Perhaps it’s your client or the server acting funny. Here are direct links to the open rooms:

• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development-api:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-off-topic:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-development-federation:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-announcements:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-support:discuss.online
• https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks-git:discuss.online

It’s not dead, perhaps you joined at a slow time. We were just chatting a bunch in there about cursor pagination. There are several rooms if you didn’t notice. General, Frontend, API, & Federation. Along with Announcements and Support.

I’m the founder of Sublinks. I’m happy to answer questions. You can find me on Mastodon @sublinks@utter.online. You’re right about the dev blog. We have a weekly Sublinks team meeting, the results of that could go into a weekly dev update. I’ve just been more focused on coding than community stuff. I’ll do better.

Thanks a lot!

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.

Thanks!

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.

That shouldn’t be a problem to add. The application will be event-driven and that’s the core of what is needed to fire push notifications.

Do you mean push notifications in the apps?

The new UI is still being developed. Sublinks currently supports the Lemmy UI.

Feature wise we plan to add a ton of improvements to moderation and CSPAM detection. We plan to improve ActivityPub to better integrate with other apps on the fediverse. We plan to create features for users to help discover other instance communities easier, use flair on posts, create favorites lists, and so on. You can click through each milestone and get an idea of what is to come. The first milestone is Parity with Lemmy to launch Sublinks. Then once the new front-end is done we’ll release that.

We’re working with creator of the Photon front-end and others to help make it as user friendly as possible.

There will also be a ton of under the hood improvements to help with federation.

The milestone themes are:

• Parity with Lemmy
• Moderation enhancements
• Federation enhancements
• User experience enhancements
• Search & Discovery enhancements

This is all before we reach the 1.0 milestone. We have around 13+ developers contributing to it already. I hope the announcement attracts more. We have a ton of support from other major Lemmy instances like Lemmy.World to get the right mix of features and testing.

Lemmy admins have a lot of frustrations with the non-existent roadmap of Lemmy and how slow development as been. We’ve almost reached parity within just a few months of work. The team is motivated and excited.

You can see the full feature roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1/views/6

Yes, that sums it up pretty well.

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.

Yes, it’s a drop-in replacement for Lemmy. The only thing you may notice is having to reset your password because the password hashing is currently different on Sublinks. Everything else will be the same or better.

It’s a migration to Sublinks not a switch. That means all data will be transferred over.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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