I created a proposal with UI design changes. Feel free to post a comment with your feedback: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1183

More things would need to be changed to make the app more readable, but I didn't want to propose too many changes at once. So this is just for the main page with default theme.

I added a mark as read button to the posts but now patiently waiting till the WebSockets -> REST API transition is complete so it can get merged.

The front end needs a lot of work… Every bit is appreciated and the maintainers are pretty fast at reviewing and providing feedback which is nice to see.

For anyone who isn't a developer: contributing is not just code.

Monetary donations help developers to continue their work, supporting them in their journey much as the brave Samwise supported Frodo. They ensure the continuity of the project, allow developers to dedicate more of their time to it, and help them acquire resources they may need.

Yet not all of us are blessed with the wealth of the Lonely Mountain, and that is entirely acceptable. For in the land of FOSS, gold and silver are not the only treasures that matter. The donation of your time and skills can be as valuable as a chest full of gold.

When you come across a bug, it can be reported, much as Pippin reported his sighting of the Nazgul to Gandalf. Yet remember, respect is key, as it was in all communications among the Fellowship. A bug report, properly done, is a gift to the community, a contribution to the common good. But it should be given with care, with thoroughness, and with the respect due to a fellow traveler on this digital road.

Finally, consider the hobbits who remained in the Shire, who, though they did not journey far, spread tales of courage and bravery, keeping spirits high and ensuring the story was known. If you love a piece of FOSS, speak of it, share it, let others know. In the vast, interconnected realm of the Internet, word-of-mouth travels faster than Shadowfax.

Every contribution, every bit of help, is more than welcome. It is cherished. It is celebrated. For in the realm of FOSS, as in Middle Earth, we are all on this journey together.

Naturally, if you are gifted with the skills of a dwarf smith, able to delve into the deep code and fix bugs or add features, your contribution will be celebrated like Gimli’s axes in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. A good pull request is a bard’s song that echoes across the halls of digital Middle Earth, a melody that can inspire others and boost morale.

I changed some stuff on the Lemmy-Ansible documentation for clarity, but I’m garbage at coding anything useful. Getting my head around rust or typescript is a real challenge from square zero.

I'm interested, but I don't know Rust and haven't done frontend work in years. Might be able to do some work around scalability and contribute to a Kubernetes deployment guide (and/or Helm chart).

I thought about writing a few userscripts to fix some minor things I was dealing with... However, I really should checkout the source for lemmy-ui first. Maybe I could help out there.

As for the backend.. it's Rust all the way down right?

I’ll try to contribute to the backend! I’ve always found it daunting, because often the issues are taken up.

My wife and I are living full time in a campervan as we travel. I have a couple pi4's, mainly for low-power-consuption reasons. One pi4 is dedicated to Home Assistant, and another one runs our nas.

The Home Assistant pi also runs Grafana, Postgres/TimescaleDB, MQTT broker, and a few other HA addons

Right now, our nas is just a single ssd attached via USB, but that's more than enough right now for the essentials. Eventually the nas will run mergerFS and rclone and automatically back up our data (encrypted) to multiple cloud providers but it's just a starting point

I have a third pi4 running misc software and is kinda my scratch pad, the main thing it does right now is talk to our solar controllers and renogy batteries thru rs485/modbus-rtu using some custom software I wrote in typescript and then publishes that data on the mqtt bus, aggregates it, and then advertises it correctly to get it into Home Assistant and from HA, into grafana

Oh, and I also have a Linksys E8450 running openWRT as our router / ax-wap

I tried and it was absolute hell. I used mail-in-a-box and the setup seemed to work but there was a bunch of issues with serving and syncing the e mails. none of the guides helped and in the end i thought if i were to get it working i wouldnt trust it very much. Can't be sure it'll be reliable or if it's gonna be blacklisted because some weird E-Mail thing isnt set fully correctly.

So it's probably possible but I don't think it's worth the hassle

I ran my own server for many years. There was a learning curve to all the fiddly bits (Postfix Configuration, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, SpamAssassin) required to get the world to see your server as worthy. There's also the problem of finding a "clean" IP that's not been blacklisted by some spam database. And even then, once in a while you end up in a database for who knows what reason. These things often made the email less useful as sometimes I'd end up in people's spam folder.

It was a good experience as I learned a lot. But it was also a constant headache. One I felt I didn't want to keep "learning" that particular thing I just moved to ProtonMail and haven't looked back.