We would like to start by saying thank you β€, no really π 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 π£ loud and clearπ£.
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.
To be fair, they canβt see the future. People can change their minds. Better to write something like this than say βwe will definitely always support Lemmyβ and then in 5 years say βlol that was a lieβ.
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
It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users.
The way I read that is "you can use the existing Lemmy clients to connect to a Subkey instance." Further it says
Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms.
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.
in case the developers of Lemmy decide to pull the plug
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 (edit: and it isn't) it seems more efficient to fork the existing code than to start from scratch.
But it's their time to waste, so whatever. Β―β \β _β (β γβ )β _β /β Β―
I think Sublinks would like to ultimately hijack Lemmyβs user base and take the project in a different direction. Theyβll 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 Iβve read, Sublinks people donβt like the Lemmy developers or at least the tech choices and way the project is managed.
I guess I can understand that, but Iβm skeptical of their intentions too. And, as a Java engineer myself, I find it pretty annoying that theyβre pushing a Java backend over the existing Rust one. Seems like a step backwards.
Interesting question then: what urgia is it that Lemmy expresses that might better be addressed through other means?
That is to say, if not Lemmy, then what? What other platform could or would occupy its space? What other forum-like platform exists that interfaces wrh ActivityPub?