Today I learned about Sublinks (here), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly....
I actually talked with Jason (one of the Sublinks maintainers) a while ago, asking about the features he was missing from Lemmy. Turns out it was just one or two minor API changes that could be easily implemented, but he never even bothered to open an issue about it. I think they just have fun reimplementing Lemmy, but it would take at least multiple years to catch up with the current features of Lemmy. And by then Lemmy will of course have many more features and improvements. So I wouldnt expect that this ever becomes useful for production.
I see that comment but somehow cant fetch it from lemmy.ml. Would you mind asking what exactly they mean by “toxic development community”? Its honestly the first time I heard something like this about Lemmy.
I agree that its good for redundancy to have another development team for Lemmy. However they will be busy for the next few years redoing all the work we have already done for Lemmy. It would be much more efficient if they simply forked the existing Rust code and implemented their desired features on top. That would also make it easy to merge their changes back into Lemmy.
Sure being more welcoming to outside contributors sounds good. Do you have any concrete suggestions how to recruit and train them? We do have some community contributors, but they seem very limited by the amount of time they have for Lemmy after their fulltime job.
Once the new round of NLnet funding is finalized we will publish those milestones. However Im not sure if a backlog like the one you linked is really helpful, it would take a significant amount of time to manage for little benefit. After all every open issue on the Lemmy Github is up for grabs for anyone to implement it.
Yes Bevy has a big advantage because its a library, so everyone who uses it is a developer and is able to fix minor issues. In case of Lemmy only a small fraction of users are developers, and even less know Rust. I watched the video, but its not easy to take concrete suggestions and apply them to Lemmy. Maybe the community reviews for PRs would be a good idea to get people familiar with the codebase. It also mentions using a project board so we should consider that. Though Im not sure how to select issues for each milestone because again, everything is up for grabs.
Create an ARCHITECTURE.md document explaining the overall architecture and different components of Lemmy. This would help new contributors quickly familiarize themselves with the codebase.
The documentation has some info about the architecture as well as how to start contributing. Is there anything particular missing, or do people not find these docs?
Publish a public roadmap with milestones and release plans. This gets people excited about the project’s direction and motivates them to contribute.
As mentioned in the other comment, we will have a public roadmap once the NLnet milestones are finalized. Other than that the issues are up for grabs for anyone, so Im not sure what sense it would make to give them priorities.
Nightly builds enable contributors to test upcoming changes, offer feedback, stay actively involved in the project’s progress, iterate quickly on improvements, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.
These are available as :dev Docker images, and deployed to test servers at enterprise.lemmy.ml etc. Maybe this should be documented somewhere to let people know?
Implement a bounty system for critical or challenging issues to incentivize contributions. Some people who don’t want to contribute with a monthly subscription may prefer this kind of contribution.
Bounty systems dont work well in my experience. Usually the reward is too low to pay an actual dev salary, and then its still a hassle to get the money into your bank account. Plus there is no gurantee to get paid for your work, its always possible that someone else submits a solution just before you finish yours.
Create project swag (stickers, t-shirts, etc.) and distribute it to active contributors as a token of appreciation.
Good idea, though we dont really have the funds to pay for that. It was also suggested to sell swag to earn money for Lemmy, but havent gotten around to that yet. Do you by chance any good company to produce and sell this?
Institute a “Lemmy contributor mentorship or apprenticeship” program where experienced developers formally take up 1-2 promising new contributors under their wing.
Well if anyone opens a pull request we give feedback as part of the review process. And if anyone has questions we also answer them in the issue tracker or on Matrix. But in practice there seems to be little demand in this regard.
Live or recorded screencasts solving issues, similar to mentorships but instead of one-on-one it allows more people to feel engaged in the development process, and provide feedback in the case of live streams.
That seems to get more into entertainment, not what we want to do.
Host discussions about issues on Lemmy itself, as suggested in the blog post below. The voting and threads with nested comments make it easier to have productive conversations compared to GitHub. The community is here so you’ll get more contributions right away in the form of ideas and feedback.
We do have biweekly dev updates which are somewhat related. But discussing individual issues here would likely duplicate discussions from Github issues.
I was a Java developer before starting to contribute to Lemmy. Didnt know anything about Rust, just wrote code and resolved compiler errors until things worked. Rust is definitely not as hard to learn as some people think.
I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss...
Having a different license for each user would cause too much complexity and fragmentation. It makes more sense to have a license per instance. This can already be configured and gets displayed under /legal. Then based on the legal info users can decide where to signup, and admins can decide which instances to federate with.
Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early...
It should be very easy to distinguish edits and deletes which were made within a few minutes or hours after writing a comment, from those made months or years later right around the reddit blackout.
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....
I wish people would stop using this silly term “Threadiverse”. There is no fundamental difference between Lemmy, Mastodon, Peertube, Friendica and so on. They all federate with the same protocol and are all part of the same Fediverse.
The problem is that “Threadiverse” is almost never used together with “Fediverse”, so anyone unfamiliar with the terms will think that they are totally distinct. I can understand if you want to categorize different platforms within the Fediverse, but then we should also start referring to Mastodon and similar projects as the “Tootiverse”.
The bridge is nothing more than another Activitypub instance. You can block it in the same ways that you can block existing Mastodon or Lemmy instances. If users want to opt in to federate with it, they should also have to opt in manually to federate with every single Lemmy instance.
When Al-Qaeda themselves claimed responsibility, even with overwhelming evidence aside? Why were so many people still reluctant, I was researching about this stuff and was shocked to see people who I respect a lot believe in this
There is nothing to be ashamed about critically examining the evidence. Here is the video of the pentagon attack, if you ask me the object looks much smaller than a passenger plane.
Interesting. However in this case the plane came down vertically so the wings/engines would hit the ground beside the building. In case of the pentagon, the plane supposedly flew horizontally at ground level, so the wings should crash directly into the building.
Where exactly does a “platform” end? Is it only lemmy.tf, or all Lemmy instances? Either way Mastodon or Peertube can hardly be considered to be the same platform as Lemmy. Activitypub is a protocol and definitely not a platform. Or would you consider threads.net part of your “platform” once it implements Activitypub?
These people previously asked Dessalines and me to participate in one of their conferences, and expected us to pay the full ticket price. I think its really outrageous to charge so much money for setting up some video calls, considering that most people who run the Fediverse don’t get any money at all. There are also no recordings published afterwards, which goes completely against the spirit of openness of the Fediverse.
TIL about Sublinks, a Java-based alternative to Lemmy's backend (github.com)
Today I learned about Sublinks (here), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly....
Protecting user content and data on Lemmy
I see talk here and there about how any company or individual can easily use anything we post on Lemmy however they want. This could include AI training, behavior analysis, or user profiling. With the recent news of Reddit data being sold and licensed for AI training, I thought this would be a great time to preemptively discuss...
Reddit: 'We Are in the Early Stages of Monetizing Our User Base' (www.404media.co)
Reddit said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission that its users’ posts are “a valuable source of conversation data and knowledge” that has been and will continue to be an important mechanism for training AI and large language models. The filing also states that the company believes “we are in the early...
A different strategy for promoting the Threadiverse
So, with news of Reddit making deals to sell user data for AI training, I think we should really start organizing ourselves for an effective migration campaign....
RFC for Private Communities in Lemmy (github.com)
Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media (techcrunch.com)
📣 This is a callout proposing a working group to improve Article interop in Mastodon, and across fediverse servers & apps (lemmy.ml)
I posted a callout earlier this week, and originally planned to use Guppe Groups....
Give me Options or give me death (lemm.ee)
Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job
When Al-Qaeda themselves claimed responsibility, even with overwhelming evidence aside? Why were so many people still reluctant, I was researching about this stuff and was shocked to see people who I respect a lot believe in this
Bridgy Fed, a bridge between the Fediverse and other protocols such as BlueSky, is using an opt-out model and that raises a lot of discussion (github.com)
Github ticket: github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/835
FediForum, an online unconference for discussing the future of the Fediverse, 19-20 March (fediforum.org)