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.
Meh. Java feels like a downgrade.
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?
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
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
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
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”?
I disagree - Java seems like the ideal choice for this. I might be in the minority in that view, though. Java seems to get a lot of hate.
Well, lots of people don’t like it. Actually according to StackOverflow’s 2022 survey, more people who have used Java don’t want to keep using it than those who do want to keep using it (54% vs 46% roughly). So yea, you are in the minority in that way.
Meanwhile Rust is well-liked by most people who use it (roughly 87%).
Lots of people are taught a decades old version of Java as their only experience with the language in college.
That could be part of the explanation, but I don’t think it upweighs the ~40% difference between Java love and Rust love. That is quite a large gap.
People who seek out rust are likely people who want to use rust. Java is still a huge player in enterprise dev, where a significant portion of active developers are. So not everyone using Java wants to use Java, but nearly everyone using rust wants to use rust.