Today I learned about Sublinks (here), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly.
The project is written in Java, which may introduce some overhead but is chosen for its maintainability and familiarity among a wider pool of developers. The Sublinks team prioritizes a more inclusive and less toxic development environment, and the project has already attracted more developers than Lemmy.
While Sublinks is starting with 1:1 compatibility, future plans include implementing additional features that the Lemmy developers have not pursued. This could lead to a divergence in functionality between the two platforms as Sublinks evolves beyond its initial compatibility phase.
README
Sublinks
A decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving social network.
- Join Sublinks
- Demo Sublinks
- Documentation
- Matrix Chat
- Report Bug
- Request Feature
- Releases
- Code of Conduct
- Contributing
- Style Guide
About
Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform, reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin. It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users. Unique to Sublinks are its enhanced moderation tools, tailored to provide a safe and manageable online community space. Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms. Sublinks is not just a platform; it’s a community-centric ecosystem, prioritizing user experience, content authenticity, and networked social interaction.
Features
- Open source, MIT License.
- Self hostable, easy to deploy.
- Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
- Only a minimum of a username and password is required to sign up!
- User avatar support.
- Live-updating Comment threads.
- Full vote scores
(+/-)like old Reddit. - Themes, including light, dark, and solarized.
- Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing
: - User tagging using
, Community tagging using!. - Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
- A post can consist of a title and any combination of self text, a URL, or nothing else.
- Notifications, on comment replies and when you’re tagged.
- Notifications can be sent via email.
- Private messaging support.
- i18n / internationalization support.
- RSS / Atom feeds for
All,Subscribed,Inbox,User, andCommunity.
- Cross-posting support.
- A similar post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities.
- Moderation abilities.
- Public Moderation Logs.
- Can sticky posts to the top of communities.
- Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.
- Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
- Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
- Can transfer site and communities to others.
- Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments.
- NSFW post / community support.
- High performance.
Contact
Contributing
Support / Donate
Sublinks is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.
Something feels off with this post. It comes off as “we are better than Lemmy” as if there is any competition and awards to be won. To say Lemmy’s development is “toxic” and this project is “more inclusive and less toxic” without backing it up with evidence is unfair.
It’s also an ad. Fuck this noise.
It seems like they’re trying to appeal to admin/users who despise where the developers of Lemmy come from and make them move away from Lemmy to their codebase.
Their “United States of Amewrica” on their github seems all too intentional.
But options are always good because the fediverse is all about options. If Lemmy gets too controversial, instance admins can hopefully move over to sublinks without losing functionality.
I’m not disputing any of that. I’m disputing the advertisement on a TIL community.
I agree, but the post is pretty much a copy/paste from the comment where I learned about the project, so blame @ptz@dubvee.org
I see that comment but somehow cant fetch it from lemmy.ml. Would you mind asking what exactly they mean by “toxic development community”? Its honestly the first time I heard something like this about Lemmy.
Hmm not sure whats the context of that quote.
Okay so I wasn’t sure before but I think this issue might be a good example: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4433
Yours and dessalines comments all come across as defensive or dismissive. The comments make it sound like you are more interested in dismissing the bug than actually acknowledging it.
This is definitely not a way to approach a bug report. You need to be much more understanding of bug reports (especially ones as serious as this one) and display a willingness to fix things, and follow through with it.
I don’t think Lemmy will work out in the long term if this kind of attitude continues.
I’m not sure exactly what they mean by it either, but I do think Lemmy could do more to be welcoming to more outside contributors. It would probably also be a better use of your time - to scale Lemmy development, it would be better to spend time recruiting and training contributors rather than just spend all your own time coding. You (the main two devs) know the code better than anyone else. It would be great use of your time to spread that knowledge to more contributors.
Sublinks for instance also uses the GitHub projects as a kind of publicly viewable backlog of issues and a roadmap. I think especially a roadmap is something a lot of users would like for Lemmy as well. It would be good use of your time to produce a roadmap of some kind. Doesn’t have to be on GitHub obviously, but just any kind of roadmap.
Sure being more welcoming to outside contributors sounds good. Do you have any concrete suggestions how to recruit and train them? We do have some community contributors, but they seem very limited by the amount of time they have for Lemmy after their fulltime job.
Once the new round of NLnet funding is finalized we will publish those milestones. However Im not sure if a backlog like the one you linked is really helpful, it would take a significant amount of time to manage for little benefit. After all every open issue on the Lemmy Github is up for grabs for anyone to implement it.
Also, even though the main motivation seems to be more contributors, there seems to only be two active contributors anyway. So not any better than Lemmy.