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Konala Koala @lemmy.world
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Regarding sublinks and feeling concerned about what is going on with it

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.

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58 comments

  • 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.

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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

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    • 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.

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    • 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

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      • Well, one thing that has me kind of worried about my community here if lemmy.world were to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks and end up becoming sublinks.world instead.

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    • 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

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      • 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.

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    • 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.

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  • 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

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  • 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.

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  • It's normal for their to be several versions of the same software in various languages.

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