cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/570507
After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
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I will be working on this when I get cycles. Barring the issues already above, there are a lot of areas for optimizations, for instance how images are handled (i.e., they can be handled through object storage like Cloudflare R2 to decrease bandwidth/ram costs). Some is more dev-ops on how common instances are setup, others are code changes to make things more efficient.
Perhaps we should start a community or communication group for this?
It’s difficult problem to solve. Lemmy’s stack is a bit unconventional. The rust backend is not idiomatic and the ui is based off a template of an isomorphic not-quite-react framework. Its not impossible, but it will take a while for alot of programmers come onboard.
That being said, there’s more to it than writing code. Better bug reports, reproduction, updating docs and triaging/managing the issues is possibly more important than writing PRs. Don’t be discouraged!
Would it make more sense to just go all in on API support for the main codebase and leave UI up to 3rd parties/separate project? Seems like that would be the ultimate anti Reddit at least
It’s on my radar and I’m sure it’s on a number of other people’s as well. It just takes a little onboarding time like all good projects.
Worth noting: the ui is in inferno js
So the backend is coded in Rust? I’ve been learning the language but haven’t actually used it outside of tutorials yet. I’m experienced in C++ and know how to program so I may look into it while I’m unemployed.
Maybe that is the problem, rust, not a popular choice for web development.
The backend is rust! The frontend is typescript with a react-type framework. So feel free to pitch in on the frontend if you are familiar with TS!
Relax my friend, would you like some Mojito? You see that doesn’t take rust out of the equation here (read again the op body text).
