this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024

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Announcement of Sublinks (discuss.online)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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We are thrilled to announce the upcoming release of Sublinks, a groundbreaking Link Aggregation Social Network, joining the Fediverse. This innovative platform is designed to revolutionize how we share and discover online. Our dedicated team of volunteer contributors has worked tirelessly, utilizing technologies like Java, Go, TypeScript, and HTML to bring this vision to life. Sublinks promises a user-friendly interface and robust features that cater to diverse online communities. Stay tuned for our launch date, and get ready to experience a new era of social link sharing!

Sublinks will have a fully compatible API with Lemmy so all current Lemmy apps will also work with Sublinks. In fact, discuss.online will switch to Sublinks to fully replace Lemmy once we reach our Parity Milestone.

For more information, visit GitHub - Sublinks and sublinks.org.

Stay tuned for more regular updates as we progress.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Is there any news on Sublinks?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Any news?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So this service is coming to sum instead of divide?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's just forking Lemmy, but it will be fully compatible with it for federation, etc. It's not meant to create a ruckus. I simply wanted to move faster with some features and I cannot do that with Rust.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Great!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It would be interesting to see benchmarks for different mock scenarios (regular user interaction, federation etc...). My understanding is that Lemmy has had a poor database design and bad SQL queries for a very long time, not sure if that improved (but since response times are definitely low with recent versions I guess yes), but it would be really cool if the database could be designed for performance from the bottom up instead of having it as an afterthought which led to the huge downtimes that we experienced last summer when servers with AMD EPYC CPUs and 100s of GBs of RAM couldn't handle a few ten thousand users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Our goal is to fix the database. I've reengineered it. This has caused us to need a migration path rather than drop-in replacement. I didn't want to inherit their schema.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's pretty cool, best luck with the project!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Good point

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Sounds very cool. Hope all the best for you/SL!

So general question ... why not contribute back to or softly-fork Lemmy?

While I'm sure you've got a lot to offer here and that SL may very well come to be awesome (especially, IMO, with the attractiveness of the tech stack to would-be contributors), I can't help but wonder if it'd be better in this moment for the fediverse to focus more on building on what's got momentum rather than splitting efforts. There are, of course, many counters to that argument ... so I'm wondering what your thoughts are in general and behind this project?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Main reason (or at least one of them) is the technology stack, choosing Java instead of Rust, to move fast with development, and (hopefully) to be more accessible for others to contribute.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

All good reasons! Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

This is great, glad to see new project growing with community support.

I'm curious as to if/how you plan to manage divergences from the current Lemmy features? Take for example the push notification issue mentioned in another reply (I can see it on your instance but because I wasn't subscribed to the community before they were posted, it is not federated to my instance) for example. If you were to add that feature while adopting web standards, and Lemmy devs continue to stubbornly move forward with janky third party app solution, how would/could the divergence be managed? I don't mean it in a negative way, just curious of the plans around things like this, as I have high hopes for this project to excel and end up better than the core Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

We'll just become our own applications at some point. The reason I'm supporting the Lemmy API from the start is to allow users to have apps from the start. At some point there will be Sublinks phone apps and the need to support the Lemmy API will go away. Similar to how you can use a Mastodon App to interact with Pixelfed.

Our plan is to implement everything right from the start. We have 4 core developers and 13 contributors helping at different capacities. Everyone is experienced and driven to do our best and make the fediverse more open to everyone.

The reason Sublinks can replace Lemmy is that we're building a migration to do so. It won't be drop-in because we are building a whole new optimized database schema. We're also keeping some of the same settings and capabilities for as long as we support their API. At some point the things we don't like will go away and the things that are liked will stay.

I run discuss.online and I wanted to contribute to Lemmy to improve moderation; however, I found it difficult to contribute in any meaningful way for a multitude of reasons. I created a service called socialcare.cloud to help with moderation but the Lemmy API is so limited I couldn't fully do everything that needed to be done without copying the entire database from the instances it serviced.

Mastodon seems so polished and easy to use. It's getting wide adoption. I want to create that experience for link aggregation social networks too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Super exciting. Thank you! I hear you completely on current state of Lemmy projects. I look forward to migrating my personal instance to this project when it becomes more feature parity!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thanks a lot!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Buzzword bonanza!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

I know, I tried to make it sound friendly and not anti-Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Hang on, you’ll switch discuss.online to this sublinks.org ? What if I don’t want to?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The change won't be noticeable until we start adding new features. The main reason to create Sublinks is to move quicker with features & functionality that the current Lemmy team cannot maintain for various reasons.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It’s just that I’ve had to create new accounts before (because of incompatibility) and recreate subscriptions, loose post history etc. Also because of instances not being maintained.

I just thought discuss.online was different and a more stable place to be. If you do migrate discuss.online will we still be able access and contribute to our subscribed Lemmy communities?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, it’s a drop-in replacement for Lemmy. The only thing you may notice is having to reset your password because the password hashing is currently different on Sublinks. Everything else will be the same or better.

It’s a migration to Sublinks not a switch. That means all data will be transferred over.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Let me just check I’ve got this right.

Sub links is an enhanced version of Lemmy with some extra features. It works with normal Lemmy Clients. We’ll still be able to access our existing Lemmy communities but if our account is on a sublink instance then we’ll be able to take advantage of the enhancements in sublink communities.

We won’t need to migrate anything across manually, just log out and log in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes, that sums it up pretty well.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Thank you

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I hope notifications will be supported from the outset.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Do you mean push notifications in the apps?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

As I understand it, Lemmy doesn’t support notifications through the api and the devs are resistant So apps have to take one of two routes either constantly polling individual servers or installing a service on the phone (which causes battery issues on Android or to get shut down on iOS)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

That shouldn't be a problem to add. The application will be event-driven and that's the core of what is needed to fire push notifications.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

I feel so old. I read that entire announcement three times, and still have no idea what Sublinks is.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Basically, it's a replacement for Lemmy. Ground-up rewrite of the source using a language with a much larger community.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I thought I was pretty familiar with the fediverse (joined mastodon in 2018) but I don’t understand what some of that means. What is a Link Aggregation Social Network and why is it capitalised?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Lemmy, Reddit, Sublinks, Kbin are all Link Aggregation social networks. They mostly share links to articles and the like. It's just the category they're in.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Lemmy and Reddit are LASNs. They collect links for people to comment on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

What’s an LISN ?

Edit: @feathercrown edited their post which originally said LISN.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Lisn al Gaib! It's the messiah of link interchange social media!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Sorry typo-- meant LASN, Link Aggregation Social Network

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

Oh, God. This must be the moment when I realize I'm over the hill for real. You're clearly assuming I know what Lemmy is, which implies that most people in this setting would, in fact, know what it is.

But I don't.

Jesus, I'm gonna need some Chivas after this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy is the software that runs discuss.online, lemmy.world, etc.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

Brother, you're makin' it worse...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

@Professor_Stevens @jgrim

Twitter is to Mastodon as
Reddit is to Lemmy (and now Sublinks)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You’re going to revolutionize how we share by being API-compatible with Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

We want to capture existing websites that run Lemmy. We'll have a migration tool to convert from Lemmy to Sublinks. Users will still be able to user their favorite Lemmy phone apps, etc.

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