epic megapost

nah, there are plenty of truth wannabes (freeze peach bigotry safe havens) that actively federate. just look at literally any competent server's blocked instances list and you'll see a few examples. there's a reason why nobody* runs completely open federation

*: aside from people who're friendly with that crowd ofc

Everyone complaining about only getting cringy content is really telling on themselves here lol

even in the deepest, darkest, secret-est parts of my soul i have no interest in any content (a) in Arabic and (b) of imams. i can't even understand a word of Arabic and am not religious, yet apparently that was the most up to date profile tiktok had on me the last time i tried it out. (which was the 3rd time or so) and i even made an account and signed in.

the politics bullshit and lame facebook-grade memes were the "best" it could muster. as in, the only things i understood.

maybe it works better in an english speaking and not-religious-asf country.

idk why but i never got tiktok. the all-powerful mystical algorithm that hijacks your brain just didn't work on me. it's all politics bullshit and lame facebook memes.

hell, the fedi (both lemmy and the microblog-verse) has "wasted" more of my lifespan overall than tiktok.

fixed that part, words are hard

The thing I'm trying to say is that "having an API" does not matter in the long term if the API does not expose the functionality needed to use it properly.

And TBF if someone joined Lemmy only because it had an API and nothing else then they're gonna be in for a very rude awakening sooner or later as the troubles of federation that previous (mostly microblogging) platforms have encountered and attempted to solve (not to mention novel problems due to the community oriented nature of Lemmy) start to show up.

This is only going to get worse, and throwing "more API" into the fire won't fix any of the important problems at hand.

Picking a fedi server software is just picking how much (and what kind of) jank you're willing to tolerate. The features are always secondary.

I don't think an API is the thing that matters here. There are quite a lot of things you can't hack on with a client alone and actually needs server side support to function (actual moderation tooling is a prime example)

Also most APIs aren't "designed" per se and just expose the internal representations of the projects they're of. A "common" API would either be too "wide" enough to be unusable (hello, ActivityPub C2S) or would severely limit experimentation and innovation (good luck on building microblogs in the Lemmy API) without having so many extensions that essentially end up being a third, completely different API.

Everyone wants a fork. Nobody wants to be the fork.

We need a small group of motivated and skilled developers to get together and decide "we're doing this", and actually go beyond announcing an empty Git repo. (i.e. actually have some usable code to show for)

Dealing with a codebase as janky and large as Lemmy is unfortunately beyond my skillset, otherwise I'd love to get involved myself.

The wording in the parent comment also seems to imply the Fediverse is just Lemmy/kbin, which is a weird self-centric take I see here (i.e. on Lemmy) a lot.

A lot of the broader fedi that has access to adequate moderation tooling are doing just fine and don't seem too "ill-suited". It's really just Lemmy that's like this.

I'm not entirely sure I'll attempt joining "the new Beehaw" wherever it may set up shop (y'all are a bit too serious news-y for my liking, personally), but all the federated interactions I had with the folk from Beehaw had been quite positive, and it's kinda sad to see y'all go. But I can definitely understand the reasons why, and I do have my own gripes with Lemmy (both the software and the unfortunate community it has picked up) as well.

those are custom emojis and for some godforsaken reason they're implemented as inline markdown images and not as actual custom emojis the rest of the fedi had a standards extension/convention for years ago

Logic errors will be a more relevant issue with a web app (things like not setting your JSON Web Tokens to expire) and Rust won’t save you from that.

I'm sure there is some arcane feature of Rust that'd let you encode that in the type checker somehow. Yeah it'd be completely unreadable and unmaintainable but knowing the Rust community there's probably someone mad enough to take a crack at it.

AFAIK the issues l.w et al are struggling with are to do with the database. The language you're calling out to Postgres doesn't really matter when it's Postgres that's taking a lifetime computing through your hell-query.

I don't know much about Go (I should really take a closer look at it) but it's definitely also a valid candidate. (Perhaps a bit too bare bones for my personal liking, but hey you can't win em all)