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.
But on the other hand, Rust is a highly desirably language whereas PHP has a historically bad rap. I don’t think devs necessarily want easiest. They want whatever is most enjoyable to use. Tooling support also matters. Stuff like static typing, for example, makes unfamiliar code way easier to understand. I’ve contributed to a lot of unfamiliar servers and I’ve noticed that ones in languages like Go are a lot easier because the static typing means it’s easier to read the code. In particular, I found servers written in Python hard to work with, and it’s not for lack of experience with the language (I’ve been using Python for longer than Go).
How easy it is to run the code also matters. Has anyone tried that with Lemmy? I was gonna run a dev kbin instance to try and make some changes, but the amount of work it seemed to require just to run the server was more than I wanted to do at the time (I really just want as close as possible to a single command way to run the server locally to test my changes so I can verify they work). Ease of contributing is very important for me to actually bother to contribute.
Lemmy has Ansible deploy scripts, and everything is dockerized. It’s as easy as spinning up a machine, setting some config values, and running a playbook.