A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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Right now, I'm feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I'm hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or the wrong platform since I'm now just recently hearing about it. I'm just feeling worried and wondering whether or not if I should do anything or not.
I don't think there is anything to be concerned about.
Sublinks will live alongside Lemmy, just like kbin does today. Some Lemmy instances might switch to it under the hood at some point, but as a user you probably woudn't even notice the change. All the data would be preserved, so your community would still be there unchanged.
It is basically Lemmy written in a different programming language, with more focus on moderation tools afaik. So for users it looks and works just like any other Lemmy instance does, and it's part of the same Threadi-/Fediverse.
Sublinks will live alongside Lemmy, just like kbin does today. Some Lemmy instances might switch to it under the hood at some point, but as a user you probably woudn't even notice the change
To expand on this, some kbin instances have already similarly changed to mbin, and no one noticed.
What happened to lbin?
Oh okay, it got me confused and made me feel concerned because I don't want to end up losing the community I created here.
Yeah. I don't think you have to worry about that anytime soon. And certainly not because of Sublinks.
as a user you probably woudn’t even notice the change.
That's not entirely true. The default UI for Sublinks is being developed to be dramatically different than the default UI for Lemmy. It's unclear if the Lemmy UI will be made available by lemmy.world if they change to Sublinks. Its also unclear if lemmy.world will simply redirect to sublinks.world.
It's also unclear if lemmy.world will use sublinks as sublinks currently doesn't exist in a form that's usable for lemmy.world. And it may turn out that what is built doesn't work as intended and lemmy.world will continue to use lemmy indefinitely.
It's planned to be 100% API compatible with Lemmy, so you'd be able to use any Lemmy-UI with it. IDK why LW or any other instance would change their default UI.
A lot of things are not final and may change, but let's just start with their stated goals, instead of speculating about all the things that could theoretically happen.
Here is your community viewed from Mbin: https://kbin.run/m/koalawallawoods@lemmy.world
As you can see, posts are there, it's possible to comment as well.
It will be the same for Sublinks
I just tried to follow that link and it appears someone needs to notify the website owners about this error message I'm getting from it and I'm using LibreWolf for my browser for privacy reasons.
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to kbin.run.
Seems to be something about the link rewrite, from where I sit - I can copy and paste the link and get exactly the expected page, but if I click it, it's broken. Seems like a Lemmy issue, if anything, as the pasted link opens just fine.
It's a basic standard LetsEncrypt certificate so either your certificate store is wildly outdated, or you have something bad going on on your network.
Actually, I just cut and pasted that kbin.run link into another browser on another computer on the same network and its working there, so that rules it down to a LibreWolf issue going on.
Can someone explain to me why sublinks was started as a project? If the main difference is improvements to the moderation tools, it feels like it could have just been a PR to lemmy.
I'm trying my hardest to not assume it's the classic "Java engineers are scared of other languages" meme
I like lemmy but also I've been following the drama from the sidelines, so I think the focus on Rust vs Java has nothing to do with the choice to create a lemmy alternative.
The reason sublinks exists is that the lemmy devs have made some large technical and PR mistakes that have led to multiple larger instance admins losing faith in them.
There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their "entitled" "demands" with them. It's not surprising to see various alternatives to lemmy springing up as a result of the devs telling people to do so.
There was the illegal content spam incident which required instance admins to interact directly with the image database in complex ways for each image to remove the content from their servers, and I believe lemmy.world disabled submitting images if you are using a VPN or the tor network as a result. The lemmy devs have made some bafflingly derisive comments about that incident.
And then there's the recent update that has broken federation of bigger instances, which is an ongoing issue. Communities are having to move instances to help with this bug which should have been caught in testing the update.
So sublinks seems to be some folks deciding that they can do it better.
Choosing Java is one way that they think they can do better. The argument goes, significantly more people know Java than Rust. Lemmy has had some problem getting extra help as a result of this limit, so hopefully sublinks will have a much larger pool of talented devs who will step up and submit code.
Sublinks isn't the only one, too. Piefed is the python Lemmy alternative that's cropped up recently and I believe there are some others in other languages.
Whether any of them can do it better remains to be seen, but it does seem like the Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn't always the most important part of a project.
Great summary!
Thank you for your valuable comment.
I believe there are some others in other languages.
There is Mbin in PHP!
I'm working on the frontend for it rather than the backend so I'll comment more about that
But a new project allows for way easier change of the base aspects. For example im currently working on a theme system thats allows for dynamic themes created at runtime as opposed to it needing to be built in. Also a components library. If this was added onto lemmy ui it would involve massacring the current structure of the UI to essentially make it a new project anyways
Originally was working on the stuff in a new UI on my own but I've merged that into what's happening with sublinks since they're making a new UI anyways as well and would let more of my UI changes to get connected up to the backend easily and shared across multiple frontends
In terms of technologies it also allows the federation code to be completely separated out from the api. Federation is currently its own project so it can be scaled separately and its made in go
Also allows for more organizational changes since we have more control over how the project is structured and the structure of how we talk to each other and decide on changes is different than how its done with lemmy (having a matrix space we talk to each other and there being weekly meetings as well)
Moderation tools is the first milestone after parity but theres also other milestones as well in terms of changes made that differentiates it from lemmy visible on our task board thats public on the github repo
Normal thats theres going to be multiple of the same type of software as people have different goals of what it should be and how it should be organized. Bevy and godot both exist in the open source gamedev space. Theres 7 misskey forks that all mostly aim to do different things but share the misskey api (and a lot of them also use the mastodon api). One of which (iceshrimp) is currently having a rewrite to change the tech stack and make it easier for them to add features
Also the moderation tools could've been Java and connect to the Lemmy database/API (maybe with some pull requests to add to Lemmy's API), which to me sounds a lot better than saying fuck it and rewriting everything, it could've lived in its own repo anyways
I tried that the but API lacked a lot of features that they were too busy to add, like proper pagination to find the latest changes, etc. I started a project like that first called socialcare.cloud but have since shut it down in favor of Sublinks.
I still feel like adding those API routes and making PRs is easier than a full rewrite, with less fragmentation too
Easier but not what I thought was needed. We need more choice!
I'm trying my hardest to not assume it's the classic "Java engineers are scared of other languages" meme
It literally is. The main maintainer didn’t want to learn Rust.
Even if that were true - does it matter?
Java is a perfectly valid choice for something like this.
Yes, Rust is “faster”, uses less memory, etc…
Java is fast enough, though. It offers a fantastic ecosystem and, seeing as these projects are ran by volunteers who do this in their free time, there’s a lot more people willing to chip in some work.
Rust's speed is a cherry on top. The main reason to use it is its language design / correctness guarantees.
I've been programming for several decades and understand nuance and subjectivity vs objectivity when it comes to this, and strongly believe Rust is just objectively much better than Java as a language.
One example is that Rust doesn't have null while Java does. The creator of null gave an excellent talk called The Billion Dollar Mistake about why null was such a bad idea, and said languages shouldn't not have used it. Instead, the alternative he gives is what Rust does.
Things like this are actually hugely important.
Also, Rust was "most loved" language in the StackOverflow developer survey for eight years in a row for a reason.
Other than Sublinks, I have never seen anyone post about how they really want to work with Java.
I have seen people wanting to do Java, and while I personally prefer rust, I do see why.
Outside of the entire Sublinks discussion, it’s important to note that Java is not just Java anymore either. Kotlin offers many of the same advantages syntax-wise that Rust does (including the lack of null), and has access to Java’s excellent ecosystem.
Ultimately, it is up to people to decide what they want to use. Regarding of your opinions on Java or Rust, it is a valid choice either way for this type of software. It’s a personal choice.
I dont know what youre concerned about relating to it but
Sublinks is a drop in replacement for lemmy. In version 0.1 nothing should really be different between the two apart from the default UI looking different
Do you know how far the development is? (just curious)
You can follow their roadmap on their github page.
Now that is a proper board. Wow. Finally an opensource project that understands project management (from the looks of it).
Anti Commercial AI thingy
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
True. I think Lemmy can greatly benefit from it and take some inspirations from Sublinks. For now there is a lack of developpers that know rust even tough this programming language is trending.
It would ease up their work and improve their communication. :)
Well, AI is one thing I want to get rid of.
Your community on koala’s is available on Lemmy, M/Kbin, and sublinks if the host sites are all federated. You just create it on the platform you like to use, if you end up switching to using sublinks in the future you could always make your sublinks account a mod on the community and access it from sublinks
FYI Sublinks is a drop-in replacement for Lemmy, it's fully compatible with the API and database structure, so it can simply be swapped out and aside from UI differences it'll work Basically the same, it could even be used with the Lemmy-UI in which case there would basically be no difference in appearance and function.
Also due to the nature of Federated services as long as everything still speaks the same protocol it doesn't matter that much the software each server uses. The community will still be accessible on those services.
What's wrong with SubLinks?
Java /s
It's normal for their to be several versions of the same software in various languages.