After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
Thank you for taking the time to read my response. I really appreciate having the approval of someone with decades of experience (which, I very much don’t). Out of curiosity, when you started programming would have been the early days of Java, C++ etc. and the start of the ‘OOP revolution’. Can you recall why you started with C, when OOP was very much en vogue?
That’s a very good question. Java and OOP really were new and exciting things when I first entered the workforce. But, I first started programming long before Uni and joining the workforce. I first started programming on one of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellivision using an ‘Intelliputer’. Then I learnt Logo on an Apple IIe. Then GW-BASIC on MSDOS, then PASCAL, then C. Then I stuck with C for a long time, including most of Uni.
So, by the time Java and OOP came along, I already had 10+ years of procedural programming behind me. That actually made it really difficult for me to to learn OOP. It was some weird paradigm that didn’t align with anything I knew. So I gave Java a mostly wide berth for as long as I could and focused instead on Perl, then PHP.
Both of those ended up getting OOP abstractions crammed into them, so eventually I did end up learning OOP, but it was more through osmosis. By then Java had largely come and gone. As much as it saddens me, Perl too largely died. That left me with PHP which, to be fair, was becoming quite a nice language by then.
By now I was a devout OOP developer and really enjoyed the OOP changes to PHP. Python, being object based, was the next logical choice. Javascript was still a pile of poo. Then Javascript got OOP abstractions too and suddenly was all the rage. Then they started putting the frontend on the backend (Node) and I was truly lost at sea. To me it it was twice as much work to build something (API + frontend) compared to the old server side rendering. It seemed way to much effort just to avoid a page load.
Nevertheless, I tried React and I hated it, it made no sense - though Javascript was looking a lot nicer by then. So I held off a little longer on adding ‘frontend dev’ to my resume, then NuxtJS came along and here we are.
So, long story short, I’ve been doing this forever. I technically review team code all day, every day. I know good code, I know bad code and have seen shit that still gives me nightmares.
The funny thing is, I have written dozens of cool tools that I think are pretty damn clever, yet I have never open sourced anything. My reason is the same as yours: Because I still don’t think any of it is good enough.