this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Having a frontend rewrite seemed more critical than trying reimplementing the backend in a different language.
Remember, Lemmy had 4 years of development to iron out bugs, and this is essentially promising to make something in months that has a fully compatible backend to support all the third party apps, while adding features on top of what Lemmy has, and with a better front end with better mod tools to boot, with a complete rewrite of everything.
The scope of this project has planned for is already unviable. Suppose that Sublinks does reach feature parity to the current version of Lemmy, congratulations, the backend or mod tools is not something a regular user is going to notice or care about at all, all they will know is that suddenly, there are weird bugs that wasn't there before, and that causes frustration.
And this project is going to get more developer traction because... Java?
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I'm very sceptical about the success of Sublinks, because it look like a project that was started out of tech arrogance to prove a point than out of a real need, I don't work in tech, but the general trajectory of these kind of projects is that "enthusiasm from frustration" can only take you so far before the annoyance of dealing with mundane problems piles up, and the project fizzles out and ends with a whimper.
Lemmy had 4 years to accrue technical debt and make foot-guns first-class features. A rewrite is probably exactly what it needs.
I have and if I'm honest I'm probably a little bit too harsh. I think the bigger issue is honestly the priorities of the dev team. There's good reason that this project is focussing on moderation tooling.
What sort of moderation tools are you missing in Lemmy?
Some things that seem hard to argue with:
My own personal wishlist:
There's some other stuff that I have seen PRs for and I do understand y'all are working hard. I appreciate the work you've done so far and the communities you've helped build. The Internet is undoubtedly a better place for it.
Dessalines is currently working on mod actions for Jerbia. Someone recently made a PR for moderator edits but it seems there was not enough interest and it was closed by the author. Better reports handling would be nice, but if you read the issue its not really clear how this should work. Private communities are on the roadmap for this year.
Karma is intentionally left out of Lemmy because it has many negative effects. Wikis make more sense as a standalone project, in fact Im working on something. Flairs are also potentially on the roadmap. For hashtags I dont really see the benefit as they would serve a very similar purpose to communities.
With regards to hashtags I think the utility is mostly in searching among similar things within a community. Suppose there's a community that serves a purpose like r/askhistorians, stackexchange, or like what I'm trying to do over at !opencourselectures@slrpnk.net. In each of those cases, it is enormously useful to be able to search the community by subtopic. Obviously, this could be solved in other ways, but hashtags are probably the simplest to understand and implement.
Very excited to see the outcome of your Ibis project, but I think Lemmy native wikis would see significantly more activity. The easiest implementation I can imagine is a slightly altered frontend for communities marked wikis that also handle some well known syntax (like [[link]] popularized by pkm systems) for internal links. That is links to posts by the same name within a community.
Currently, I'm working on a lemmy bot that handles exactly this internal linking, and hashtag functionality, then builds a static site with support for github pages (so the end result is both a linked community and a seperate site), but I'd much rather have this functionality built into lemmy. To be frank, I'd much rather be trying to build this functionality into lemmy and if I wasn't nearly certain it'd get shot down as out-of-scope, I'd probably be doing that.
I know you're not particularly fond of growth based arguments for new features, but I sincerely believe that the thing that made reddit great in those early days was the tendency for communities to compile resources (particularly for niche and hobby communities). This gave the communities a certain depth that is nearly impossible with posts alone. If that were a first-class feature of Lemmy, I think you'd very quickly see Lemmy fill the niche that federated wiki projects and supplementary wiki services have so far failed to.
Then hashtags would have the same use as post tags on Reddit. I think thats a cleaner solution and there are plans to implement it.
Lemmy is already a very complicated project, and adding more functionality will only make it harder to maintain. Also there are lots of people who use wikis without Reddit, Wikipedia is one of the biggest websites in the world after all. So a Fediverse alternative is very much needed. Plus Lemmy and Ibis can federate in the future.
karma requirements and hashtags doesn't seem right since the former will make people to farm karma for the requirements which is one of the reasons why newbies on reddit always dump post until they get a decent karma. lemmy is not a microblogging site, hashtags have better use in platforms like mastadon. post flairs should be implemented though.
Says who? Because that's how the old platforms used it? I think we should really be moving past the direct influence of these corporate platforms and on the fediverse that probably means something of a well understood common language (like @user@instance or !group@instance). Hashtags were only ever a thing on twitter because the users just started using them and full text search was sufficient to handle it (this is more or less the position we're in on lemmy). Direct support didn't come till much later.
The ones on the Sublinks roadmap are interesting, for instance the warning system: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/7
There was also this list from a few months ago: https://discuss.online/post/12787?scrollToComments=true
True a warning system makes sense.
And you think that a rewrite would magically solve all those technical debts?
Magically no, but sometimes a clean slate is easier than a refactor. I'm speaking generally though, I've never looked at Lemmy's code, and I'm not even who you originally replied to.