Today I learned about Sublinks (here), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly.
The project is written in Java, which may introduce some overhead but is chosen for its maintainability and familiarity among a wider pool of developers. The Sublinks team prioritizes a more inclusive and less toxic development environment, and the project has already attracted more developers than Lemmy.
While Sublinks is starting with 1:1 compatibility, future plans include implementing additional features that the Lemmy developers have not pursued. This could lead to a divergence in functionality between the two platforms as Sublinks evolves beyond its initial compatibility phase.
README
Sublinks
A decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving social network.
- Join Sublinks
- Demo Sublinks
- Documentation
- Matrix Chat
- Report Bug
- Request Feature
- Releases
- Code of Conduct
- Contributing
- Style Guide
About
Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform, reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin. It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users. Unique to Sublinks are its enhanced moderation tools, tailored to provide a safe and manageable online community space. Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms. Sublinks is not just a platform; it’s a community-centric ecosystem, prioritizing user experience, content authenticity, and networked social interaction.
Features
- Open source, MIT License.
- Self hostable, easy to deploy.
- Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
- Only a minimum of a username and password is required to sign up!
- User avatar support.
- Live-updating Comment threads.
- Full vote scores
(+/-)like old Reddit. - Themes, including light, dark, and solarized.
- Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing
: - User tagging using
, Community tagging using!. - Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
- A post can consist of a title and any combination of self text, a URL, or nothing else.
- Notifications, on comment replies and when you’re tagged.
- Notifications can be sent via email.
- Private messaging support.
- i18n / internationalization support.
- RSS / Atom feeds for
All,Subscribed,Inbox,User, andCommunity.
- Cross-posting support.
- A similar post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities.
- Moderation abilities.
- Public Moderation Logs.
- Can sticky posts to the top of communities.
- Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.
- Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
- Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
- Can transfer site and communities to others.
- Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments.
- NSFW post / community support.
- High performance.
Contact
Contributing
Support / Donate
Sublinks is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.
Then how do you explain there is no major contributor to Lemmy besides the two main devs?
Well, for one thing federated message boards are incredibly niche to start with, and the pool of people willing to work on one for free in their spare time is bound to be tiny aside from language concerns. I know we all want the fediverse to be the hot thing that everyone uses, but that ain’t reality.
I’m not exactly seeing a massive contributor pool for sublinks here either.
On this board you already see 5-6 different contributors for the 0.1 version, which is at least twice the number of Lemmy contributors:
https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6
Anyway, let’s see how it evolves, but it seems promising
… lemmy has like 100 contributors listed on GitHub. Just looking at the contributors list for the sublinks api vs the Lemmy main project it seems like Lemmy has far, far more contributions.
I think competition is a good thing, I hope sublinks gets like all the users and contributors and a dozen more projects spin up in all the languages of the rainbow—especially given they should all be contributing to one big pool of shared content— but it’s worth at least staying grounded in reality when making claims about the projects.
It’s super, super silly to be reactively defensive of one project or the other here. It really feels like what some people actually want is yet another language pissing contest more than anything else. All the languages are fine.
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Didn’t realize I didn’t write both of those, eh?
I realized if afterwards, which is why I deleted my comment. Didn’t the deletion federate? Sometimes it does not.
Eh, maybe my client just didn’t refresh it; I saw it from my inbox.
If you compare the contributors on the lemmy backend and the sublinks backend there is really not much of a difference.
Any open source project rides on a very small sample of individual contributors.
At the scale of having a handful of contributors, it’s more likely random variance than due to the language you’ve chosen. The sample size is simply too small.
I can speak for myself - I know Rust very well but I simply don’t have the time to contribute to Lemmy’s code (I’m also spending some time already being an admin for Feddit.dk and I feel that is all I can muster).
Getting contributors to open source projects is never easy, regardless of programming language.
But I mean… there is no problem with competition right. Maybe it’ll turn out that sublinks will have more development with more contributors. But it has yet to be shown, there are also only 1 or 2 developers working on sublinks at the moment, if you check the github contributor stats.
Having a look at the current project board, seems like they are progressing quite fast: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6
We’ll see how it evolves, but compared to Lemmy development, this seems at least more structured and more inviting for people to take a ticket and start contributing
It could be - time will tell. But that has nothing to do with Rust vs Java.
Personally, I feel that if your goal was to make a clone of Lemmy with better structured tickets and a roadmap and all that… why don’t you just talk to the Lemmy devs about organizing their issues, creating a road map and contributing as a project manager? That is work and a skill that is often sorely lacking in open source development. That seems much easier and more iterative than trying to rewrite the whole thing in a different application.
Open source needs some project managers to contribute their skills, imo. Contributing to open source made me finally understand how necessary PMs actually are. When left to our own devices, devs are… chaotic.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
That is work and a skill that is often sorely lacking in open source development
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Because people only contribute to projects they care about, can get clout from, or use and want to fix something that’s bugging them. Lemmy is just too niche right now.
If in five years there’s still just the two devs then you may gloat and tell me I was wrong and I will accept the shame