Sublinks

Been 6 months since the last post here. Figured it may not be a bad idea to see where things are at. How has progress been?

Just wondered if there’s an update? The announcement made it seem like it was nearly ready but six months on there’s little publicly visible on sublinks.org?

Hello,

We're looking for GoLang contributors to help with the federation service. We're happy to have people that contribute code or help with code reviews.

If you know anyone or if you're interested please reach out!

Email: hello@sublinks.org Mastodon: https://utter.online/@sublinks Online form: https://sublinks.org/join_organization.html

Thanks, jgrim

I tried to join Sublinks, but found no instances running. Is there a list of them?

Also, what are the recommended Android clients for it?

Thanks

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.

👉Moderation Survey HERE👈

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, The Sublinks Team

Been working recently on a theme library for sublinks that will let themes be written in json files and then be read in and swapped between easily. (Ideally would allow people to make a theme at runtime using UI on instances that then generates a json file or zip file)

Attached is an example theme with some basic colors added in. The assets would be taken to populate theme lists when looking at your themes and variants are variations of a theme (that share everything defined in config but also have their own versions of certain aspects)

Below is some of the variants of the theme (accent color is different between the variants)

This theme is currently on a repo https://github.com/sublinks/starlight but note images will not work yet as previews arent set up

How color parsing works

If just a color is entered for a variable (e.g. #1f1f1f) then the variable is set to that color

Mentions can be entered to do the same color as another variable. (e.g. @accent gets the accent color.

Operations can be entered to an operation on the previous value. Putting values fter the operation is like passing arguments to it (not all operations need arguments, some are optional and some have multiple arguments). (e.g. @accent > darken > 2 darkens accent by two steps).

> is used to separate parts of a string that the parser needs to identify

To handle operations, first the string has all of the infix operators replaced with postfix operators. So @accent > darken > 2 becomes @accent > 2 > darken. Then things in the chain between > are interacted with one at a time. If its a color or value it gets popped onto a stack. If its an operation it pulls things from the stack, does the operation, and then pushes the result onto the stack

Back with another update on the home page. Ive added a new communities section on the right, made the right sidebar be able to be hidden, and added in the post sort and scope options above the post feed (as well as fixed some misc bugs)

Will be spending future days now cleaning everything up, adding in behaviours for choosing post scopes and sorts and having that reflected in the feed, and fixing bugs that popped up

Auth has also now been merged in so ill be integrating that into the home feed for things like the subscribed post feed

This update came a little later than I wanted to since ive had some other things I had to finish up but ~~ill be having another update posted tomorrow~~ edit: doing some auth shenanigans which is breaking the build. Logging in is now implemented and added to the home page though :) update soon once some things get merged in

Also are you guys/gals also add anymore federated services support in the future like pixelfed or frendica ?

Another update on some progress. Been working on implementing popovers that will show information when you hover over things for long enough. This gives an easy way to get certain information without needing to leave the post feed

Moving your mouse off of the chip or popover closes it so you can keep browsing

Community chips (with the icon and gradient) replace links to communities in markdown. It makes sure that everything is a link relative to your instance and that it can trigger a popover for the community

This is shown in the video below with nested community chips (the description of these communities in lemmy currently link to other communities and those have all been replaced with chips)

More sidebar progress coming tomorrow

edit: if anyones over on the microblog side feel free to follow me there for some more frequent updates as im working on things. Usually will do progress reports there and then larger updates here. @Ategon@bytes.programming.dev

Hey everyone! Ill be starting to share updates on the frontend visuals here like I was doing with Pangora before it got merged into Sublinks

• Edit: note for people who are wandering in here not knowing what Sublinks is. Sublinks is an upcoming fediverse link aggregator separate from lemmy. It will have api compatibility on release so frontends and apps should still work but the project will be focusing a lot on mod tools and federation updates once it reaches parity. This UI is the default frontend I'm designing for it

Starting off with some progress I've been making on the Home Page. Been taking things I enjoy from both alternate frontends such as Photon and Tesseract, as well as Misskey forks like Iceshrimp and Sharkey.

People who followed me as I was developing Pangora might recognize a lot of similar design decisions

Still in progress but ill try to share new progress at least every couple of days when I work on it with new additions

The left sidebar can be collapsed to show only icons for people who want a bit more space for post cards

Hovering over an option adds a popover saying what it is

In addition when you scroll down the navbar shrinks a bit to give you more space for post cards. On mobile the navbar hides completely when you scroll down and then shows again when you scroll up

The frontend is still heavily in progress so things may change a lot still before release as I refine it. If you've got suggestions feel free to give me them

I like open-source projects with transparency and community-driven approach to development. How does Sublinks ensure transparency and community involvement in its development process? Could you shed some light on the guidelines or process by which feature requests are evaluated, approved, rejected, and prioritized for inclusion in the roadmap?

As someone with a background in Java from college and a newfound interest in Spring Boot, I am eager to contribute to the Sublinks codebase. However, transitioning from small example projects to a large, complex codebase can be intimidating. Could Sublinks have a mentorship program or opportunities for pair programming to support new contributors in navigating the codebase? Having a mentor to guide me through the initial stages would be invaluable in building my confidence and understanding of the codebase, enabling me to eventually tackle issues independently. Then I could mentor a new contributor. I believe it's a nice way to recruit new contributors.

I've been pondering the idea of creating a community right here on Discuss Online that mirrors the activity from the GitHub issue trackers across the various Sublinks repositories. My goal is to establish a space where both a bot and community members can share updates on issues, as well as provide feedback and suggestions in a more discussion-friendly format.

Previously, I set up a similar system for the Lemmy issue tracker at !issue_tracker@lemm.ee, but unfortunately, bot accounts were banned due to excessive activity. I'm seeking approval beforehand to avoid setting it up only to face potential bans later on.

This community would serve as a real-time mirror of the GitHub issues from repositories like sublinks-api and others within https://github.com/sublinks. It would not only facilitate better visibility for the issues but also allow for a more structured conversation flow, thanks to the nested comments feature. Plus, the ability to sort comments by votes can help us quickly identify the most valuable ideas and feedback.

Before moving forward with this initiative, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think this would be a valuable addition to this community? Are there any concerns regarding the potential activity levels from bot postings?

Looking forward to your feedback and hoping to make our collaboration even more productive and enjoyable!