this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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FediLore + Fedidrama
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Chronicle the life and tale of the fediverse (+ matrix)
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Forking solves the problem of inactive maintainers, or the problem of maintainers who don't review and/or accept PRs, but Lemmy really doesn't have either of these problems at the moment.
With all forks of maintained projects it starts with saying several times "No, but seriously, you need to do something about this"
Forks are the enemy of open source. The goal is merges. When someone forks a project without plans to merge back, it's a sign that the project has failed them in some way
It's a shame it's not written in a PHP framework or something that's more common. Plenty of devs have been helping about contributing to kbin development, it sounds like it's a lack of manpower on Lemmy's end that's contributing to this
Yeah, Rust was a good technical choice but in practice it really narrows down the pool of potential volunteers
It was an incredibly poor technical choice.
Programming goes through fads where people will claim X can solve every problem. Eventually people realise a languages strengths/weaknesses and communities form.
Rust is the current fad language, its developed a strong following in C/C++ communities but they have nothing to do with middleware (the role Lemmy is using Rust).
It means lemmy devs will have to build everything themselves (instead of focussing on lemmy) and the pool of contributor's will remain small.
Rust is a great and fabulous language, but flexible it is not. If I were starting a Lemmy or Kbin type project from scratch I'd likely start with Python, TypeScript, Lua, or Go depending on what specifically I was worried about bogging me down in the future. And then later on if there were really heavy procedures or db calls that couldn't be simplified anyway else, do those in rust. I think Rust has some very interesting features for micro service development, but for a monolith like Lemmy, it's surely a nightmare
See my goto is Java/Spring Boot or Typescript/TSOA.
I avoid Python because Setuptools/Twine/FastAPI/\ docs conflict and seems to change so creating a good practice project layout is a huge time sink and none of the Python devs I meet seem to understand it.
I am doing GoLang atm, its ok but dev adoption is low where I am and no one has shown me a killer library/framework and being controlled by Google I am waiting for them to get bored and kill it.
Spring Boot takes longer to get going than TSOA/Express but hibernate makes SQL interactions trivial. I love typescript but types makes complex NoSQL queries far more convoluted than Java equivalents (its because Types can't inherit and client libraries don't use interfaces). So TSOA rocks in cases of speed or simplicity.
It is, there are currently discussions of attempting to do so but the issue lies that Rust is not only a really new programming language that really never was well suited for an application like this, forking means nothing if no one is going to contribute to the fork in the first place. I know that pawb.social is working on a fork iirc