jgrim of Sublinks

Yeah, we also call them communities

It’s a reputable web development language and Spring Framework is very robust. I knew it would make development very quick and easy. Also, everyone learns Java just a little so I feel like it’s easy for the average person to contribute. Rust is certainly fun but Java is tried and true. The organization of the Lemmy project’s code vs Sublinks is night and day. It’s so easy to extend and grow Sublinks.

Great summary!

Easier but not what I thought was needed. We need more choice!

That’s not true, I wrote a blog post about it: https://jasongr.im/blog/why-i-started-sublinks/

I tried that the but API lacked a lot of features that they were too busy to add, like proper pagination to find the latest changes, etc. I started a project like that first called socialcare.cloud but have since shut it down in favor of Sublinks.

Java isn’t my preferred language. I did learn Rust to try to contribute but found the code base in less than ideal state and the process of contributing to risky. They don’t always accept all PRs. I also have low faith in the success of Lemmy due to it’s poor QA process and it’s major lack of features.

I believe Java is the best option for this type of application, I almost did it in PHP. My goal was to attract as many people as possible to want to contribute. It’s worked, I have a ton of people contributing in some way, Sublinks roadmap is clear and organized, and we have a super-motivated and driven team.

We won’t fail.

Hey, I’m the founder of Sublinks. It’s a huge collaboration of several major Lemmy instances like lemmy world, beehaw, discuss.online, programming.dev, and quite a few others that wish not to be named until the release.

Some admins are directly working on the project while others are providing other types of support. @Ategon@programming.dev is certainly a major contributor and has helped develop the new front end in many major ways. You can follow some progress updates here: !sublinks@discuss.online

We have several different teams of developers:

1. API / Java
2. Front-end / JS/CSS/HTML
3. Federation / GoLang
4. Libraries / JS
5. Requirements gathering and organization
6. Design & Graphics - UI/UX
7. Lemmy to Sublinks migration tools

There is an active community on Matrix where all of us chat: https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online if anyone is interested in joining. We also have weekly touch bases to discuss progress and next steps. There are tons of people contributing.

We are currently taking donations only through Github: https://github.com/sponsors/sublinks if you’re truly interested. We’re all working on this part-time in our free time and making fantastic progress.

Let me know if you have any questions!

What is an example of a good reason to start a new project?

That’s an over simplified version. For the record, I couldn’t downgrade without data loss.

Thanks a lot!

People were reaching out to me to try to understand these details so I just made a blog post to just point people to.

Thanks, me too!

Yes, almost all team members are contributing code, designs, feature requests, etc. I called out @Rooki@lemmy.world specifically because he’s been a major contributor. One of the admins is actively recruiting people to help contribute to Sublinks, this is how we got so much support so quickly. It’s a very close collaboration. I owe a lot of thanks to the Lemmy.World team.

We have 13 contributors with Sublinks so far. I expect more will come after the announcement.

I’ll get it on there on the sidebar. Thanks a lot for the feedback. The demo site has been up for so long that I didn’t think of it when I announced it.

Yes, there is going to be a tool that exports from Lemmy via a direct database connection and adds to Sublinks via the API. Sublinks is heavily event driven by design. We’ll want some events to trigger during import.

It’s basically a fork of Lemmy. But rather than forking, we’re rewriting the entire tech stack to something easier to support and enhance. You can see the full roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1

1. I referenced the Rust code to determine what was sent and received. We’re implementing better code logic; we’re not just copying their API. We want to be compatible to attract users and support all the hard work used to create Lemmy phone apps.
2. Java is for the core Sublinks API/core. Golang is being used for the federation service that operates independently. Once it’s done, it will be platform agnostic if someone else wants to use the federation service for their fediverse project. They communicate through a message bus.
3. Yes, we plan to do the new API correctly. We will support Lemmy’s API for as long as it is relevant, primarily for mobile apps.

Multiple domains aren’t possible yet, but that doesn’t mean we cannot add it later.

I’m unhappy with the Lemmy roadmap, development speed, and quality. I wanted to contribute but found it difficult to. I did the next best thing and created a somewhat drop-in replacement with a much larger community of developers who are willing to support it.

You can see the complete Sublinks roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1. The first release of parity (v0.10) will use the existing Lemmy front-end. All releases after that will no longer support the Lemmy UI because that’s when the enhanced features start to roll in. We don’t want to support or fork the current Lemmy UI.

Exactly, we already had 13 contributors working on it before it was announced.