Lemmy developers are spamming with comments and merge requests on github, but the platform hasnt seen any major feature introduction for the last 3 years. Any thoughts?
Posted by Normal-Walk3253@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 50 comments
I know only 2-3 people work on this but there are solo projects that are moving faster than this.
Major meaning something that will make average new user coming to Lemmy less confused, cause new users are confused as hell. And it doiesn't change.
LibertyLizard@reddit
Dessalines spends all his time removing factual information about his favorite dictatorships to his instance so it’s no surprise little gets done.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
Oh yes, I forgot. Better yet. Don't know if you know that, but he has YouTube channel where he literally reads books aloud. Regularly. https://www.youtube.com/@dessalines6388/videos
Nuts
Asyncrosaurus@reddit
It's written in Rust, which is predominantly a systems programming language. Writing a web service in Rust is a red flag they're not a great software engineer.
busymom0@reddit
That's not true. Rust is used more and more nowadays for backends as it's very performative.
645ad897f808337c9eb7@reddit
Not really? Its very popular for that.
645ad897f808337c9eb7@reddit
Honestly the codebase is high quality.
Starting_______now@reddit
Thank you, I quite enjoyed Gabriel Rockhill The US did not defeat fascism in WWII, it discreetly internationalized it. Very informative -- the stuff on US collaboration with Klaus Barbie alone was worth the video length.
Bubbly_Romeo@reddit
I wish I had an award to give to this post!
privinci@reddit
tankie logic
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
This is a legitimate reason why many people refuse to donate to the project.
He seems less interested in building out the platform than he is in running lemmy.ml. You can see the history of all the moderation work he does, compared to the average PR on Git.
gazpitchy@reddit
The thing is, anyone can fork it and make their own version if they really want to. And it is non-profit and totally up to the developers how much time they spend on it.
Just the nature of open source stuff really.
r721@reddit
NLnet funds Lemmy devs though, it's hard to compete with that:
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-06-17_-_Update_from_Lemmy_after_the_Reddit_blackout (2023)
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-09-11_-_New_NLnet_funding_for_Lemmy (2024)
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
Sunaurus is long gone, and so is lemm.ee, which is a damn shame, because it was the only major one that understood what an instance was supposed to be.
Delicious_Ease2595@reddit
Where did he go
LibertyLizard@reddit
Quit due to toxicity according to the statement he put out. A shame.
Delicious_Ease2595@reddit
Did he move to another alternative
Bubbly_Romeo@reddit
As far as we know, no.
gazpitchy@reddit
50k is a nice amount for a side project, but it's not even one year of a developers wage. So it won't make anyone work on it full time for long, unless they are driven by passion for the projects.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
The question is how difficult it is to fork it and speed it up. Because I don't know about any serious forks that want to speed up the development. Maybe because the code is just bad? And maybe that's why devs are moveing so slowly as well?
If it would be written in more popular language I guess more people would pick it up.
Delicious_Ease2595@reddit
Have you checked PieFed
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
That has the opposite issue. The dev is entirely too focused on reinventing the wheel, pushing rapid features and changes without stopping for a moment to question the effects it will have on the larger ecosystem.
PuddingFeeling907@reddit
This user is totally against the fediverse. They will come up with any poor excuse to dismiss it. Private voting has issues with manipulation.
Skavau@reddit
What features are you referring to?
It was broadly unpopular, that's why.
I don't know what you mean by "overly controlling admins".
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
I feel like this is also lemmy issue. The focus is not there where it should be.
Delicious_Ease2595@reddit
Rust is solid and a good choice, what's stopping users building it with their favorite language?. There have been so many alternatives showcased in this sub to choose.
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
Because it would require someone who knows Rust and has ample free time.
But even the few of those who exist on Lemmy.arent willing to help because those devs are difficult to work with, and resistant to others implementing changes. Not to mention their polical leanings, and the activity they allow on their primary Lemmy instance put off many people from wanting to help in the first place.
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
They'd have to know Rust to fork.
Good luck finding a bunch of Rust devs willing to take this burden on for free.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
What a great decision it was to write this in rust. Futureproof.
...Or rather developmentproof.
Die4Ever@reddit
They've been working on v1.0 for a while and haven't released it yet because it has API changes that the apps will need to support, but there's lots of improvements being saved up in there. I believe it will be including multi-communities, post tags, and a redesigned search page
Also I think there have been major features added in the past 2 years. Scaled sort, user export/import, instance blocking, image log moderation, local-only communities, image proxying settings, parallel federation sending, search box in community sidebar
If you want to keep up with this stuff, subscribe to
!announcements@lemmy.mlRickyFalanga@reddit
don’t forget post flairs! (one of the features i miss from reddit)
Skavau@reddit
note OP, /u/Normal-Walk3253 - I can't reply because /u/HotTakes4HotCakes has blocked me but:
As far as I know, is a complete lie. I have no idea what he's referring to here.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
Yeah, I know, plenty of folks attacking fediverse here. Not sure why, maybe these are bots.
OBVIOUSLY admins can do whatever they want, they can fork the most malicious version of lemmy, mastodon or whatever and users won't even notice.
Societies but also internet are built around trust.
aaron_tjt@reddit
They are communists, of course no work gets done
Skavau@reddit
Piefed is obviously where to look now if you're interested in rapid development. It's that simple. I've stopped caring about what Lemmy specifically does now.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
Looks similar. Reddit clone like Lemmy? How is it's fediverse integration? Damn I might actaully switch to that if the development is faster and functionally its similar.
Die4Ever@reddit
PieFed is great, and it's written in Python, and they're already getting a plugin system so it should be easier for devs to contribute
also Rimu is always receptive to feedback, and features are being added all the time
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
Dang, I'm too excited rn. Gonna shit my pants.
Fuckin FINALLY
Was waiting for this shit 1,5 years. Having 3 commies developing fediverse version of reddit was a bit annoying.
Got plenty of questions but honestly i'm freaking installing this tomorrow and will just see how it goes. Going to start fresh instance , will try to hook up Photon UI as a second UI. Im just thinking how will I migrate but thankfully there are only 2 active users on my lemmy server, and hopefullly they won't mind getting their old links removed.
rimu@reddit
Another UI that I quite like is Blorp. You can try it at https://blorpblorp.xyz/instance?q=piefed.social or self-host it.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
WOW, that's awesome. Better than Photon. TBH Photon dev is focused on the wrong things as well. I talked to him on matrix and that's the vibe I'm getting. He's would spend more time trying to optimizing loading time from 0.4 s to 0.3 sec instead of fixing obvious easy to do UX issue. It's like he doesn't feel the real user's perspective and he doesn't get a enough feedback to be aware of that.
rimu@reddit
If you have any trouble, pop on over to chat.piefed.social and we'll sort you out.
Die4Ever@reddit
your users can export their profile out of Lemmy and import the file into PieFed, that way it remembers what communities they're subscribed to and their profile description
communities can somewhat be transfered to PieFed but it's only a partial transfer, and I think it would require both servers being online at the same time so you would need a new hostname
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
THANK YOU!
HotTakes4HotCakes@reddit
Terrible. its fundamentally unlike what Reddit was and what Lemmy was supposed to be.
Admins can completely manipulate how things are federated, meaning you can no longer trust the actual vote counts and post viability.
Skavau@reddit
It integrates with the fediverse the same way any Lemmy instance would. And it has fast development, and the dev isn't a tankie.
Normal-Walk3253@reddit (OP)
Ok you got me excited big time right now. Want to know more. I registered. So it looks like it flawlessly suuports all the existing lemmy communities thats nice. SO much better communities search UX. So it's a solo developer, do we know more about this rimu guy? What are his plans for this? Are there any better UIs than this bootstrap generic on pifed.social? Besides having python and not having commies working on it, in what ways is it better in your opinion?
Die4Ever@reddit
yea there's a bunch of apps, and Photon is just a different web frontend not an app
https://piefed.social/post/1258559
Skavau@reddit
Piefed has flairs, hashtag, events, scheduled posts, feeds (you can make your own feeds and add communities to it), wiki pages for communities and a much faster development cycle. Rimu is based from New Zealand and has general socially liberal-moderate politics (I haven't asked him in detail ofc)
PuddingFeeling907@reddit
Piefed is def the future!
Mothman394@reddit
Genuine question: are new features actually needed? Bad innovation is worse than no innovation at all — if it isn't broken, don't fix it. Reddit has innovated a ton in the last decade but most of that "innovation" has been so bad that I opt out of it as much as I can. (still on old.reddit so I don't have to bother with bloat and spam). I only tried Lemmy out because Reddit was pretending to kill off 3rd party apps and no way in hell was I going to use the official reddit app with its vastly inferior UI and unblockable ads.
Skavau@reddit
Yeah, Lemmy could do with a lot of QoL fixes. Piefed has some things it doesn't have.