Hello world!
We would like to start by saying thank you ❤, no really 🙏 THANK YOU to ALL the moderators out there!
Without you folks, we would have no one to help keep our community safe and help build the communities both here on Lemmy.World and on other fine instances. To this end, we want to make sure your voices are heard 📣 loud and clear📣.
So, in the spirit of transparency, we would like everyone to know that we are looking to help out the folks working on Sublinks. Over the last several months we have grown to be more than just Lemmy.World. We've added platforms such as Pixelfed and Sharkey to help offer our users more diverse options for expressing themselves online. We still are very committed to Mastodon as well.
We DO NOT plan on moving away from Lemmy as a software platform at this time. Any changes in our core services would need to be discussed extensively internally AND externally with our community members. We firmly believe in the growth of the Fediverse and without the users, there would only be software, and that's no fun!
Sooo...
The Sublinks team has written up a little survey, which we feel is both thorough and inclusive. It covers a wide range of topics, such as user privacy, and community engagement, along with trying to gauge things that are difficult when moderating.
Also please be aware the information collected by this survey is completely anonymous. As many of us in the social sciences background know, if you want the REAL feelings of individuals, they need to feel safe to express themselves.
Please feel free to comment in this thread, we will do our best to respond to any genuine questions.
We look forward to hearing from each and every one of you!
=Sincerely,
Fedihosting Foundation
PS ... also if this sounds like a corporate press release to you folks, we still punk 🤘😜🤘
Well that is concerning.
Personally, I don't give a shit about all this weird BS and infighting. I moved to Lemmy simply because my Reddit client was killed. I could give less of a shit about FOSS and finding 10,000 different platforms that everyone and their mother is now creating. I hope that lemmy.world doesn't end up going away. All I want is a community to interact with, not a constantly fracturing platform with weird political infighting.
This is part of why some people (myself included) are skeptical about Sublinks - I'd rather see us all gather around Lemmy, which already exists and is open source, rather than duplicate effort across different implementations.
However realistically speaking, over time more implementations will probably appear, because people won't agree on what to build or how to build it.
In some ways that is good as well - it gives choice for users about what software to use, just as users can choose their instance and apps and such. But I think it's a little early to start something new while Lemmy is still so new.
Why? Am I not up to speed with something?
Is it?
I was under the impression that Sublinks was basically a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, just with better mod tools. If Lemmy.world switched to it, would normal users (not mods) even notice or care?
I think Sublinks would like to ultimately hijack Lemmy’s user base and take the project in a different direction. They’ll maintain a Lemmy-compatible API until they have a critical mass of instances/users using it and then do as they please. Based on what I’ve read, Sublinks people don’t like the Lemmy developers or at least the tech choices and way the project is managed.
I guess I can understand that, but I’m skeptical of their intentions too. And, as a Java engineer myself, I find it pretty annoying that they’re pushing a Java backend over the existing Rust one. Seems like a step backwards.
From what I can tell, it's more worrying that .world is trying to essentially build up a new site like Mbin, from the ground up, in Java, rather than just working to make Lemmy better. It appears to be a severely underestimated workload for no benefit whatsoever, other than "better" mod tools, which could be folded into Lemmy either way.
Yeah, I agree reimplementing the protocol in Java instead of Rust seems like a downgrade. I think part of the reason for Sublinks is creative differences with @Dessalines, but even if the problem is getting upstream acceptance for patches it seems more efficient to fork the existing code than to start from scratch.
But it's their time to waste, so whatever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We have never rejected any patches from lemmy.world admins or from sublinks developers.
I don't know. I'm not beholden to a single platform. I use Lemmy with like three different clients too (Tesseract is by far my favourite for Desktop) so the "Lemmy" I care about is essentially just an API. The link above says
The way I read that is "you can use the existing Lemmy clients to connect to a Subkey instance." Further it says
Meaning we'll likely be able to at least view Sublinks content via lemmy, if not interact with it like any other Lemmy community/post. In that case, who cares if it's not Lemmy? To the end-user it might as well be.
My main concern is that a lot of jumping around would mean we'd lose users each jump. Eventually we'd just have empty halls with no content. Knowing that Subkey is out there as an alternative in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug, or something else happens with it, is heartening.
I love tesseract! Thanks so much for mentioning it. This makes .ml more like Alexandrite.
Based on some comments here I think I will likely leave .world when they stop or try and change to sublink. It looks like that is the imminent goal. Tesseract makes it much easier to leave. Thanks again!
Yeah, Tesseract is fantastic. Though I'm sure you could use Alexandrite with .ml as well, provided the client and API versions are compatible. Tesseract has some additional discovery features and such too, I believe.
For all we know though, one might even be able to migrate from Lemmy to Sublink. Like I said, they could swap over from Lemmy and we might not even notice it. I don't really see the problem.
They literally can't. It's open source and publicly licensed. If they abandon the project (or even if we don't like their direction), it can be forked (copied) and maintained by someone else.
Yes but that requires someone else to do the work. If Sublinks takes off instead, why stick with Lemmy?
Anyway it’s all conjecture right now. We have lemmy, things are working just fine.
To be fair, they can’t see the future. People can change their minds. Better to write something like this than say “we will definitely always support Lemmy” and then in 5 years say “lol that was a lie”.
If the Lemmy admins can't make a living from it, that's the Lemmy community's fault.
Clock is ticking
Ticking for what exactly?