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Right now, I'm feeling concerned and wondering what is going on in regards to Sublinks here, since I have created a community for discussion on koalas about a week ago on here and have started and been doing work on it recently. But now I'm hearing about Sublinks and feeling concerned if I created it on the wrong instance or the wrong platform since I'm now just recently hearing about it. I'm just feeling worried and wondering whether or not if I should do anything or not.
I like lemmy but also I've been following the drama from the sidelines, so I think the focus on Rust vs Java has nothing to do with the choice to create a lemmy alternative.
The reason sublinks exists is that the lemmy devs have made some large technical and PR mistakes that have led to multiple larger instance admins losing faith in them.
There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their "entitled" "demands" with them. It's not surprising to see various alternatives to lemmy springing up as a result of the devs telling people to do so.
There was the illegal content spam incident which required instance admins to interact directly with the image database in complex ways for each image to remove the content from their servers, and I believe lemmy.world disabled submitting images if you are using a VPN or the tor network as a result. The lemmy devs have made some bafflingly derisive comments about that incident.
And then there's the recent update that has broken federation of bigger instances, which is an ongoing issue. Communities are having to move instances to help with this bug which should have been caught in testing the update.
So sublinks seems to be some folks deciding that they can do it better.
Choosing Java is one way that they think they can do better. The argument goes, significantly more people know Java than Rust. Lemmy has had some problem getting extra help as a result of this limit, so hopefully sublinks will have a much larger pool of talented devs who will step up and submit code.
Sublinks isn't the only one, too. Piefed is the python Lemmy alternative that's cropped up recently and I believe there are some others in other languages.
Whether any of them can do it better remains to be seen, but it does seem like the Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn't always the most important part of a project.
Thank you for your valuable comment.
There is Mbin in PHP!
Great summary!
They were kinda acting entitled to not just free labor, but to have their issues prioritized over others.
I mean, Lemmy was explicitly written in Rust because the creators of Lemmy wanted to do a project in Rust. The complaints that I've seen about the language choice are just bizzare with that context. I'm quite happy with others hoping in and making their own compatible things in different languages because that makes the world more interesting and gives more people something that they might want to contribute to.
Beehaw was acting like a customer, which they kind of were and sort of weren't at the same time. Customers act entitled, but they didn't seem to be any worse than most. Lemmy's devs are right in that they don't owe them anything, really, but the way they voiced that was bad PR, IMO.
It sucks having to care about message when all you want to do is make something you like, so I get it, buy I don't think it looked great from the outside.
I don't think choosing Rust was inherently a bad move. I think it makes sense that if you are going to try to make a competing platform to NOT choose Rust, and instead pick something that a lot of people can contribute to.
But yeah, complaining about their initial choice doesn't make sense, and neither does the "why don't they just learn Rust" sentiment given the context of all this other stuff.
I'm not aware of them having a support contract. This is exactly what I mean when I state that they were, in fact, acting entitled. To my knowledge, the Lemmy project has 0 customers. It is a FLOSS project so, everyone needs to check their entitlement at the door. None of us are entitled to anything from the devs. They are volunteers donating their software to us.
With FLOSS projects, one can file issues but the software is "as is" as specified in the license. If one wants changes that are not prioritized by the devs, the choices are: wait, contribute, or fork. That's it. None of us are customers but recipients of gifted software.
Hard disagree. Some people clearly need some tough love and etiquette lesson. If someone gives you a gift and your response is to complain the it isn't quite what you wanted, this is generally considered rude and ungrateful behavior. Want to be a customer? Buy commercial software.
Context is very important here and in other places. The devs' goal was primarily to make a project in Rust, not to compete with anything. With that being their goal, "learn Rust or start your own project" is really the only reasonable response.
To reiterate though, I am very happy that Sublinks, k/mbin, et al have been established. Some people like developing in Java or PHP and it brings a smile to my face for the options to be available to them. Add to this the compatibility with Lemmy and I think that this is a beautiful recipe for open-source innovation. I think that we can all benefit from the "cross-pollination" between projects and ideas that can better manifest in some languages can be ported to others.
Having a support contract has nothing to do with being a customer. If the devs didn't want customers, they shouldn't have released their product to the public. It really just seems like they can't handle the stress of writing code AND managing their customers' needs.
Tough love is never the correct way to deal with people, and never the way to manage a product.
In some of the threads I've seen the devs have said that they could be making more money if they went to a big tech corp while also exhibiting behaviors that would NEVER fly at any of the big tech companies.
Learning projects are great! Releasing them isn't necessarily the best way to go about things, though.
Don't get me wrong, I don't envy the lemmy devs for the position they've put themselves in. It is incredibly stressful to juggle what they're trying to juggle, and PR is not usually the strongest skill an engineer has.
I hear you on the context of choosing Rust. It's not really that relevant to what I'm saying, but I have seen people complain about Rust as the language preventing them from contributing. Having more contributor's wasn't their goal, it was to build something in Rust to begin with.
My point was that Sublinks' goal IS to invite contributors, so Java is a smart choice.