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.
In terms of maintainability and efficiency, it probably is.
In terms of number of potential contributors… well time will tell, but currently doesn’t seem any better.
Rust is rapidly gaining popularity and it’s popular with the type of people who would use Lemmy. There aren’t contributors because there aren’t many users.
Though like you said, time will tell
For me i dont see any gains in popularity. Java IS popular right now, not in 10 years. Java is mature enough.
It’s cool to like Java, I’m not hating on it, but it’s just silly to pretend that Rust isn’t popular today.
Rust is used in fewer corporate environments, no doubt there, the Java inertia is strong… but a glance at any moderately recent dev survey should indicate pretty clearly that Rust is on a lot of devs minds and is well received.
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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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
Popular? Objective C is still popular and more demanded than Rust.
Yep. The job market isn’t as strong for rust, which is what that chart is showing you. Corporate acceptance != popularity.
Rust is #6 on the Stack Overflow developer survey in popularity. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023
Again, I don’t know why the community is insisting on making this a dick measuring contest for languages. People love rust. People love Java. I know people who still love Perl. I know one guy who really seems to look fondly on his Fortran days. they’re all fine.
Just be happy that someone is excited enough to write some code to make the fediverse a little more diverse and maybe cool.
Sounds like the most positive approach.
The thread from a month ago was really negative towards Java, it was surprisingly aggressive
I remember. It is a very annoying and negative trait that the dev community can’t seem to shake, the insistence on making hating certain tech (or even just like coding styles in general) part of their whole identity.
I remember thinking Clojure was stupid and people who used it were stupid because all of my peers told me so and made fun of the parenthesis relentlessly. Then I grew up a little, read a Clojure book, and fell in love with it. Plus learning to code in a brand new way made me a better dev overall.
Correct. But those accusations that java was a bad choice i just cant have it. This isnt “I love Rust” or “I love XYZ Programming language” it was “F*ck you for using java”.
Isn’t it more like the other way around? Lemmy was written in Rust, then this clone is in Java - isn’t that more like “damn you for using Rust”?
This thread chain started with:
Sublinks using Java is not about Rust hate. They just thought it was the better choice for them.
In terms of maintainability its an upgrade. Can you read the code from the current lemmy as a non rust coder? no. Now look into any file in sublinks can you read that? Probably yes.
Maintainability is gained too with the more possible contributors that have more knowledge about java and can improve more and more the code
No I can’t - I’m not a Java dev and I find Java to be insanely verbose honestly. I find Rust much more parseable.
But seriously, debating readability of languages is such a subjective thing. What is not subjective is Rust’s reliability and static analysis.
You don’t need any of that for a web server… There should be minimal state to synchronize between threads (the assignment of a request to a thread) all handled by your web framework. Asynchronous IO can be much more significant which you can do in both Rust and Java equally safely. I haven’t kept up but Java was working on a threading model that allows old school threads to act like fibers or real threads effectively allowing dumb parallelism to scale like crazy for blocking IO with minimal code changes as well.
Java should be just as good if not better (by the nature of being a VM that doesn’t have unsafe blocks) when it comes to the memory safety side of things. Java also optimizes quite well for long running applications like web servers.
It’s really not a bad language and it continues to get better.
I disagree - any software is better with more reliability. Static analysis becomes more and more important as the code base grows.
(Safe) Rust and Java are both memory safe. I don’t think any is better than the other in this aspect. Many projects use
#[forbid(unsafe)]to make sure they only use safe Rust. Unsafe Rust is not necessary in 99.9% of cases, certainly never for a web server like Lemmy.It’s subjective obviously. I don’t like it personally, some people do. To be fair I think there are worse languages out there - Python for instance. At least Java has static typing, which is nice. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens with the different fediverse forum implementations.
You’re saying static analysis and reliability like they’re things Rust objectively has that Java doesn’t.
The only things Rust has at a fundamental level are a borrow checker and value types.
Value types can be nice for performance in certain situations (which aren’t nearly as important for a web server as fibers/coroutines). The borrow checker is nice for threading (which isn’t an issue in a restful web server design as previously stated). That’s about it.
It’s not possible to write (memory) unsafe Java code. All Java code is memory safe. Most rust code is memory safe.
Of course that’s not entirely true because of the possibility for bugs in the Rust compiler or the JVM.
Java and Rust both can call out to C libraries as well which of course… You get what you get.
Python can have static typing these days as well. It’s just optional and controlled by the project.