Sublinks Aims to Be a Drop-In Replacement for Lemmy

Too bad it's java

I have a hard time believing that rewriting the backend from scratch would be faster than getting PRs approved on the main project.

Forks like this with one guy who "knows best" usually die a slow quiet death as they get left behind by the main project.

Why Java though ? Like really ? It's... Better than any other compiled language ?

What missing features are so important that you decide to recreate the entire backend of Lemmy because you think the devs aren't fast enough?

Permanently Deleted

Competition is good. We need to take the web back

Java backend? What year is it?

an alternative Java-based backend

kill it with fire

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.

Permanently Deleted

a missed opportunity to name it Jemmy

I'm just here for the joke

EDIT: sentence structure

I didn't know Lemmy was written in Rust.

Based on all the other threads and cross posts it just seems like this software is being created because Jason Grim doesn't like the lemmy devs or their politics. I guess that's as good of a reason to fork as any. I'm happy with the way lemmy is and how its being created so I have been doing monthly donations to them for its development.

I like this, I will contribute to this, I think a lot of Java haters in this thread fail to realize just how massive Java is compared to everything else.

Rust might be the latest, hottest, bestest Java killer out there and it might be a completely superior language to Java, doesn't matter, it's dwarfed in terms of how many people actually use it for real projects, projects that should run for years and years. Even if Rust is the true Java killer, it's gonna take a good few more years for it to kill java, measured in decades, there is just way too many projects and critical stuff out there that is running on Java, that means lots of jobs out there for java, still and still more.

This means there are a lot of senior Java programmers out there with lots of years of experience to contribute to this project.

Plus Lemmy itself having alternatives and choices is just a good thing.

I've been hearing a lot of good things for a while. Lookin forward to it.

Forget the backend! I just want the frontend not to crap itself whenever it can't fetch the site icon!

I guess my username won't make sense anymore. But it sounds so good that it doesn't need to make sense.

So while there's plenty of talk in here (even from the core lemmy devs) about how much it makes sense and how much value there is in starting a new project with a different tech stack that includes Java, compared to simply contributing back to the current project that has momentum ... and while that's an interesting and important conversation ...

Realistically, developers will make what they want to with what they want to (to a fault IMO, especially within the broader mission of the fediverse, but that's besides the point). This project will happen, people will contribute and it may succeed.

So, to focus on the positives and what can be made good about this ...

It's great that there's some sort of settling on a standard here and trying to be a "drop in replacement". Continued commitments to consistency and interoperability would be awesome. While collaboration may be naturally limited, there'd still definitely be scope for it ...

• ideas and designs, obviously
• Database management and optimisation, which is likely a big one.
  • On that ... AFAICT, SL is using MySQL? Can't help but wonder (without knowing the technical justifications here) whether it would make much more sense to stick with the same DB unless there's a good reason for divergence.
• Front ends and the API, another big one but one where the two projects could conceivably work together.

I'm likely being very naive here, but I can see both projects coming under a single umbrella or compact which provide different backends and maybe DB setups or schemas but otherwise share a good amount in design and mission.

However unlikely that is ... trying not to fragment the fediverse too much would be awesome and its pleasant to see some dedication here to that end.

I can't find the fucking porn on Lemmy, so maybe this is a good thing.

Not sure whether this implementation will be lighter on resources than what Lemmy currently uses. Given the overhead of the JVM though, it's unlikely it will be supported by, say, a single Raspberry Pi

🤮