this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024

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Announcement of Sublinks (discuss.online)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Buzzword bonanza!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 13 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@jgrim

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

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

@Professor_Stevens @jgrim

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Lemmy is to Reddit as Mastodon is to Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

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.

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

@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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Agreed, not critical just puzzled.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 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.

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

So this service is coming to sum instead of divide?

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Great!

[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (5 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.

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[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

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

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Good point

[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago (5 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.

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[–] [email protected] 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?

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

All good reasons! Thanks!

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