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Fediverse @lemmy.world

James Baxter @discuss.online

1y ago

Why I started Sublinks: A timeline of events

Why I started Sublinks: A timeline of events

37 comments

Deja vu
- I think he's trying to justify the project given some of the hate
  
  I really don't get why anyone would throw shade at another option being added in. The entire point of the fediverse is decentralization and choice. Having a fully compatible option for users and people wanting to run their own instance is a good thing. Kbin and mbin are an option, and now there'll be a third.
  Keeping all the eggs in one basket just isn't a benefit, diversity of choice is. Even if they fuck up sublinks and it sucks, having it there is good. The argument that they should be working on lemmy instead just doesn't hold water. If someone is dissatisfied with a project, they won't be working on it at their best, if they even do keep working on it.
  
  Has there been any hate? (honestly asking) I didn't catch any of it. I was just confused as to why one would choose Java for a web app, but other than that I welcome any new platform. Thats exactly what makes the fediverse great

You should also include a link to sublinks or say what it is or something?
- https://sublinks.org

I'm all for competition within the Fediverse (that's a big strength of the Fediverse if you ask me). I just wish we'd move on from Java and other exception-based languages.
- What's wrong with exceptions?
  
  Exceptions opt out of the type system. The problem with them is the same problem as null. Here's a video of the creator of null explaining: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Null-References-The-Billion-Dollar-Mistake-Tony-Hoare/
  Null and errors are just values at the end of the day, and should be treated as such. Doing so means your code is far easier to reason about.
  Rust takes this approach and is one of the many reasons people love it so much.
  
  What @asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world said, but also they kind of have the same problem as goto. The control flow becomes very complicated and you can jump from one place in the code to another extremely far away.
  Spooky action at a distance, basically.
  
  Because exceptions are old and the new (recycled) kids are much more fun to play with? Or people yearn to implement the low level switch-case pattern error matching mechanism all over again, which try-catch-exceptions were solving.
  I think there is no moving on from a paradigm as long as it has a function.

Interesting perspective

So LW is helping build it???
- Yes, almost all team members are contributing code, designs, feature requests, etc. I called out @Rooki@lemmy.world specifically because he's been a major contributor. One of the admins is actively recruiting people to help contribute to Sublinks, this is how we got so much support so quickly. It's a very close collaboration. I owe a lot of thanks to the Lemmy.World team.
- Looks like it was updated to add it lw details. That is curious.
- So LW is helping build it???
  Don't expect Lemmy.World to ever switch to it, though. Ruud sets up a new server for each bit of fediverse software. That's why Calckey.World will not migrate to the Sharkey fork of that software and its users will only get encouraged to move over on their own.

Exciting stuff! In particual I really like how neatly organized the project roadmap is, with a quick glance at the project GitHub page I can tell what you guys are working on and how development is proceding.
Also, props for using a widely established language like Java. I know Rust has lots of advantages and is all in all an awesome language, but having to learn a new language just to be able to contribute and submit PRs to your favourite open source project kinda kills the hype (and takes away a bunch of time).
- Thanks so much! We're trying hard!

Hey, I remember your issue with the latest tag! Shame I missed the spawn of sublinks.
- You're watching the spawn now! It's still in development :)

Honestly i don't think these are good enough reasons to create a new project, there are other open source reddit alternatives and non of them toke off, it's hard to build a project like that and having NLNET funding might have made it seem easier then it is.
Forking might have been a better options, or just developing a sever addon API so you could create plugins like on wordpress or discourse.
I tend to believe competition is good but in this case it seems like it will just fragment the already limited resources of the fediverse.
I warned someone that the project he started probably won't replace an existing popular project and eventually he seems to have abandon it, he could have spend that time improving the existing project.
I realize this is not feel good advice and i could be wrong, but i felt like i should say it.
- What is an example of a good reason to start a new project?
  
  Where there is some important design decision that the project leaders don't want to change.

all this because of misuse of the latest tag and unwillingness to downgrade the version? lol seems a little excessive but hopefully it turns out good
- That’s an over simplified version. For the record, I couldn’t downgrade without data loss.

37 comments