The Threadiverse is growing again, this time offering an effort to build a new Lemmy replacement from scratch, with API compatibility.

Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.

  • @[email protected]English
    16•10 months ago

    Lemmy had 4 years of development to iron out bugs

    Lemmy had 4 years to accrue technical debt and make foot-guns first-class features. A rewrite is probably exactly what it needs.

      • @[email protected]English
        11•10 months ago

        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.

          • @[email protected]English
            10•10 months ago

            Some things that seem hard to argue with:

            • A mod panel with things like ‘add moderator’ (maybe this could be attached to the new moderator view?)
            • Targeted reports (choose who receives it; admin/moderator)
            • Moderation actions on jerboa
            • Moderator edits. There’s a fine line here and I can understand why you wouldn’t want total edit capabilities but it’d be nice to at least be able to do things like mark as nsfw and add content warnings. This sort of feature should also probably target megathreads
            • Private communities (I know local only communities are in the works but there’s a whole mess of other criteria that would be useful)

            My own personal wishlist:

            • Karma requirements
            • First class wikis
            • Hashtags (I actually think a super simple stopgap solution here is to just have them link to the appropriate search page)
            • Flairs

            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.

            • @[email protected]English
              6•10 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]English
                2•10 months ago

                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 [email protected]. 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.

                • @[email protected]English
                  1•10 months ago

                  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.

            • @[email protected]English
              2•10 months ago

              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.

              • @[email protected]English
                3•10 months ago

                hashtags have better use in platforms like mastadon

                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.

          • @[email protected]English
            4•10 months ago

            The ones on the Sublinks roadmap are interesting, for instance the warning system: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/7

            Create a way to create a warning system for users. For example, a user gets a warning for posting a broken link multiple times. We don’t want to ban them for that. Or a admin gives a user a Warning with a reason. Create a rules system for auto actions like banning for some time or forever. Consider adding types of warnings. This should also track bans from communities for admin-level auto actions. The profile page shows strikes similar to Mastodon for Mods/Admins only and the user that owns the profile. Examples, warnings in each community, and bans. Rules will be applied to counts of warning types or total warnings over time. 3 warnings within a month is a ban for a month, for example.

            There was also this list from a few months ago: https://discuss.online/post/12787?scrollToComments=true

    • @Sir_Simon_SpamalotEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      And you think that a rewrite would magically solve all those technical debts?

      • @[email protected]English
        6•10 months ago

        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.