this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024

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Announcement of Sublinks (discuss.online)

submitted 9 months ago by jgrim@discuss.online to c/announcements@discuss.online

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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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[–] shrugal@lemm.ee 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Buzzword bonanza!

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 points 9 months ago

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

[–] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 11 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.

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 7 points 9 months ago (12 children)

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

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 3 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?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 6 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.

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

What’s an LISN ?

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

[–] Feathercrown@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Sorry typo-- meant LASN, Link Aggregation Social Network

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[–] doidera 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

So this service is coming to sum instead of divide?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 4 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.

[–] doidera 3 points 9 months ago

Great!

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 4 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.

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 1 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?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 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.

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 3 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.

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yes, that sums it up pretty well.

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 3 points 9 months ago

Thank you

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 2 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.

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 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.

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks!

[–] Blaze@discuss.online 3 points 9 months ago

Good point

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's neat how your breathless description makes it sound like you've discovered fire but then it reads like a "devs not implementing our pet features" fork.

You'll be - of course - committing changes back to a feature branch to enrich the project better than Kay Sievers did, right? This isn't some petulant land-grab like Bender going off to make his own casino?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It’s not a code fork it’s a completely new codebase in a different language.

It’s not just about implementing “pet features”. I’ve worked closely with admins of all major Lemmy instances to build the feature set for this and the roadmap plan.

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Will it compete with https://join.piefed.social/ ? Or does it have some stand out features ?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You can see the full feature roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6

[–] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Thank you, to a non-developer eye that doesn’t look any different to Lemmy.

Please are you able to explain why sublinks is better and what the extra features are?

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The new UI is still being developed. Sublinks currently supports the Lemmy UI.

Feature wise we plan to add a ton of improvements to moderation and CSPAM detection. We plan to improve ActivityPub to better integrate with other apps on the fediverse. We plan to create features for users to help discover other instance communities easier, use flair on posts, create favorites lists, and so on. You can click through each milestone and get an idea of what is to come. The first milestone is Parity with Lemmy to launch Sublinks. Then once the new front-end is done we’ll release that.

We’re working with creator of the Photon front-end and others to help make it as user friendly as possible.

There will also be a ton of under the hood improvements to help with federation.

The milestone themes are:

Parity with Lemmy
Moderation enhancements
Federation enhancements
User experience enhancements
Search & Discovery enhancements

This is all before we reach the 1.0 milestone. We have around 13+ developers contributing to it already. I hope the announcement attracts more. We have a ton of support from other major Lemmy instances like Lemmy.World to get the right mix of features and testing.

Lemmy admins have a lot of frustrations with the non-existent roadmap of Lemmy and how slow development as been. We've almost reached parity within just a few months of work. The team is motivated and excited.

[–] Blaze@discuss.online 5 points 9 months ago

Lemmy admins have a lot of frustrations with the non-existent roadmap of Lemmy and how slow development as been. We’ve almost reached parity within just a few months of work. The team is motivated and excited.

That's very impressive

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 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?

[–] dresden@discuss.online 6 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.

[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 9 months ago

All good reasons! Thanks!

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 1 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.

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 5 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.

[–] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 5 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!

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 4 points 9 months ago

Thanks a lot!

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