Is Lemmy's code base "good"?
Is Lemmy's code base "good"?
I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
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Someone mentioned they had started out using websockets instead of http. I guess they’ve since migrated, but that design choice makes me wonder about the qualifications of the devs to make that kind of choice.
Why's that?
Web sockets are meant for applications where it's important that you receive updates fast in a push fashion. E.g. collaborative editors like Google docs or a chat application. To scroll Lemmy or open a specific Lemmy post you don't need that at all. You can just fetch the data once and have users refresh manually if for example they want to fetch the latest comments on a post. Using websockets for that type of application just puts unnecessary strain on the server.
They also originally thought they’d have it update in real time which was a bit of a mistake. When you’re running a small test instance it’s kinda neat if comments and posts pop up as they’re made, but the reality of that is a scroll jacking nightmare.
Maybe they wanted a different type of user experience. But yeha, maybe that's something Reddit could pull off because of their infrastructure... And they don't even do it because there's not much user value to it.
Although reddit does use some websockets so you can see how many users are also seeing the post at the same time.
But not websockets for EVERYTHING.