this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024

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Announcements

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Announcement of Sublinks (discuss.online)

submitted 11 months ago by jgrim to c/announcements

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We are thrilled to announce the upcoming release of Sublinks, a groundbreaking Link Aggregation Social Network, joining the Fediverse. This innovative platform is designed to revolutionize how we share and discover online. Our dedicated team of volunteer contributors has worked tirelessly, utilizing technologies like Java, Go, TypeScript, and HTML to bring this vision to life. Sublinks promises a user-friendly interface and robust features that cater to diverse online communities. Stay tuned for our launch date, and get ready to experience a new era of social link sharing!

Sublinks will have a fully compatible API with Lemmy so all current Lemmy apps will also work with Sublinks. In fact, discuss.online will switch to Sublinks to fully replace Lemmy once we reach our Parity Milestone.

For more information, visit GitHub - Sublinks and sublinks.org.

Stay tuned for more regular updates as we progress.

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[–] shrugal@lemm.ee 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Buzzword bonanza!

[–] jgrim 5 points 11 months ago

I know, I tried to make it sound friendly and not anti-Lemmy.

[–] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

I feel so old. I read that entire announcement three times, and still have no idea what Sublinks is.

[–] jgrim 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Basically, it's a replacement for Lemmy. Ground-up rewrite of the source using a language with a much larger community.

[–] FelipeFelop 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I thought I was pretty familiar with the fediverse (joined mastodon in 2018) but I don’t understand what some of that means. What is a Link Aggregation Social Network and why is it capitalised?

[–] jgrim 6 points 11 months ago

Lemmy, Reddit, Sublinks, Kbin are all Link Aggregation social networks. They mostly share links to articles and the like. It's just the category they're in.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Lemmy and Reddit are LASNs. They collect links for people to comment on.

[–] FelipeFelop 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

What’s an LISN ?

Edit: @feathercrown edited their post which originally said LISN.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Sorry typo-- meant LASN, Link Aggregation Social Network

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[–] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 2 points 11 months ago (4 children)

@jgrim

Oh, God. This must be the moment when I realize I'm over the hill for real. You're clearly assuming I know what Lemmy is, which implies that most people in this setting would, in fact, know what it is.

But I don't.

Jesus, I'm gonna need some Chivas after this.

[–] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

it's funny, because I'm reading your comment from lemmy! to me, you're already "on Lemmy" so good job.

In old man terms: it's just a bunch of websites that talk to each other. we share links and memes, using some sites with a reddit aesthetic (lemmy), some with a twitter aesthetic (mastodon), but all (most of) the content gets posted to each other. me, I found my way here from the announcement being linked on Lemmy.

and you're not missing much from the announcement. they didn't really say anything substantial. it's all just corporate speak - bedazzled promises yet to be delivered. we'll see what they launch when they launch it, but i stopped caring by the time i read "innovate" and "revolution". at the end of the day it's gonna be pizzas and cats.

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[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago

Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter.

[–] jgrim 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy is the software that runs discuss.online, lemmy.world, etc.

[–] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

Brother, you're makin' it worse...

[–] awilbert@mastodon.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@Professor_Stevens @jgrim

Twitter is to Mastodon as
Reddit is to Lemmy (and now Sublinks)

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[–] FelipeFelop 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

There are so many buzzwords in that announcement it makes my head hurt.

In fact, went to sublinks.org and the about section is also full of buzzwords. It’s not clear at all.

[–] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

@FelipeFelop

Well, I didn't mean to be particularly critical. I just didn't know what it was announcing. Now that you mention it, though, the wording is a bit corpo for the Fediverse.

[–] FelipeFelop 2 points 11 months ago

Agreed, not critical just puzzled.

[–] hperrin@lemmy.world 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You’re going to revolutionize how we share by being API-compatible with Lemmy?

[–] jgrim 9 points 11 months ago

We want to capture existing websites that run Lemmy. We'll have a migration tool to convert from Lemmy to Sublinks. Users will still be able to user their favorite Lemmy phone apps, etc.

[–] doidera@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

So this service is coming to sum instead of divide?

[–] jgrim 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's just forking Lemmy, but it will be fully compatible with it for federation, etc. It's not meant to create a ruckus. I simply wanted to move faster with some features and I cannot do that with Rust.

[–] doidera@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 11 months ago

Great!

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's neat how your breathless description makes it sound like you've discovered fire but then it reads like a "devs not implementing our pet features" fork.

You'll be - of course - committing changes back to a feature branch to enrich the project better than Kay Sievers did, right? This isn't some petulant land-grab like Bender going off to make his own casino?

[–] jgrim 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It’s not a code fork it’s a completely new codebase in a different language.

It’s not just about implementing “pet features”. I’ve worked closely with admins of all major Lemmy instances to build the feature set for this and the roadmap plan.

[–] FelipeFelop 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Will it compete with https://join.piefed.social/ ? Or does it have some stand out features ?

[–] jgrim 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

You can see the full feature roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6

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[–] FelipeFelop 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hang on, you’ll switch discuss.online to this sublinks.org ? What if I don’t want to?

[–] jgrim 4 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The change won't be noticeable until we start adding new features. The main reason to create Sublinks is to move quicker with features & functionality that the current Lemmy team cannot maintain for various reasons.

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[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It would be interesting to see benchmarks for different mock scenarios (regular user interaction, federation etc...). My understanding is that Lemmy has had a poor database design and bad SQL queries for a very long time, not sure if that improved (but since response times are definitely low with recent versions I guess yes), but it would be really cool if the database could be designed for performance from the bottom up instead of having it as an afterthought which led to the huge downtimes that we experienced last summer when servers with AMD EPYC CPUs and 100s of GBs of RAM couldn't handle a few ten thousand users.

[–] jgrim 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Our goal is to fix the database. I've reengineered it. This has caused us to need a migration path rather than drop-in replacement. I didn't want to inherit their schema.

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's pretty cool, best luck with the project!

[–] jgrim 3 points 11 months ago

Thanks!

[–] Blaze 3 points 11 months ago

Good point

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds very cool. Hope all the best for you/SL!

So general question ... why not contribute back to or softly-fork Lemmy?

While I'm sure you've got a lot to offer here and that SL may very well come to be awesome (especially, IMO, with the attractiveness of the tech stack to would-be contributors), I can't help but wonder if it'd be better in this moment for the fediverse to focus more on building on what's got momentum rather than splitting efforts. There are, of course, many counters to that argument ... so I'm wondering what your thoughts are in general and behind this project?

[–] dresden 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Main reason (or at least one of them) is the technology stack, choosing Java instead of Rust, to move fast with development, and (hopefully) to be more accessible for others to contribute.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

All good reasons! Thanks!

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