Sorry if this seems like a silly question but I have noticed over the last few months my feed(?) has started to act odd.
No matter what I do I don’t see any posts from .world. I checked and mander does not seem to block .world (kinda why I liked this instance) and even weirder is how my feed gets filled with mostly .ml posts with almost no activity no matter how I sort.
This did not happen before and got me thinking, I don’t even know how this works across federated instances.
Does anyone know:
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How does the sorting work on an instance? Is it all the same no matter what instance it is?
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Did anything change in the last few months, that would cause all .world (and I assume others) posts to not show?
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Other then changing instances what can I do to mitigate the weird slanted results?
I’m actually mildly surprised it’s still only two devs. Are they treating it like a walled garden, or is there really a complete lack of interest in contributing to the codebase?
We are two fulltime developers and a handful of devs who regularly contribute in their free time. We could definitely use more devs but the donations are simply not enough.
Rust is a niche language
It’s like starting a book club in Esperanto compared to English. Sure, Esperanto is supposedly a better language, but very few people know about it
Rust is not a niche language. It’s a strict and strongly opinionated language by design. People with background in strongly typed languages, who additionally use opinionated linters and formatters have an easier time adjusting. JavaScript “devs” (note: distinct from “software engineers”) probably pull their hair out over a lot of stuff in because in my experience, many js devs know enough about the language to work proficiently in a couple of frameworks, but haven’t really dug into the nuances of the language, and also have limited experience with strong typing.
My main argument about Rust being a niche language is how few contributors there are to the Lemmy codebase.
Mbin (PHP) has more spread across its contributors:
But maybe Rust isn’t that niche, but the Fediverse apps and projects are niche themselves.
The Lemmy frontend is written in Typescript which is a very popular language, yet it has even less contributors than the backend.
Not sure. There was some controversy with some of the devs making alt front ends and admins complaining about the slowness. I’ve seen mention of one of the two devs learning Rust just to participate. So it is not entirely a walled garden. The front end devs wanted to make an alt from scratch but in something like JavaScript although I don’t recall the details exactly. There were a lot of red flags related to privacy and understanding the community at large in the posts I saw from them. When asked why they weren’t adding pull requests with Rust in order to address their complaints I got no reply.
All that said, I’m no dev. I can read in to around half the code I come across if I really try, and can successfully modify maybe half of that if I spend a few days on it, but I suck at clever code and the DRY cult types. I haven’t tried to look into Lemmy in any depth beyond figuring out the basics.
Hmmmm, and it does not help the controversy when this issue seems to happen to then fill smaller instances with .ml posts…
The .ml instance is run by the developers. If it isn’t well configured we would have no reason to be here.