cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/570507
After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
I’m a Rust developer but most of the issues are on the frontend UI IMO.
- Constantly refreshing post feeds on the homepage
- Posts changing while you’re commenting
- Momentarily showing you logged in as someone else
- Long delays in comments and votes being applied - sometimes forcing you to refresh the page with no confirmation
- Wasted side space on the built-in themes on desktop
I wish there were a simple UI like Hacker News - https://github.com/IronOxidizer/lemmy-lite was one attempt at that but it isn’t maintained or finished.
I don’t think the instance-level “silencing” from Mastodon is a good idea tbh. It leads to more free-loading of content hosting and less of a federation.
Im not a rust dev (yet, would like to in the future) so I just saw the original post show up on my feed and though it might be a good idea to crosspost it here where the rust devs actually are. If I knew and had experience with rust I would for sure work on contributing, but alas I dont. :(
Also, yes I agree a lot of the issues are in the UI
I think InfernoJS, Typescript, Bootstrapv4 and CSS experience would be more useful right now, at least to improve the official UI.
There’s definitely tickets that are backend. Stuff about connecting similar communities, a different way to load new instances so you don’t have to wait a few minutes with no indication anything is happening (I don’t know if there’s a ticket for that one, but there should be).
Edit: The ability for a user to move to another instance, automatic rendering of c/community@whatever as a link.
I’ve been working on learning Rust and getting familiar with Lemmy code in my spare time. I would guess there are other devs in the same position that would like to contribute, but it takes time to get up to speed. There will probably be many new contributors in the near future.
