I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
There are no good code bases, only less bad ones.
From some comments I’ve read, it’s at least in better shape than kbin? A few people expressed interest in helping with that project and then went running for the hills after reading through the code.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
I read from one admin that a Lemmy instance is a lot easier to set up and maintain than a kbin instance. It’s initially more complicated to set up and updates are just a super headache to deal with. That sounds like a showstopper. I mean kbin is not going to get too far if it’s that difficult to run and maintain an instance, no matter how good or bad the code.
From a user perspective kbin has a really nice looking interface, though Lemmy has more features. I’d like to see kbin do well. It’s younger than Lemmy so it’s going to be behind, but hopefully the overhead in running an instance can be resolved.
The best code base is the repo I just created and haven’t committed anything to.
Just clone this one. Guaranteed the best repo ever! https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
No the answer is that it is written in a modern language, is in its infancy and needs a lot of work to be really great, but it’s based on a certified protocol ActivityPub, that Mastodon and other “fediverse” systems use. It’s going to be really great, eventually.
“It depends” is a reference to an inside joke between developers. I agree with you that it could be really great, whether or not a code base is “good” or “bad” is just a complicated and highly subjective question to answer
If you think four years of technical debt is a lot, wait until you hear about Microsoft Windows.
Well it’s written in Rust. Doesn’t that make it automatically awesome and fast?
It’s from this old meme video
It’s fine. Nothing impressive about it but nothing horrifying about it. Could use better testing and better documentation, it’s pretty weak on both fronts. It’s a pretty young/immature code base, hard to have much tech debt yet. Not like its core dependencies can be a decade out of date. But it’s easy to navigate and understand,relatively speaking.
Could use better testing and better documentation
I’ve seen one dev talk about documentation and it’s admittedly weak, but they’re pretty impacted by everything else. It’s on the burner and they’ll work on it at some point.
As long as the backend is stateless, it can be scaled to handle huge amount of users, at least in theory. IMO the main issue right now with Lemmy deployment is pictrs not being stateless. It uses a filesystem-based internal database called sled. Not only this make pictrs not stateless, you can’t even run multiple replica of pictrs in the same host because sled would crash if the database file lock is already acquired by another replica. Someone with some rust skill should consider donating their time to add postgresql support to pictrs soon, which will greatly help making Lemmy scalable. Too bad I know nothing about rust.
An interesting choice of solution there for image hosting… I would have thought they would have gone with a simple proxy through to an object store like S3, GCS, Wasabi, insert other clone here. Or even picked an off the shelf BLOB capable system for self hosting like Mongo or Cassandra. Then your image hosting becomes stateless as you just give each image a flake ID, pop it in the storage system and give back a shortened URL. I’m sure they had their reasons though :-)
