like this.