Feedback from all moderators

Hello world!

We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!

Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.

So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We’ve added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that’s no fun!

Sooo…

The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.

Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.

👉

Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.

We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!

=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation

PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

A_Random_Idiot,

PS … also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

"YES FELLOW KIDS, WE ARE ALSO, HOW YOU SAY, STILL DOWN WITH “IT” "

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/4ca6fd1e-3e6c-4353-ae30-84da9787a72a.png

victorz,

It?

Uh, yes, I, too, am down with IT. 🎈🤡

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

😱

DontTreadOnBigfoot,
@DontTreadOnBigfoot@lemmy.world avatar

I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!

A_Random_Idiot,

is this a quote? I could have sworn I’ve heard this before.

littlewonder,

Grandpa Simpson

A_Random_Idiot,

Ah yeah, I remember it fully now with that tid bit firing up the neurons.

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

Well that is concerning.

SuckMyWang,

Clock is ticking

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.ml avatar

Ticking for what exactly?

Syrc,

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”.

DandomRude,
@DandomRude@lemmy.world avatar

If the Lemmy admins can’t make a living from it, that’s the Lemmy community’s fault.

grue,

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?

Cowbee,

From what I can tell, it’s more worrying that .world is trying to essentially build up a new site like Mbin, from the ground up, in Java, rather than just working to make Lemmy better. It appears to be a severely underestimated workload for no benefit whatsoever, other than “better” mod tools, which could be folded into Lemmy either way.

grue, (edited )

Yeah, I agree reimplementing the protocol in Java instead of Rust seems like a downgrade. I think part of the reason for Sublinks is creative differences with @Dessalines, but even if the problem is getting upstream acceptance for patches (edit: and it isn’t) it seems more efficient to fork the existing code than to start from scratch.

But it’s their time to waste, so whatever. ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯

Edit: I stand corrected.

nutomic,

We have never rejected any patches from lemmy.world admins or from sublinks developers.

phoneymouse,

I think Sublinks would like to ultimately hijack Lemmy’s user base and take the project in a different direction. They’ll maintain a Lemmy-compatible API until they have a critical mass of instances/users using it and then do as they please. Based on what I’ve read, Sublinks people don’t like the Lemmy developers or at least the tech choices and way the project is managed.

I guess I can understand that, but I’m skeptical of their intentions too. And, as a Java engineer myself, I find it pretty annoying that they’re pushing a Java backend over the existing Rust one. Seems like a step backwards.

dojan,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

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.

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

I love tesseract! Thanks so much for mentioning it. This makes .ml more like Alexandrite.

Based on some comments here I think I will likely leave .world when they stop or try and change to sublink. It looks like that is the imminent goal. Tesseract makes it much easier to leave. Thanks again!

dojan,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, Tesseract is fantastic. Though I’m sure you could use Alexandrite with .ml as well, provided the client and API versions are compatible. Tesseract has some additional discovery features and such too, I believe.

For all we know though, one might even be able to migrate from Lemmy to Sublink. Like I said, they could swap over from Lemmy and we might not even notice it. I don’t really see the problem.

Serinus,

in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug

They literally can’t. It’s open source and publicly licensed. If they abandon the project (or even if we don’t like their direction), it can be forked (copied) and maintained by someone else.

dojan,
@dojan@lemmy.world avatar

Yes but that requires someone else to do the work. If Sublinks takes off instead, why stick with Lemmy?

Anyway it’s all conjecture right now. We have lemmy, things are working just fine.

asdfasdfasdf,

Why? Am I not up to speed with something?

dingus,

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.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

All I want is a community to interact with, not a constantly fracturing platform with weird political infighting.

This is part of why some people (myself included) are skeptical about Sublinks - I’d rather see us all gather around Lemmy, which already exists and is open source, rather than duplicate effort across different implementations.

However realistically speaking, over time more implementations will probably appear, because people won’t agree on what to build or how to build it.

In some ways that is good as well - it gives choice for users about what software to use, just as users can choose their instance and apps and such. But I think it’s a little early to start something new while Lemmy is still so new.

CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV,
@CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t see why the moderation tools couldn’t just be improved on Lemmy. The new moderator view has been very useful for me as a moderator. We already have Lemmy and Kbin. The Sublinks about page doesn’t say how it is going to be different/better than the existing options apart from moderation tools. On top of that it is made in Java instead of Rust? That’s just going backwards in my opinion… This post also does not state why you guys are interested in a Lemmy alternative. You could have named some issues you have with it and why something else would be better(just like the Sublinks guys could have done in their about page). I started my communities here and put a lot of effort in them. I can’t just switch instances without destroying most of the work done. The language used here really makes it sound like this instance is on borrowed time. Being able to transfer communities to another instance would be nice…

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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.

Carighan,
@Carighan@lemmy.world avatar

Honestly though if they need to learn Rust to do that, it might not be a good idea. I’d rather have a very good implementation in Java than a very amateur one in Rust. Depending on the implementing dev, of course.

nutomic,

Its not necessary to learn Rust to improve mod tools in Lemmy. There can be external mod tools implemented as api clients using any language, such as LemmyAutomod. Its also possible to add plugin support for Lemmy, which again can be implemented in various languages thanks to webassembly

SorteKanin, (edited )
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Usually that kind of thing depends more on the dev and less on the language. Junior devs will write bad code in any language. An experienced dev can pick up a language and write good code quickly.

Also, if you want to consider the effects of junior devs on a project, the Rust compiler is much more likely to ensure that junior devs don’t do something stupid, since the compiler makes it harder to make mistakes.

ad_on_is,
@ad_on_is@lemmy.world avatar

At this point they just might contribute to kbin then. If they know Java, they probably know PHP too, or at least it’d be easier to pick up.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

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.

kadu,
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

Hello there! I love lemmy.world - I moderate communities such as /c/Minecraft and /c/Relationship_Advice and will always be onboard for improving our platforms and reaching more people.

I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren’t integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

You might not remember specific details during that whole jump in workload, but during the first week of Reddit migration, some moderators from communities that fought really hard to build an user base migrated here - one for menopausal women in particular caught my eye, as the moderator did everything in her power to migrate users who weren’t tech savvy to a whole new platform. The reason this effort didn’t work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse. If, for whatever reason, we add yet another layer we are explicitly saying we only care about esse of use for tech savvy programmers. This is a fine stance to have, but make it clear and explicit if that’s the case.

As a final addendum, the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers - if that’s the root of the matter, I’m even more disappointed.

Still, as always, I will support the .world family of servers and there’s simply nobody quite as good, competent and dedicated as this team in the Fediverse.

awwwyissss,

the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers never harmed any of the several opposition communities or servers

Hard disagree. Lemmy is full of authoritarian propaganda, and they’re quite happy to abuse and harass users. The devs might be on lemmy.ml instead of Hexbear, but they’re on the same team spreading their propaganda with a ML facade.

I’ve been told I’m “going to get the wall” (i.e. they’ll execute me against a wall, a death threat) and had an old account followed around with them downvoting everything I posted until I just abandoned it.

I still use Lemmy but I won’t even admit I use it unless it really cleans up a lot of the misinformation and hate, and I see certain devs as central to this problem.

I’ll happily move to a new platform to avoid them.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

I’ll happily move to a new platform to avoid them.

Just to be clear, Sublinks is still a Fediverse application and presumably if lemmy.world switched, it would still federate with the instances it currently federates with, so you would not avoid anyone any more than you currently are.

If you want to avoid certain instances, go to an instance that has defederated from those instances (or make your own).

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

I also do not personally believe in yet another slicing of the communities into different platforms, and if Sublinks aren’t integrated into Lemmy - requiring new communities or separate accounts - I will not be following along. Of course, somebody else could always take over my communities in that event, but I just wanted to let out my opinion on this.

Sublinks would work th same way as Mbin does. People on Mbin can currently interact with all the Lemmy content in a similar way Lemmy users do.

The reason this effort didn’t work and most of these communities reverted back was the extreme fragmentation and confusing nature of the early Fediverse.

To be fair, when the migration happened, Lemmy wasn’t ready. Federation was still flimsy, and LW was under constant DDoS attack. Lemmy is in a much better state now.

jelloeater85,
@jelloeater85@lemmy.world avatar

Thank you so much! We’re trying our hardest ❤️

At the end of the day we want to make sure the whole Fediverse keeps on growing in a safe way.

Sublinks will be API compatible from Day 1. So you will be able to interact just fine with Lemmy from it (and other activity pub servers, I believe). Also all mobile apps will work with it as well.

hamid,

I want to start by saying I am extremely thankful for Ruud and the team and think that you did an amazing job with lemmy.world and I wish you success in the future.

That said, I am a monthly 30 dollar donator to Lemmy and I am not interested in Sublinks. I read through the threads and my take is that I think the motivation for the development of it goes against my personal politics and mischaracterizes nutomic and dessalines. While I appreciate the nature of open source to open up avenues for people to act as they think is best, I do not want to leave the Lemmy.

Ahead of a migration to Sublinks I hope there comes a cleaner way to move communities off lemmy.world. If I had known how the Fediverse worked 11 months ago I would have self hosted an instance and shared my communities that way as to not be defederated from people I want to be federated with. 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.

Again I totally get that this is provided free and as is and as such you are free to make the decision you think is best. Even though I am a difficult person, I very much appreciate you, your team and what you are trying to accomplish. Thank you.

ruud,
@ruud@lemmy.world avatar

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.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

It does sound very complicated. You’d probably need both instances to agree to the transfer somehow and then you’d need to transfer all the data (old posts from before the two servers federated for instance).

It would probably need to be built into ActivityPub if it should really work between different Fediverse services too.

spaduf,

It’s probably not worthwhile to transfer the data. I would say the subscriber base alone get’s you pretty fare.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

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

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

I would have asked the same question, just do it earlier than later or then add a note, on where to find your new community if you want to move your community too. That is sadly a software limitation and would be irritating if a whole community can just swap instances.

hamid, (edited )

Because I don’t want to make a lateral move to another instance hosted by someone like you and would prefer to do it myself. I work full time and it took me a few months to figure out how to deploy and maintain my instance before I put it to production.

edit: English is not my first language, I didn’t mean this to sound attacking. When I said someone like you I meant in general someone that I do not personally know and sometimes the way English speakers cloak language is not clear

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Ahhh ok, i wish you good luck with your instance! If you need some tips or help i know a good guy on the LW team ;D .

hamid,

Because 10 months ago I chose to host c/veganhomecooks here. I do now use my own instance that I run out of Azure and plan to figure out a way to move my comm there but that is not easy to two click and move, I would lose all the subscribers and posts and it would not be cached on any other federated server. It is currently the largest and most active vegan focused community on the fediverse and do not want to leave it behind.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

I see. Well, good luck with this. If that helps, I noticed that if you communicate openly with your community, explain a progressive plan, the transition can go quite smoothly (I moved communities from LW in the past).

Losing the posts sucks indeed, maybe we should bring this topic as its own thread to see if someone wants to work on a tool to allow export and import of posts.

wit,

I don’t understand this post, at all… Did something happen to Lemmy? This post has very clear intentions.

If you just wished to help the folks at sublinks to gather information on moderation tools, as you claimed, you should have just opened an issue on their github or on their sublemmy or whatever. Do not create a sticky for 200k people to see.

Rooki, (edited )
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Yes the 0.19.3 upgrade happened.

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

edit: version typo

AchtungDrempels,

Yes the 0.19.4 upgrade happened.

And… what does this mean? Something bad will be introduced with 0.19.4?

Rooki, (edited )
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

We hoped for the best and we got the worst. Even after we waited like multiple months after release and what got we? We got a headon crash to the wall.

Bad documentation, changed setup, ui issues, sort issues, performance issues, ddosed multiple times by smaller 0.19.3 instances that crashed and restarted, some other issues that could have been seen if blackbox tested just once.

For smaller instances ok they can live with it. But we waited extra long, and then got the worst, untested software.

edit: typo in the version

AchtungDrempels,

Are you talking about the current release then, 0.19.3?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

sry was a typo

hatchet, (edited )

Considering that Lemmy is an open source project which is being built collectively by a big community, your comment sounds extremely strange. You are basically saying “we did not do enough testing for the 0.19.3 release, and we accept none of the blame for it.”

Edit: The more I think about your comment, the more strange it becomes… you guys are literally running the biggest instance, but rather than participate in the testing of big releases, you let smaller instances do it for you and then complain if nobody else is testing it at your scale. Your comments would be completely understandable if this was a paid product, but come on… Just think about it, would you also have this kind of approach for IRL community projects?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

We did our testing, but we didnt scaled it up to be similar size of our main instance. There everything seemed fine, but when we upgraded the real issues have rissen up and were just breaking every setup we had.

We had some trust that other instances and developers had tested it at least by turning their instance on and report it, but didnt seemed so. Some issues isnt even caused the instance size. Some issues were documentation were just wrong and not noted it was experimental.

Of course we should have mirrored our big instance, but that would have increased the costs and would be time heavy.

ikidd,
@ikidd@lemmy.world avatar

What I’m wondering about is how you might start using a platform with a much, much smaller userbase, and expect that scaling problems won’t be as bad or worse. With even less sister instances to get troubleshooting info off of.

Zangoose,

I think they mentioned in another comment, but sublinks is developed in Java, so the .world team would be able to contribute more to the actual development/testing process (edit: since they aren’t familiar with rust).

Serinus,

You know what’s easier (and more productive) than starting a new project from scratch? Learning Rust. It’s the future anyway.

yuriy,

Learning Rust. It’s the future anyway.

So is buying an electric car and working from home. “Rust is the future” is turning into the new “I use Arch btw”.

Zangoose,

That’s the thing though, because it’s kind of a paradox. If you had a single team working on it, then sure, it might be easier to just learn Rust. However, on an open source project, especially a volunteer driven one, that isn’t necessarylily the case. Your average enterprise dev probably isn’t even considering rust as an option yet, because it’s still in early stages in terms of tooling and support infrastructure.

I made another comment in this post, but as it is right now languages like Java and C# make up significantly more projects/job positions than rust. If you want to get more contribution from volunteer devs, it needs to be in a language that devs are comfortable with. Most people won’t want to learn a whole new programming language for a volunteer project when they’re already working a full-time job in a different language. I explained this in the other post, but that’s why I think having both projects is still beneficial. Sublinks and Lemmy can (hopefully) continue to exist at the same time and benefit from each other’s development, especially if they stay API compatible. Sublinks will have a lower barrier to entry (thus maybe a quicker development cycle with more people involved), while Lemmy will help contribute to the validation of rust as a language for production code.

Also “rust is the future” implies that’s the only programming language that is worth learning, which is simply not the case. Different languages are better at different things. There will never be a single language that’s best at everything. Even for a specific task, multiple languages are good at doing the same thing. For example, Go, Rust, C#/any .NET, and Java/any JRE can all do REST services like Lemmy pretty well. Of those, I wouldn’t even say Rust is the best choice, because its frameworks are all still pretty new.

Other languages are growing and evolving as well. Even old languages like Java and C++ have had significant improvements in their modern standards (Java records, C++ smart pointers, etc.). Hell, even COBOL got a new standard version as of 2023 (if I had to guess, this didn’t do much for it though). Just because certain languages are bad right now doesn’t mean they will stay bad forever.

Serinus,

Out of all those languages, I wouldn’t choose C++, COBOL, or Java. Go, C#, and Rust all have benefits.

But regardless, the project exists and it’s generally better to contribute to the existing project than to rewrite it from scratch. We didn’t need two dozen Lemmy clients only for most of them to be abandoned, either. Our effort is limited, and fracturing it isn’t going to do anyone any favors.

Lemmy works pretty well at a large scale. It’s easier and more productive to bug fix and improve on the existing project in a new language than to reinvent the demonstrably working wheel in Java (of all things) that’ll bring its own, brand new set of distinct issues.

But hey, at least it’s not PHP.

marathon,

Well Rust is far better than JAVA will ever be.

wit, (edited )

I read all your posts on this thread and honestly… I am shook. There is very clearly some resentment there, resentment that goes beyond the interests of the community and beyond the points of the OP.

There are always going to be issues with this type of software. You should raise them appropriately, on their repository, so they get fixed in the next release. That is how FLOSS works. Do not use that to divide the community. We are not big enough for that yet.

Instead of being shady and manipulative, how about you create an issue/post with the current lemmy bugs/troubles and give an honest chance to the devs?

And you are mad because of documentation? I mean, I understand, it must be infuriating, specially being the biggest community. I understand the stress. Had it happened to me, I would have been mad as well. But come on. Be better than that. Documentation is text. Just send a PR with the correct configs. That should be easy. Sure, you hurt, but use that to improve the community, not to divide it.

And check the upvote/downvote ratio of all your comments here. You have more downvotes than upvotes. That is the community speaking.

And I wonder @ruud, is he speaking for Lemmy.world with his comments?

testeronious,

if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘

dude that sounds even more corporate 😂😂😂😂

Just kidding, xoxo <3

OpenStars,
@OpenStars@startrek.website avatar

fr fr no cap skibidi rizz 😜

jaybone,

Deadass slaps, fam.

Serinus,

If I’m looking to build skills in a new language, that language is probably going to be Rust and not Java. One of those languages has a bright future. The other is going to look a lot like Fortran in 15 years.

I expect real performance issues with Java at some point, especially compared to Rust. The initial difficulty in picking up the language is worth it if I never have to see another Factory pattern that only returns one type. Why just use a constructor when you can use idiopathic idiomatic java?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

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.

ripcord,
@ripcord@lemmy.world avatar

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

What a stupid, dismissive, and worthless take.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Its a stupid take, to dismisy java and JuSt UsE RuSt. We chose java for a reason, we want to get going with development, that cant be done with slowly building up a rust team. As they are already bussy on lemmy. So it would be just a fight for developers too.

SorteKanin, (edited )
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Its a stupid take, to dismisy java and JuSt UsE RuSt.

Isn’t Sublinks more like dismissing Rust and saying “JuSt UsE JaVa” to use your own words? I mean Lemmy is already there with Rust and development is already going with an existing Rust team. If all the Sublinks devs wanted was to improve mod tools, it’d probably take much less time to just learn Rust and start contributing to Lemmy. But I suspect that just improving mod tools is just part of the motivation and the real motivation is to not depend on the existing Lemmy devs and use Java instead of Rust (i.e. “JuSt UsE JaVa”).

To be clear, they are totally welcome to do that, but it sounds kinda weird to argue that people are saying “JuSt UsE RuSt” in some sarcastic manner when that is what is already there and is being used.

pivot_root,

Java isn’t inherently better at running as a distributed system than any other language is. If you want a service that can horizontally scale infinitely, learn Erlang and use the BEAM VM.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

At least the way we structure sublinks, it can get easier clustered.

LeroyJenkins,

way to tell devs to fuck off and stop complaining. ngl I’m interested in this space, know java well, and still was immediately turned off by Java. SPRING BOOT no less. does your internal team work with anybody that has experience in building TEAMS and not just software? if you did, you guys should know what devs want and it’s NOT writing java sb for free. this is a bad take, especially coming from an engineering leader.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

We have a bigger main developers team tham just 2 guys. Everybody has their favorite language. Its a gopd take especially in tge statistics.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

We have a bigger main developers team tham just 2 guys

Citation needed? If you check the last 3 months of Lemmy development and the last 3 months of Sublinks development, there’s a lot more activity on Lemmy.

SorteKanin, (edited )
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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.

Nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust either when he started contributing. It’s really not so difficult to learn as it seems.

I’d love to help anyone learn btw. I unfortunately don’t have the time to contribute to Lemmy myself but I love teaching so if anyone would like to learn some Rust, hit me up.

Serinus,

Don’t tempt me. I’ve been meaning to put together a simple Rust API for ages and just haven’t gotten around to it. AI was still bad at Rust when I last tried, making up crates, etc.

I’ve read, uh, half the Rust book. So I get the basic concepts.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Axum is a great crate for a web server :P

ericjmorey,

FYI: lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy

Maybe @SorteKanin would be interested in helping people there.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Oh nice, I was not aware of this community 👍

asdfasdfasdf,

Don’t use AI for writing code, at least not when you’re learning it.

Natanael,

Especially not when deciding on libraries, etc, there’s literally been supply chain attacks creating fake libraries with the same fake names that chatgpt wrongly suggests

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

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).

Serinus, (edited )

In normal use cases I’d agree about performance. But on the scale of Lemmy it’s absolutely likely to make a difference long term.

And if you’re going to use a managed language, why not something that has less baggage and a brighter future, like C#? It’s as open and multiplatform as Java these days with less of the overzealous, Java-specific OOP culture.

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

Agree on both points. Especially Javas memory usage could be problematic.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

Feel free to start your own, to be honest I feel it’s like the only major language missing now, as we have PHP with Mbin, Rust with Lemmy, Python with Piefed and Java with Sublinks

setsneedtofeed,
@setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world avatar

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

At this time

Hmm.

elbarto777,

Hmmmmmm…

Tarquinn2049,

They just wanted to head off anyone assuming that, due to adding support for other platforms. And leave it open in case lemmy tanks in some way at some point. All we can know is our current intentions, we can’t know what our intentions will be if things change in the future. We can guess, but only so accurately.

asdfasdfasdf,

LMAO, Sublinks devs are so engrained in Java that they want to rewrite Rust in Java, and their survey they send is written in Office 365? They’re a meme.

The Java idea is absurd and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

I disagree with the Lemmy devs’ political views a great deal, but:

  1. It’s open source so you can audit if they’re doing anything bad
  2. Just fork it and improve if you have issues with the code they’re writing / features

Java is a horrible language. Nearly every developer I’ve talked to in the last several decades agrees, even previously hardcore Java devs. Please just stop.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

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!

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

We dont know rust

There is a solution to this problem and it doesn’t involve writing any lines of Java or reimplementing a whole system.

GlitterInfection,

Nobody uses Java… it’s too popular.

asdfasdfasdf,

Hard disagree. I think Java is objectively bad.

I can give Rust to a completely inexperienced dev straight out if high school and they will be able to write a multi threaded program without data races since Rust was designed so that isn’t possible. That’s one example of many.

Even null is something the creator of null said was an objective mistake, and that concept is embedded into Java, while it doesn’t exist in Rust.

Learning Rust to the point where your code is correct is absolutely not hard at all, which is why it’s so bizarre when people create projects like this.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Like said its personal opinion. But what do we see with lemmy? Its on rust and still there are many bugs in there and the feature development is relative slow than to other open source projects.

maegul,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Apologies for a bit of a negative thought here …

But I went through the survey, mainly curious to see what SL are thinking about in terms of moderation tooling, and was somewhat disappointed to see mostly broad and open ended questions. While these can be very valuable in surveys for picking up on as much information as possible, I was hoping to see more specific ideas about moderation tooling for people to provide feedback on, instead of “what do you find difficult” etc style questions.

To be harsh for a moment, it almost feels like the SL team decided they’d work on moderation tooling, then realised they don’t quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done. Now I know that’s likely untrue, given that some admins and the SL teams have already had conversations. But still, I was hoping to see some manifestation of those motives and conversations in this survey. Maybe that’s unreasonable of me … I’m not sure.

All of that being said, a complaint I’ve made in this space before (to other platform devs), which I’ll share here again …

platform specific moderation work is a bit of a shame on the fediverse. It may not be tractable, but some form of platform generic plugin style moderation tooling really seems like where things should be headed. It would be cool if something like that was what was being worked on here rather than reinventing the wheel for a ~50,000 MAU userbase.

It could be in whatever language or stack you want. APIs are there and if new ones are needed they’d be worth working on too. You could make whatever frontend for it you like. And there is likely some interesting protocol involved too. I know there’s talk about such things over on the mastodon side.

But generally, IMO, plugins, rather than whole new platforms (with blackjack and hookers) is likely what the fediverse needs at the moment given its scale (and lack of major growth in the near future).

KevonLooney,

feels like the SL team decided they’d work on moderation tooling, then realised they don’t quite know what to do and so are looking for ideas on what should be done.

You dislike being asked to provide your opinion on an anonymous survey with optional demographic questions? And then you post your opinion on the same comment with your screen name attached? Why?

maegul, (edited )
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

You are misreading my post and putting words in my mouth.

The point was not wanting to do the survey. Not at all. Just that isI’d presumed there would have been more concrete concepts in there.

Why are you responding this way? Seems a bit reactive.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

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

nutomic,

This is not true, Lemmy can definitely have plugins and there is an extensive discussion about this topic. The conclusion is that plugins should be implemented in webassembly, so that they can be written in many different languages. See extism for details. Whats needed is someone with a clear use case who can implement a proof of concept, as it wouldnt make sense to add plugin hooks that no one uses.

Also mod tools can be implemented as api clients such as LemmyAutomod.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Ok thanks never knew about such discussion! But it is missing like hooks, events, triggers. Otherwise a plugin is almost useless and just hooking directly to the db would be more effective.

External bots, have one big downsode that kills it for most “plugin” use case, it is pull, many use cases want a push method over a trigger, event or similar. And to fetch the api every second is inefficient if you say so. Direct db access is not available for everyone.

nutomic,

Sure the plugin hooks still need to be implemented. It wouldnt make much sense to do that now before any actual use case exists, then the hooks would remain unused or wouldnt even work properly. Thats why it should be implemented together with a proof of concept plugin.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

On sublinks we already do stuff apready with those hooks. So that is already implemented

nutomic,

I couldnt find it in the repo, what sort of plugin hooks do you have?

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

In the services, the “events” all of those can be hooked into. In our case the only thing that is missing is a way to load a plugin into the software is missing. But it is comming up and if someone really needs that urgently a custom build, it is really easy to integrate a logic into it and build it into a custom build, by simply putting it into a custom file and then pulling upstream for updates.

NocturnalMorning,

We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time.

So… you’re thinking about it? That doesn’t instill a lot of confidence in continuing to use this platform moving forward. I started contributing donations to the lemmy platform development, and will not be very happy if you just decide to abandon it in the future.

jelloeater85,
@jelloeater85@lemmy.world avatar

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

EvolvedTurtle,

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

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

After mulling this post over for awhile:

  • .world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.
  • The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge. So much so, it is a common complaint from users that feel excluded or uninterested in Linux. The use of Linux implies a distrust for Microsoft, and for the most part megacorporations. While the survey creator (sublinks) may receive anonymous data, Microsoft is absolutely correlating information that comes across their server and selling that data. In my opinion, this should have been an obvious thing most of the Linux community will not participate in, (myself included as one of the most active users and a mod). And it reflects poorly on the FOSS nature of sublinks. A FOSS survey system is needed badly for effective engagement.
  • As many of us in the social sciences background know… Please explain the intention of this statement. I don’t mean to be cynical, but to me, this implies I have been part of some science experiment of unknown intentions and implications; at the extreme end of possible meanings. I thought we were a FOSS community, many with a self hosting interest. A social sciences interest and background has entirely different motivations and raises concern for me.
grue,

.world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other.

Seems to me that’s because (with the possible exception of Lemmy vs. Kbin) this is the first time there have been two Fediverse services of the same type. (After writing that I fact-checked myself: it turns out there are two Twitter-equivalents in addition to Mastodon, Misskey and Pleroma, but they’re not noteworthy enough to have their own Wikipedia pages, so…)

Anyway, it seems to me (given that Sublinks is intended to be API-compatible with Lemmy) this is less of a “position them against each other” (as in competing for users in a walled-garden sort of way) issue and more of a “choose among several equivalent implementations the one you like best” issue.

ruud,
@ruud@lemmy.world avatar

.world has many instances in the fediverse and existed long before Lemmy.world. Ruud has never, to my knowledge, posed anything like this post about another potential fedi service. The other fediverse services have coexisted without need to position them against each other. This difference in approach implies intentions, if not outright actions with the illusion of user input.

I see my name mentioned here, but I don’t understand the remark. Positioning fediverse services against each other? The team has posted this to get input to assist the Sublinks development team in getting moderation tools in their software. I think it’s good there’s many options in software to choose from. Lemmy, Kbin, Main, Piefed, Sublinks. I also run mastodon, but also similar platforms like firefish, sharkey, akkoma etc. Users can choose. Nothing is positioned against each other. They all work together as 1 large Fediverse. And, the more instances, the better. The fediverse ideally should exist of many instances instead of a few large ones. (Yes, I agree that having 1 big Lemmy server isn’t ideal. But that’s another discussion.)

AchtungDrempels,

Aaah, so the plan is to run sublinks on, say, sublinks.world and keep lemmy.world running with lemmy? Like you do with the mastodon alternatives?

ruud,
@ruud@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t know yet. I think that’s something we need to discuss with the team and get input from the users. (Yes, I did register sublinks.world :-) )

j4k3,
@j4k3@lemmy.world avatar

Hey Ruud. Overall the post comes across as if it has odd intentions. It does not clearly state the purpose of the post but it explains a bunch of what it is not. In corporate America and American politics we are constantly getting these kinds of messages. It almost always means everything that is addressed in the message is about to happen. The person that wrote the information is trying to tell the reader how to think instead of providing information and allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions.

You have mentioned your other servers in the fediverse in the past, and it was always in this type of informative, “draw your own conclusions” type of post. I appreciate that, and can respect it.

The proper way to introduce sublinks would be in a similar vain, to simply state that it exists and what its merits are versus Lemmy. If change may be coming to Lemmy.world, simply explain the reasoning behind those decisions. It is great if you can involve the community, but the involvement should be following the principals and alignment of the community to engage with them. Microsoft as a service for providing my personal details is not aligned with my values. Perhaps if I lived in the EU I would feel differently, but in the USA I have little choice but to avoid these companies entirely.

A survey is often a tool used to gauge how to administer a change that will be unpopular, and this usually means the change in direction addressed in the survey has already been decided.

My concern could be completely misplaced. I have not punched a hole in my firewall for Microsoft or agreed to their terms of service to see the content of the survey. The only information I have is what is posted here.

My concern has nothing to do with the obvious joke. I am concerned that this post does not describe its purpose clearly, it implies major changes are coming, and it promotes feedback in a way that does not align with my principals as a very active user here. On a separate note, the comment about sociology is curious for its unsolicited randomness. Do you run any scientific experiments in the background or allow other to do so?

I default to a skeptical line of questioning , but I am not trying to be negative or accusatory. It is mostly a desire to learn and understand what is happening under the surface.

Rooki, (edited )
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

EDIT: I am sorry for the previous text, i was a little too moody there, so the downvotes are probably justified ;)

The prevalence of Linux users on this platform is common knowledge.

Yes we all knew that, but because of convenience and we didnt wanted any issues with accusations that we correlate ips that accessed the self hosted form with lemmy user ips, so we chose to use Microsoft Forms

Sanctus,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

You answered none of that user’s questions at all and used your post to tear them down.

Vigilante,

Yeah fine power tripping here nothing else to see folks . also they aren’t “foss elitist” you said the survey was “anonymous” and they explained how its not.

Rooki,
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Huh, when do i see that i have banned him? is it again lemmy federation issue here? Like always?

It is anonymous for our POV, the other way around if we / sublinks hosted that form, we would have more data than with microsoft, for example we could corelate the ip you accessed lemmy.world and the form website we hosted, so we can identify directly what user voted that.

In that perspective it was a better choice to use microsoft forms, for ddos protection and anonymous from our side, as we dont get any personal information, not even the ip from your submited form.

CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV,
@CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV@lemmy.world avatar

You know that in the FOSS space Microsoft does not have a good standing. Asking people on a FOSS based social media to give anonymous answers about another FOSS project through a Microsoft service is a bit of an oversight.

Rooki, (edited )
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Edit: Sorry, for my harsh response, edited my original comment. I am sorry for my bad behaviour.

aeharding,
@aeharding@lemmy.world avatar

Are you planning on sharing the results of the survey? I think the Lemmy folks would be interested in it too.

laverabe,

Is there an alternate survey site that could be used other than Microsoft? The site is pretty much impossible to see in dark browser mode as well (light grey text on white background).

Aside from that though, what is the difference between Lemmy and sublinks?

Lifecoach5000,

I’d like to know this as well. Perhaps better mod tools?

SorteKanin,
@SorteKanin@feddit.dk avatar

They say they plan for better mod tooling, but so far it’s still not released so it’s difficult to know how it will be different or better (and whether Lemmy will get better tooling by that point also).

Rooki, (edited )
@Rooki@lemmy.world avatar

Better mod tool and a more common and well known programming language. A seperate team for UI/Design and API, so that the development goes faster and goes to multiple checks before it gets released. It is lemmy api compatible, so your iphone or android app will still work.

Sublinks has a roadmap too, to give everyone a glimpse where everything is and what is planned. And Sublinks developers welcome everyone that want to support the project, even non developers that want to input their ideas or personal experience.

Sublinks will add some moderation tools for mods and instance admins, to have a better control over their instance and to reduce spam, trolls or illegal content ( not pirated but that BAD porn stuff )

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