After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon's that people mentioned Lemmy doesn't yet have. Not only i didn't find it, i also saw that there's about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it's maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it'd grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don't have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected.
I'm a sysadmin, haven't coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven't ever touched Rust, so can't help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy.
The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that's PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
No, it wouldn't be. The first step is honestly to get it running locally, then make sure debugging and breakpoints work, and then pick a feature you want to add or improve, use the debugger to see what code currently executes, and then hook your feature into it. Make sure to familiarize yourself with Rust syntax if you're not already, but I think you could do it.
Basically like being at work lol. Would need to learn Rust first, though. I heard it's complicated, but not sure what that means.
Kind of in the same boat as you. Self taught when it comes to coding and I've dabbled in Rust a little. It's way over my head, or was last time I messed with it. Strongest with C# (thanks Unity) for reference. Not saying not to do it but just giving a heads up from someone you might relate to.