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.

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.

      • wesley@yall.theatl.social
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        11 months ago

        Just peeking at the source code and it all looks like pretty standard stuff. Looks just like apps I’ve worked on at several jobs.

        Is it sexy? No. But a lot of people have experience with this and could help develop.

        Only time will tell if this project pays off though

      • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch. That by itself should already speak volumes.

        One-Up projects like this rarely ever turn out well, that’s from my own experiences. Even though this isn’t a popular view, I still think I’m right on this one, we can circle back in say, 6 months, to see if my predictions are right.

        • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          I’m pretty sure Nutomic was a Java dev before starting work on Lemmy and learning Rust from scratch.

          That is true, I used to be an Android developer and then learned Rust by writing code for Lemmy. Are you by any chance my new stalker?

          And if we’re comparing the languages, the fact alone that there are no Nullpointerexceptions makes Rust infinitely better than Java for me. I also agree that this sort of copycat project will soon be forgotten. For example have you ever heard of Rustodon?

          • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Are you by any chance my new stalker?

            No, it was on that AMA you guys did months ago, and I remember things about people.

            • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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              11 months ago

              Very impressive! The only thing I can remember well are places.

          • spiderman@ani.social
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            11 months ago

            there are no Nullpointerexceptions makes Rust infinitely better than Java for me.

            what’s wrong with having null pointer exception?

            • Tom@programming.dev
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              11 months ago

              Null is terrible.

              A lot of languages have it available as a valid return value for most things, implicitly. This also means you have to do extra checking or something like this will blow up with an exception:

              // java example
              // can throw exception
              String address = person.getAddress().toUpperCase();
              
              // safe
              String address = "";
              if (person.getAddress() != null) {
                  person.getAddress().toUpperCase();
              }
              

              There are a ton of solutions out there. Many languages have added null-coalescing and null-conditional operators – which are a shorthand for things like the above solutions. Some languages have removed the implicit nulls (like Kotlin), requiring them to be explicitly marked in their type. Some languages have a wrapper around nullable values, an Option type. Some languages remove null entirely from the language (I believe Rust falls into this, using an option type in place of).

              Not having null isn’t particularly common yet, and isn’t something languages can just change due to breaking backwards compatibility. However, languages have been adding features over time to make nulls less painful, and most have some subset of the above as options to help.

              I do think Option types are fantastic solutions, making you deal with the issue that a none/empty type can exist in a particular place. Java has had them for basically 10 years now (since Java 8).

              // optional example
              
              Class Person {
                  private String address;
                  
                  //prefer this if a null could ever be returned
                  public Optional<String> getAddress() {
                      return Optional.ofNullable(address);
                  }
                  
                  // not this
                  public String getAddress() {
                      return address;
                  }
              

              When consuming, it makes you have to handle the null case, which you can do a variety of ways.

              // set a default
              String address = person.getAddress().orElse("default value");
              
              // explicitly throw an exception instead of an implicit NullPointerException as before
              String address = person.getAddress().orElseThrow(SomeException::new);
              
              // use in a closure only if it exists
              person.getAddress().ifPresent(addr -> logger.debug("Address {}", addr));
              
              // first example, map to modify, and returning default if no value
              String address = person.getAddress().map(String::toUpperCase).orElse("");
              
        • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          I also was a professional java dev, and also had to use spring boot in most corporate environments.

          I don’t wanna knock anyone’s re-write, because I know how difficult it is to dissuade someone when they’re excited about a project. But to me, starting a new project or doing a rewrite, is the best opportunity to learn a newer, better language. We taught ourself Rust by coding lemmy, and I recently learned Kotlin / jetpack compose because I wanted to learn android development. Learning new languages is not an issue for most programmers; we have to learn new frameworks and languages every year or so if we want to keep up.

          This is potentially hundreds of hours of wasted time that could be spent on other things. Even if someone absolutely hates Rust and doesn’t want to contribute to the massive amount of open issues on Lemmy, there are still a lot of front-ends that could use more contributors.

        • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
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          11 months ago

          it it common to announce a ‘major rewrite’ without having it complete?

          i mean, at the moment, theres little to discern it from lemmy at the moment… why make a big public proclamation about it before you even touch the front end?

    • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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      11 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.

        • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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          11 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.

            • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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              11 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.

              • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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                11 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.

                • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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                  11 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 !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.

                  • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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                    11 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.

              • spiderman@ani.social
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                11 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.

                • spaduf@slrpnk.net
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                  11 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.

            • Blaze
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              11 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

        • 0ops@lemm.ee
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          11 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.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      There are some projects that start because of “tech arrogance” as you describe the current situation. MariaDB, Git, LibreOffice are some of the most famous ones, but I’m sure there are more.