Feedback from all moderators

wit, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Yes the 0.19.3 upgrade happened.

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

edit: version typo

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

Yes the 0.19.4 upgrade happened.

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

Rooki, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

Are you talking about the current release then, 0.19.3?

Rooki, 1 month ago

sry was a typo

hatchet, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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

yuriy, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

Well Rust is far better than JAVA will ever be.

wit, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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?

arin, 1 month ago

Thanks peeps, making this community awesome! People in lemmy have 2000% better critical thinking than other similar social forums.

Imperor, 1 month ago

So if someone has a community on lemmy.world, would they need to move to sublinks at some point? Where and how would one do that? Asking for myself.

Thanks for all your work here.

Rooki, 1 month ago

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.

Imperor, 1 month ago

Alright, neat! Always happy to go for some FOSS experiments :)

hungrycat, 1 month ago

This is the first comment I’ve scrolled to where someone has asked about what moving to Sublinks means in terms of practicality, so I’ll hitch my question here too.

To be sure I understand, are you saying that any existing community will be automatically migrated to Sublinks? Would I need to also create a new user account with Sublinks or would this also be migrated? Posts, comments, up/downvotes? Are those all migrated?

I’m just having trouble understanding what a move to Sublinks means in a very practical sense for users and communities. Is this just a backend change that I—as a user, as a mod—would likely not notice? Thanks for any clarification you can provide.

Rooki, 1 month ago

Everything will be migrated, you will only see some minir downtime when the migration happens. But it will be announced and it will still take some time

maegul, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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

nutomic, 1 month ago

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

Rooki, 1 month ago

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.

recursive_recursion, 1 month ago

While I’d like to contribute to the survey, I’m not comfortable using a Microsoft form in addition to providing uniquely identifying info

I’m still willing to contribute in other ways tho🤗

Rooki, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You can dm @jgrim any of your thoughts and ideas. Or just put your ideas into !sublinks and create a public discussion or even if you techie enough just create an issue on github github.com/sublinks/sublinks-api and jgrim and the team will discuss about it.

Thanks for your help

jgrim, 1 month ago

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

recursive_recursion, 1 month ago

searching online a couple I’ve found:

• NextCloud Forms
  • AGPL-3.0
• OhMyForm
  • AGPL-3.0
• LimeSurvey
  • GPL-2.0

jgrim, 1 month ago

I was hoping not to have to host it myself. I won’t need it often. I was mostly curious about a Saas. Thanks though!

recursive_recursion, 1 month ago

totally fair

no worries!🤗

jgrim, 1 month ago

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

recursive_recursion, 1 month ago

ayyy it’s got AGPL-3.0 and it’s dockerized🎉

noice👌

jgrim, 1 month ago

It’s actually extremely buggy. Not sure if we’ll fix it or find something else. Perhaps something you suggested.

recursive_recursion, 1 month ago

fair enough🌻

sometimes being realistic means to compromise and choose something that works albeit unoptimal so it’s totally understandable👍

jgrim, 1 month ago

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

owatnext, 1 month ago

What’s with the demographics questionnaire? It’s an experience survey lol.

goferking0, 1 month ago

Yeah that’s the weirdest part.

kadu, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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.

Zerlyna, 1 month ago

Whoa. Some of us moderators are just average users who escaped from Reddit. I moderate two small niche support groups. (Stopdrinking and bipolar) I know the other moderator in bipolar is about the same tech level as me. (NOT coders!).

This sounds like we need to rehome our groups???

Blaze, 1 month ago

Why would you need to?

Zerlyna, 1 month ago

I don’t want to! I love it here and the small yet personal communities we have. My peeps check in daily or weekly. I try really hard to contribute to the overall instance. What I’m reading here in this thread sounds ominous from some people.

Lennnny, 1 month ago

Yeah same. I’m a bit confused and concerned. I just want a post comments and enjoy content, I don’t want to keep moving house every couple of years.

jelloeater85, 1 month ago

Any big moves would be discussed with the community. We aren’t the best at communicating sometimes, but we do care about supporting the user base here. We would never want to put anyone in a bad spot.

laverabe, 1 month ago

Admins, mods, users; we’re all human. I dunno if it’s some big secret but I use /c/asklemmy posts as informal posts, and just consider the highest comment as the most popular opinion. Imperfect but effective.

I asked what community Lemmy most needs, and the most up voted comment was ‘cranes trains and excavators and stuff like that’. I made the sub and it’s been pretty popular. Maybe you guys could take the same approach, just an informal asklemmy post asking for input before any site changes?

jelloeater85, 1 month ago

We’d definitely do something like that ❤️

I think a lot of folks don’t realize how hard it is to run a website.

Everyone says “too bad, you caused it yourself by being this big”, well someone had to do it…

All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves. And the thing is, the Fedi is only going to get bigger, if it wasn’t us specifically, it would have been another server that would have gotten big.

The whole team here has dumped 1000’s of hours into keeping this thing alive. It’s just rough to see the comments here.

AchtungDrempels, 1 month ago

Just wanted to say that i am really thankful that you at lemmy.world had open doors when others couldn’t cope with the signups last summer, and i was also very happy being on lemmy.world, i always had the impression that you want the best for your users. But i am also irritated by the animosity towards the lemmy devs, and after seeing that f.e. sunaurus apparently is able to have a constructive relation with them, the behaviour or claims of some of the world team seems really odd to me. I have no knowledge about what’s going on at admin / dev level, i am just a user, so i can only go with what i can read here on lemmy.

Thank you again for all that you guys did!

Rooki, 1 month ago

Some of the world team That is probably me. I am sorry about it.

Sublinks should not replace lemmy but add alternatives to the fediverse. We understand it is difficult to maintain such big software especially if there is always that exceptional “big” instance that has special requests for special / specific features. With it we just want to have less “beef” with the lemmy devs, with “big” instance issues.

hatchet, 1 month ago

All the best to you and the team, I understand it can be rough. But similarly, I think most of what you wrote could just as well have been written by a Lemmy maintainer:

I think a lot of folks don’t realize how hard it is… All we ever really wanted was a nice place for folks to express themselves… The whole team here has dumped 1000’s of hours into keeping this thing alive. It’s just rough to see the comments here.

Lemmy devs are in exactly the same position, and reading the comments in this thread, I am getting the vibe that lemmy.world admins are not willing to see this. Just check the messaging your admins are putting out there (even in the comments under this post), imagine reading that messaging as a Lemmy dev, and tell me it wouldn’t feel just as rough.

Btw, I think a clear source of all the negative comments here is not the fact that Sublinks is being developed. Every time Sublinks gets advertised on Lemmy, there is this toxic “finally we can get rid of the original Lemmy dev team” messaging along with it - sometimes it is more hidden between the lines, other times, it’s very blatant. This messaging inevitably creates uncertainty in users about the future of their instances. THAT’S the real issue here, at least from my point of view.

CsXGF8uzUAOh6fqV, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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.

Vigilante, 1 month ago

The title and starting was so unlike .world that i for a sec doubted if i was reading instances wrong but oh well seems like a heading to lure you in and bam you with a completely different things.

Vigilante, 1 month ago

Why do you people seem to love mod tools so much when it comes to causing contraversary but are always late to update instance ver ?

Blaze, 1 month ago

LW is unique in the way that it is by far the largest instance, it makes sense that they want to take their time to update, they usually come up with unique issues.

If people could move away from it to other generalist instances, that would help with the issues. My former main instance, Reddthat, is now unable to fetch votes in a quick way because LW centralizes so much of the users and communities. More details can be be found here: reddthat.com/post/16122033

Now that LW is on 0.19.X, users can move to another instance in two clicks from the settings.

Rooki, 1 month ago

Yep, with that upgrade we noticed a increase in federation issues, we are trying to help every other instances, that has federation issue to us to keep them updated.

Vigilante, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Lol says they are not corpo and anonymously collecting and then shows microsoft forum down your throat . Also the hello fellow kids type of PS was icing on the cake for me . Thanks for the laugh cheers.

Now be a good little powertrippy mod and remove it as we all know you like to show how strong and big you are by using the mod tools lemmy doesn’t 'have" . Also how’s suckin up to threads going nowadays ? Lololol

Rooki, 1 month ago

I think you have lost few braincells by writing those sentences.

From our perspective it is more anonymous than having it self hosted. As we could corelate users IPs of lemmy and visitors of the form.

We dont want to get ddosed by some script kiddies too. Because they just dont like LW or so.

And yes, the mod tools are really lacking in many places.

ripcord, 1 month ago

Your reply style here really makes me question how “non-toxic” the development environment will really be.

Rooki, 1 month ago

I am just return the favor. If you give a non toxic/troll comment i would have responded otherwise.

I am sorry if you are feeling attacked.

ripcord, 1 month ago

I’m not the person you replied to.

But your comments are frequently not constructive. At all. That concerns me.

Rooki, 1 month ago

The person i replied to wasnt constructive too? So what is your point?

If it is a point that “microsoft bad!!!”, then yeah thats a valid point. But WHAT is an alternative to that? That is secure, ddos protected and doesnt cost us more than 0$. Additionally who will set it up for one survey? And again, self hosted != more privacy. We see your ip there and on lemmy, so we could theoretically correlate your ip and boom we have your lemmy account, on microsoft forms we dont that.

If you are really concerned that microsoft is doing shady stuff with your correlated answer, then dont use it as simple as that and dont blame someone that is doing this in their free time and for no money.

Essence_of_Meh, 1 month ago

But WHAT is an alternative to that?

Cryptpad has forms. There’s also Framaforms though I can’t say how well it works or whether it would suit your needs.

Rooki, 1 month ago

Ok i will give those alternatives to the sublinks team.

Essence_of_Meh, 1 month ago

If you need other alternatives in the future Awesome Privacy repo has a pretty good list on various categories.

Serinus, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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

LeroyJenkins, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

Axum is a great crate for a web server :P

ericjmorey, 1 month ago

FYI: lemmy.ml/c/learningrustandlemmy

Maybe @SorteKanin would be interested in helping people there.

SorteKanin, 1 month ago

Oh nice, I was not aware of this community 👍

asdfasdfasdf, 1 month ago

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

Natanael, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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

Blaze, 1 month ago

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

aeharding, 1 month ago

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

j4k3, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

.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, 1 month ago

.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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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, 1 month ago

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

Vigilante, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago

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, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

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