I’m not much of a programmer and my free time is too limited to move quickly, but the functionality looks possible based on the published frontend API. Someone will almost certainly beat me to it, but I am hoping to write a browser extension that replaces the blue “You are not logged in…” boilerplate text about how to subscribe to a remote community with a subscribe button that does the dirty work in the background for you.
I don’t think Reddit will die and agree that the majority will return. I will browse my favored communities in both and favor participating here. That said, the Lemmy universe has been in rapid expansion for 2 weeks. It’s premature to judge it for the fragmentation of communities at this stage. I strongly suspect the ergonomics of finding and subscribing to a community you want will improv over the next six months.
Why is php a bad thing in this case? It seems like exactly the kind of application that php is well suited for. Plus there’s the maturity of php’s major frameworks. While I’m not saying Rust is necessarily bad for building web applications, it’s web frameworks must be less mature and battle tested. Plus, it seems like a lower bar to get community dev contributions for a php project than rust.
There certainly seem to be topics I track where forum activity outpaces Reddit. Haven’t explored Discord for the purpose. I would like to see communities emerge or move to something on the activitypub - lemmy devs made a forum frontend (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB). The potential seems to be there to provide a forum interface/experience that federates.
I like your ranking. I sit in a couple of xmpp muc for xmpp client projects, but there are virtually no public non-xmpp related xmpp rooms. But doesn’t really cost anything to start one I suppose.
Small servers also tend to disappear, though. As far as I know, federated content simply goes away when the server does.
I don’t use SimpleX, but it’s hard to argue against a well developed open source privacy focused messaging app. There are a million “privacy-focused” messengers out there with various flaws around security or sustainability. Matrix is great but the goals seem a little different. Plus, it wasn’t that long ago that Matrix was struggling to find funding.
What’s your xmpp server of choice?
I think that would be a great addition.
To be fair, most tech companies had layoffs in the last six months and it seems that most were bigger cuts. Also, my best guess is that Reddit has been unprofitable/burning cash from the beginning (~18 years) - that can’t and won’t last forever.
I’m conflicted about the slur filter episode. Sure, a clever way to moderate a brand of toxic community participants. If I’m not mistaken, moderation tools were far from mature at that stage and lemmy.ml was an active community dealing with community issues. I wasn’t involved in the community outside of keeping an eye on the project development and perhaps the community needed a heavy handed solution - not for me to say. But the implementation left some questions and from my memory, dev response to pushback was not positive. I think it took over a year, maybe two, to remove.
That was the first exposure many, many people had to the Lemmy project - it probably resulted in a lasting erosion of trust in the software among people who had/have no interest in using the blocked slurs, and formed an impression that will continue to echo for many years despite the filter being removed. The impact goes far beyond people who would use or defend the use of the excluded language.
There is a perspective that Nim kinda sorta writes/looks like a compiled Python. It also seems to get mentioned everywhere.
I don’t have any professional experience or ambitions, but:
Use nim for personal projects. It feels like there is less boilerplate than others I’ve tried and it felt more natural to me than python. Faster than python and compiles. Plus has a javascript backend option. Pretty neat language all in all and does an ok job from scripting to web.
Interest in trying? Probably Kotlin. Seems like another language with wide utility.
Love the trellis.