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

Buzzword bonanza!

[-] jgrim@discuss.online 6 points 9 months ago

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

[-] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 13 points 9 months ago

@jgrim

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

[-] jgrim@discuss.online 9 points 9 months ago

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

[-] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 3 points 9 months ago

@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.

[-] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

it's funny, because I'm reading your comment from lemmy! to me, you're already "on Lemmy" so good job.

In old man terms: it's just a bunch of websites that talk to each other. we share links and memes, using some sites with a reddit aesthetic (lemmy), some with a twitter aesthetic (mastodon), but all (most of) the content gets posted to each other. me, I found my way here from the announcement being linked on Lemmy.

and you're not missing much from the announcement. they didn't really say anything substantial. it's all just corporate speak - bedazzled promises yet to be delivered. we'll see what they launch when they launch it, but i stopped caring by the time i read "innovate" and "revolution". at the end of the day it's gonna be pizzas and cats.

[-] ericjmorey@discuss.online 1 points 9 months ago

but all the content gets posted to each other

Unfortunately this is far from true. Mastodon and Lemmy have fundamental federation issues. But that's nuance that isn't important to people who are probably never going to use Lemmy (or SubLinks) directly.

And SubLinks is going to be more interesting to admins of Lemmy and app developers for Lemmy than users for some time, so I get the apathetic response.

[-] TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee 2 points 9 months ago

yeah i think omitting defederation from the initial explanation makes it more digestible. It'd have been better to say Most instead of All though, yeah

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

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

[-] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 2 points 9 months ago

@jgrim

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

[-] awilbert@mastodon.social 3 points 9 months ago

@Professor_Stevens @jgrim

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

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[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter.

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

There are so many buzzwords in that announcement it makes my head hurt.

In fact, went to sublinks.org and the about section is also full of buzzwords. It’s not clear at all.

[-] Professor_Stevens@mastodon.gamedev.place 3 points 9 months ago

@FelipeFelop

Well, I didn't mean to be particularly critical. I just didn't know what it was announcing. Now that you mention it, though, the wording is a bit corpo for the Fediverse.

[-] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 2 points 9 months ago

Agreed, not critical just puzzled.

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

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)

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

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[-] hperrin@lemmy.world 7 points 9 months ago

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

[-] jgrim@discuss.online 10 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.

[-] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 5 points 9 months ago

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

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.

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[-] doidera@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 9 months ago

So this service is coming to sum instead of divide?

[-] jgrim@discuss.online 6 points 9 months ago

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@lemmy.eco.br 3 points 9 months ago

Great!

[-] FelipeFelop@discuss.online 2 points 9 months ago

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

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

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.

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[-] maegul@lemmy.ml 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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

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!

[-] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

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

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

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

[-] chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 1 points 9 months ago

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 6 points 9 months ago

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

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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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024

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