Sublinks
github.com
Link Aggregation Social Network in the Fediverse. Sublinks has 15 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

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

GitHub stars GitHub tag (latest SemVer) gradle workflow GitHub issues License

Sublinks

A decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving social network.

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, and Community.
  • 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.

  • Mwalimu@baraza.africaEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Something feels off with this post. It comes off as “we are better than Lemmy” as if there is any competition and awards to be won. To say Lemmy’s development is “toxic” and this project is “more inclusive and less toxic” without backing it up with evidence is unfair.

      • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        I see that comment but somehow cant fetch it from lemmy.ml. Would you mind asking what exactly they mean by “toxic development community”? Its honestly the first time I heard something like this about Lemmy.

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Would you mind asking what exactly they mean by “toxic development community”? Its honestly the first time I heard something like this about Lemmy.

          Okay so I wasn’t sure before but I think this issue might be a good example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4433

          Yours and dessalines comments all come across as defensive or dismissive. The comments make it sound like you are more interested in dismissing the bug than actually acknowledging it.

          This is definitely not a way to approach a bug report. You need to be much more understanding of bug reports (especially ones as serious as this one) and display a willingness to fix things, and follow through with it.

          I don’t think Lemmy will work out in the long term if this kind of attitude continues.

        • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          what exactly they mean by “toxic development community”?

          I’m not sure exactly what they mean by it either, but I do think Lemmy could do more to be welcoming to more outside contributors. It would probably also be a better use of your time - to scale Lemmy development, it would be better to spend time recruiting and training contributors rather than just spend all your own time coding. You (the main two devs) know the code better than anyone else. It would be great use of your time to spread that knowledge to more contributors.

          Sublinks for instance also uses the GitHub projects as a kind of publicly viewable backlog of issues and a roadmap. I think especially a roadmap is something a lot of users would like for Lemmy as well. It would be good use of your time to produce a roadmap of some kind. Doesn’t have to be on GitHub obviously, but just any kind of roadmap.

          • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            Sure being more welcoming to outside contributors sounds good. Do you have any concrete suggestions how to recruit and train them? We do have some community contributors, but they seem very limited by the amount of time they have for Lemmy after their fulltime job.

            Once the new round of NLnet funding is finalized we will publish those milestones. However Im not sure if a backlog like the one you linked is really helpful, it would take a significant amount of time to manage for little benefit. After all every open issue on the Lemmy Github is up for grabs for anyone to implement it.

    • daddyjones@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      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.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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%).

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            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.

            • BURN@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              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.

      • AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        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

        • Rooki@lemmy.worldMEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          For me i dont see any gains in popularity. Java IS popular right now, not in 10 years. Java is mature enough.

          • Nate Cox@programming.devEnglish
            0·
            8 months ago

            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.

              • Nate Cox@programming.devEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                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.

                • Rooki@lemmy.worldMEnglish
                  0·
                  8 months ago

                  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”.

                • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
                  0·
                  8 months ago

                  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

            • Blaze@reddthat.comEnglish
              0·
              8 months ago

              Then how do you explain there is no major contributor to Lemmy besides the two main devs?

              • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                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.

              • Nate Cox@programming.devEnglish
                0·
                8 months ago

                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.

  • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    I actually talked with Jason (one of the Sublinks maintainers) a while ago, asking about the features he was missing from Lemmy. Turns out it was just one or two minor API changes that could be easily implemented, but he never even bothered to open an issue about it. I think they just have fun reimplementing Lemmy, but it would take at least multiple years to catch up with the current features of Lemmy. And by then Lemmy will of course have many more features and improvements. So I wouldnt expect that this ever becomes useful for production.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Despite disliking Java, I’m glad to see another implementation of the platform we’re all using, as it makes this part of the fediverse less dependent on any particular development team.

    Why in the world did you enclose the readme in a code fence, though? It would be so much better to let the markdown do its job. My eyes are burning.

    • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      I agree that its good for redundancy to have another development team for Lemmy. However they will be busy for the next few years redoing all the work we have already done for Lemmy. It would be much more efficient if they simply forked the existing Rust code and implemented their desired features on top. That would also make it easy to merge their changes back into Lemmy.