maegul

!learningrustandlemmy@lemmy.ml

It’s for learning rust (the programming language) and the lemmy code base itself as a sort of “reading club”. If you’re the type of person who might be interested there’s a good chance you’ve heard of it already. We’re currently working through The Book (conventional learning resource) through a couple of Twitch streams and regular posts/discussions.

More collaborative learning activity is plenty welcome!

Youre right about lemmy-ui, unfortunately it doesnt have enough contributors. I dont know why that is, you’d think a project written in a popular language like Typescript would easily find contributors.

Random thoughts:

• Is it obvious enough that one can contribute to the UI separately from the backend and that it's a Typescript SPA style UI?
  • If not, maybe a bit of a "dev recruitment campaign" could help ... let people people know and what sorts of issues could really do with new contributors lending a hand? Maybe even a bit of a "Inferno isn't that different from all of the other SPA frameworks/libraries spiel?"
• Is the use of Inferno as oppose to one of the big 3 React/Vue/Svelte a repellent? (perhaps a downside to the "diversity" of frontend frameworks?)
• Are would-be UI contributors more inclined to make their own front-end or app than contribute to the default webUI?

More generally:

• Would a server side rendered webUI be welcome?
  • Then the contributions would mainly be on templates and their "simpler" logic, which might be more attractive or easier to get started on?
  • Plus, it might be more efficient? The current UI feels to me like it would suit server side rendering well.
  • Is this where the new leptos UI is heading ... more server side rendering (I don't know much about leptos)
• Do you have a sense of usage numbers for the different apps and frontends? Obviously you only run lemmy.ml, but do you have a sense of how much the front-end gets hit versus the API directly?
  • I ask, because If the default WebUI is really the main interface, then it makes sense to try to organise some more contributors (It's certainly my main, nearly exclusive interface, as much as I've like some of the alt front ends or apps)

Absolutely!

The bit I'm conceptually stuck on (not know much at all about how a good plugin architecture would work) is how a plugin can surface or affect the UI, especially in an ecosystem with multiple UIs/Apps/Frontends, and, a federated ecosystem at that.

Given the apps, I figure it's not possible without a convention of plugins providing APIs which apps can then implement against when available, which adds a good amount of complexity but should be viable for popular/useful plugins. Though, tangentially, this does affirm for me that the whole native mobile app expectation is a bit of a trap for a social system like the fedi (as webUIs are naturally more universal and maleable).

So, for immediate results, I can see only two options:

1. a plugin operates on the backend directly manipulating or creating content not unlike a bot
2. a plugin provides its own webUI which is made available through a simple and dedicated location in the UI

Is there something I'm missing about how a plugin system could work?

I hear you for sure on this.

I personally appreciate the push the core devs make for a "less demanding" relationship between users and open source devs. I think they have a point and it's good for long term sustainability and I'll probably find myself defending it.

But I like you're framing, and in retrospect it seems (as is usually the case) that some people organising was what was missing just to get everyone helping each out as much and efficiently as possible. While any member of the community can (and should) do that, at some point it makes sense for the core devs to take on a task like that, I agree.

Should there be something like a lemmy admin's community for talking about the ins and outs of running a lemmy instance? Something like that over time can be some sort of band-aid for missing documentation (it's searchable etc).

I'm aware that there's the matrix room and a lemmy support community ... but maybe just opening things up to any chat about hosting lemmy in one place could actually help (in part because you can easily search specifically within one community).

but we’re at a critical point right now. It’s no longer software that is just fun side projects and building stuff that looks cool, it has some real issues now that it has a real userbase. I’m definitely one to say “But it’s FOSS, and other people can pick up and submit a PR” - but it also says something when the head devs just completely ignore a massively huge issue with it.

This is a general issue I think, not just for lemmy but the whole fediverse (whatever one's opinions might be on particular priorities).

It's all non-profit and being run and built at a much smaller scale than many users would appreciate (I think). Sure there are plenty of people here, but not that many. Combined with no obvious revenue streams, such as ads or subscription fees, there really is only so much that can be done. Some time last year even the Mastodon team (by far the most successful fediverse platform) admitted that they didn't have the capacity to work on new things for a while ... they were just busy keeping things running. And they are (apparently) notorious at being slow to ship new features. Meanwhile platforms like firefish just straight up died last year.

So yea, it might be a critical point, for sure. But putting more on the core dev teams may not be the answer for the simple reason that it's just not viable in the long run.

If we enjoy the bigger community focus and open and non-profit organisations that makeup the fediverse, the "answer" at this critical point might be to find a way to give back somehow ... to organise, build communities, run fund-raising campaigns, think of ideas for more sustainable funding, find devs who can help etc etc. It's perhaps onerous and annoying, even to read perhaps ... but this is likely the tradeoff we have to make for a place like this.

The introduction of a plugin system seems interesting here, though it's still alpha and basically looking for feedback from would-be plugin developers

AFAICT, there's no established way for a plugin to surface affect the UI, which would be a somewhat unwieldy problem anyway due to the apps and frontends ecosystem. Probably the best path for any plugin that provides a UI would be to have a system for aggregating links to plugin UIs.

With something like that in place, plugins and other services that just use the DB/API, could really go a long way to filling these holes, if they haven't already.

So it seems that the work needed here is perhaps "distribution" work ... where there's a more "plug and play" Lemmy distribution with plugins etc bundled?

It’s our generation’s cigarettes.

“I don’t know, everyone was just doing it” is what we’ll say and what prior generations have said about smoking everywhere all of the time.

The stimulation from and addiction to nicotine or social dopamine … it’s the same shit. The weird marketing, branding and business capture big tech has now could look just like the marketing and wealth of cigarettes in the past.

Cheers for the response! Interesting to see that we generally align pretty accurately over this. I wasn't clear we would and half expected you to come in and say "fuck that, I just don't like lemmy world".

I did think of making a separate post of my rant, but figured it'd just get downvoted and there wouldn't be any point. After this, I'd be happy to put it up.

Also, I've just posted in the meta community about this, generally poking around the issue and what happened and how better administration might be possible.

I'm a little late on this thread/issue, but I agree with @sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al .

I'm also inclined to push back on the anti-lemmy.ml stance being pushed here. And to be clear, While I'm on lemmy.ml, I joined before "the migration" when it made sense to join the "main" instance as it then was and I have no particular affiliation with them or their politics.

Inline with what sabre is saying, I think there's a certain degree of political entitlement and "defederation-fever" creeping into this general sentiment. I think the communists/tankies should be allowed to do their thing without it being an issue, just like any other niche interest/viewpoint that can build a space here.

I suspect there's some dangerously presumptive politics at play here ... where moderation action is presumed to be "power tripping" mainly because the moderator's politics is presumed to be completely wrong. How about, "yea, that's their thing, it's unlikely something productive will come out of speaking flatly critically about china on lemmy.ml ... their moderation can go overboard sometimes, but their defensive about all of that ... if you want to do that, you'll need to go to a more western instance/community"

Building different spaces with different rules, vibes and beliefs, while simultaneously committing to inter-connectivity as much as possible ... is basically the idea of the fediverse. It allows us to talk to each other without being stuck in one group's (or corporation's) policies and world-view ... and more idealistically, allows us to see different world-views more clearly as we contrast the different spaces we can be connected to. If everything were on lemmy.world, it'd be hard to see the world-view (ha) that the mods/admins and even majority there impose on the rest.

That's the idealism, and I think it's very real.

But the pointy end of the stick is disagreements which lead to downvotes and moderation. That's what enables the creation of a particular space, and needs to just kinda be accepted a bit more.

That's the part not stated enough IMO ... at some point, if you're going to be committed to the inter-connectivity part, you need to be respectful of the fact that another space exists and can be antagonistic to some of your views. That's fine. On reddit, we'd just steer clear of a particular sub-reddit and maybe disparage them elsewhere. De-federation or targeting an instance as plain bad or wrong is a useful tool that the fediverse provides but which, IME, can easily become over zealously embraced in a sort of dog-pile behaviour. A more useful behaviour, IMO, is to try to work out ways that the fediverse can persist with such antagonism and disagreements.

Not being surprised that communists are hard on criticism of communist countries seems like a start to me (where, TBF, such criticism is pretty wide spread in the west to the point that I don't blame them for being cranky about it). Being open to the idea that you can get along with same communists on just about any other issue is a good next step. It'd be the same with criticising tech workers on programming.dev or trans/gender/queer issues on blahaj.zone or criticising western imperialism and capitalism on lemmy.world. Though I suspect the lemmy.ml admins could do a better job at sign-posting their politics/policies here.

These are spaces with particular sensitivities. Antagonising them indifferently is kinda rude at some point. Demanding that they not have their sensitivities is kinda against the fediverse at some point. Interestingly, the admin of lemmy.ml, dessalines, basically said the same thing recently.

Now, to be fair, I haven't looked into the moderation stuff that seems to have precipitated this conversation and I'm certainly open to the idea that the lemmy.ml mods overstepped (mods tend to do that IME). But my general view is that, as communists living in the west, they've probably come against a good amount superficial criticism and frankly prejudice that us general westerners wouldn't really notice, and so have pretty sharply guarded boundaries around that sort of dialogue. So they've built their own space (well platform actually), that is generally geared toward FOSS and privacy about which many of us have shared interests ... but they also have some pretty clear policies around communism that are clearly very personal to the admins that are better respected than exiled or antagonised.

Also, none of this is to say everything should be on lemmy.ml. Quite the opposite. Diversify! That's part of my point. But away from lemmy.world too, and with the understanding that part of diversification is enabling niche spaces that can cause friction and said friction isn't, in itself, a problem. Instead, IMO, we tend to get a bit feverish whenever these sorts of things spark up. Anyway ... rant over!

OMFG ... it's beautiful!

Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.

Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they're perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I'm still probably in a bubble on this).

But I'm not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.

And, yea, I'm chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.