dessalines

2nding @nutomic, that I'm really happy with the stack.

The one that seems really magical to me, is diesel. With it we get a compile-time-checked database, that's tightly integrated to the rust objects / code.

Every single join, select, insert, etc is checked before lemmy is even run, and it eliminates a whole category of errors resulting from mismaps.

Its made adding columns, and changing our data structures so much less error-prone than when I lived in the java-world.

Whenever we find that we'd want to do things differently, we usually do a refactor ASAP so as not to keep rolling spaghetti code. We've had to do this many times for the federation and DB code, and even have 2 major refactors that also add features ongoing. But luckily we've been able to stay in the rust eco-system for that.

As for UI, leptos didn't exist when I built lemmy-ui, so I went with a fast react-like alternative, inferno. Its showing its age now, so @sleepless1917 is working on lemmy-ui-leptos, which hopefully will supercede lemmy-ui.

There's a forum sort called NewComments, that servers and any user can use to turn lemmy into a forum-style feed.

Instances can already disable downvotes site-wide, but we also already have fine-grained vote display settings:

Merging communities is no more possible than merging mastodon users.

Which mod tools do we need?

We already have RSS feeds.

We already have the ability to save posts and comments.

Word filters and flairs are in the works.

There's too many other things here for me to answer.

This is all a matter of dev resources. If we had maybe 6 full-time devs, we could handle things like backwards compatibility.

People forget that lemmy, like other open source hobby projects, don't have the resources that large corporations do. People understandably get frustrated when there's breaking changes, but they also need to not put enterprise-level expectations on a small number of people.

If someone wanted to work on that, of course we wouldn't be opposed, but you should know how monumental a task that would be.

Protocol handlers are the way to go IMO. I've opened an issue based on @phiresky's comment.

We won't add UUIDs or any "universal" sort of identifier, but universal links are still possible without them.

There's some discussion of this here. It's not something I care too much about, but anyone is free to add more detailed URLs to either lemmy-ui or other front-ends.

Its been years but no one has found it important enough to them to work on.

All these are due to a lack of developers for open source in general. Jerboa needs more devs than just me and @MV-GH, but no one else has stepped up to take on fixing any of these. If there were 5 more of me, I could get these done, but I'm too busy.

Yeah, it's not hard to select a server and it's a "good thing to do", but it's still better to give people the option to go for convenience instead of the "proper" path.

We could add a "fast join" button to the signup dialog on join-lemmy.org , where it takes you to a random instance's signup page.

Overall though, we should ignore the "advice" from reddit that tells us that people are too stupid to sign up for anything now. People did this for every forum and every other site all until ~2005 when US tech gobbled up most services, and ppl continue to show us that yes, they do know how to type in a username, password, and email to sign up for something.

Duplicate post aggregation. The nature of federation will always make it make sense to have duplicate communities, but this will also make posts with the same links, same images, same videos, etc show up in people's "all" feeds multiple times.

In lemmy-ui we have a post-deduplicator for feeds, but unfortunately not a lot of other apps (including jerboa, that's my bad) have added something similar.

A way to backup your whole user data and completely restore it on any instance you want. If an instance goes under, it should be possible to keep all subscriptions, all your posts, all your comments, and migrate them to a new instance.

Settings export already exists. Copying historical content and rewriting history isn't possible in a federated system, but we do have an open issue for data export.

Even that isn't too necessary, since you can already put images in spoiler markdown blocks.

Open up an issue on their repo.

You can hide images behind spoiler tags also:

Not bad, the swiss chard and spinach I planted recently are sprouting, so that's got me excited.