• gabe [he/him]@literature.cafe
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    8 months ago

    For context, there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes when it comes to lemmy admin stuff especially in the matrix channels. There is a significant frustration and lack of confidence in the lemmy developers at this point. Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

    • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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      8 months ago

      Based on what I’ve seen on the public facing part of the developer side, I get the feeling this isn’t the kind of group that can build the kind of organization required to make this sustainable in the long run.

      I’m just waiting for when Beehaw releases that they’ve given up on Lemmy and have created a new tech stack.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s open source. We don’t have to depend on the original developers.

        If it gets too bad, someone can just make a fork.

        Afaik people are just impatient with the developers and have different short term goals.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          8 months ago

          I mention a new tech stack because Beehaw brought it up as an option and a lot of people have commented on the difficulty of development in this environment.

            • Rob T Firefly@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Rust seems like a great foundation.

              The fact that I know you’re referring to the programming language called “Rust” doesn’t make this sentence any less funny.

            • Kogasa@programming.dev
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              8 months ago

              It could still be rust. Code is always the easy part. Design and organization and funding are hard

      • Ategon@programming.dev
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        8 months ago

        In terms of new tech stack currently theres sublinks being made by devs/admins of a bunch of instances (discuss.online, lemmy.world, programming.dev, etc.)

            • Kogasa@programming.dev
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              8 months ago

              Not really a substantial opinion, but I have little hope that replacing a fairly well established Rust codebase with a brand new Java one will do much in terms of increasing contribution.

              • thundermoose@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                I wouldn’t shortchange how much making the barrier to entry lower can help. You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex, and that can have a chilling effect on contributions. This is not a dig at Rust; it has to force you to build things in a particular way because it has to guarantee memory safety at compile time. That isn’t to say that Rust’s approach is the only way to be sure your code is safe, mind you, just that Rust’s insistence on memory safety at compile time is constraining.

                To be frank, this isn’t necessary most of the time, and Rust will force you to spend ages worrying about problems that may not apply to your project. Java gets a bad rap but it’s second only to Python in ease-of-use. When you’re working on an API-driven webapp, you really don’t need Rust’s efficiency as much as you need a well-defined architecture that people can easily contribute to.

                I doubt it’ll magically fix everything on its own, but a combo of good contribution policies and a more approachable codebase might.

                • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
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                  8 months ago

                  You have to fight Rust a lot to build anything complex

                  nutomic, one of the main Lemmy devs, didn’t know Rust before he started working on Lemmy. He just started working on Lemmy and learned Rust in the process. The difficulty of Rust is exaggerated.

                  • thundermoose@lemmy.world
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                    8 months ago

                    Hyperfixating on producing performant code by using Rust (when you code in a very particular way) makes applications worse. Good API and system design are a lot easier when you aren’t constantly having to think about memory allocations and reference counting. Rust puts that dead-center of the developer experience with pointers/ownership/Arcs/Mutexes/etc and for most webapps it just doesn’t matter how memory is allocated. It’s cognitive load for no reason.

                    The actual code running for the majority of webapps (including Lemmy) is not that complicated, you’re just applying some business logic and doing CRUD operations with datastores. It’s a lot more important to consider how your app interacts with your dependencies than how to get your business logic to be hyper-efficient. Your code is going to be waiting on network I/O and DB operations most of the time anyway.

                    Hindsight is 20/20 and I’m not faulting anyone for not thinking through a personal project, but I don’t think Rust did Lemmy any favors. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how performant your code is if you make bad design and dependency choices. Rust makes it harder to see these bad choices because you have to spend so much time in the weeds.

                    To be clear, I’m not shitting on Rust. I’ve used it for a few projects and great for apps where processing performance is important. It’s just not a good choice for most webapps, you’d be far better off in a higher-level language.

              • morhp@lemmynsfw.com
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                8 months ago

                Who knows. Java is a much bigger programming language than Rust. Might be easier to find developers. But obviously it depends on interest. Who knows.

              • Ategon@programming.dev
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                8 months ago

                Theres been a bunch of activity and people joining in in the dev matrix already

                Backend pretty much already has parity and the frontend is currently the main thing that an updated demo is waiting on but should be ready really soon

                I’ve been designing an updated home page recently for it that I’ll be pushing out this week that looks miles better than lemmy-ui since I could do everything from scratch and thus quickly

    • aeharding@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That sucks. As a 3rd party Lemmy app developer, I’ve only had positive interactions with the Lemmy devs. They’re even being proactive in communications.

      • tool@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Try submitting a pull request for something in one of the core repos.

        They behave as if every line of code in your commit is a sentence proclaiming “Why yes, your wife is a whore, your dog doesn’t love you, AND your baby is ugly.”

        I’m not kidding, there’s no hyperbole in that statement. Go read some of their declined pull requests threads for some entertainment.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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      8 months ago

      That’s kind of the impression I got but thought maybe I was just mistaken because I haven’t actually been hands-on with this project. That’s unfortunate to hear.

    • tool@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Even those who try to contribute to the project get eventually feeling pushed out.

      Submitting a pull request to one of their repos on Github was really an experience, and I can tell you that I will never submit another one to the Lemmy project while they’re still the lead devs based on that experience.

    • cum@lemmy.cafe
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      8 months ago

      What about kbin, isn’t that entirely different software that can be developed to phase out Lemmy?

      • MBM@lemmings.world
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        8 months ago

        From what I heard Kbin’s developer is very inactive, so people started a fork called Mbin. Mbin might be alright?

    • stackPeek@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Perhaps there’s starting to be a Lemmy clone/alternative? I think it’s named Sublinks

    • maltfield@lemmy.ca
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      8 months ago

      Better to publish such issues on a public website than let it get buried in matrix. People other than devs & instance admins need to be aware of the risks that they’re taking when using Lemmy.