I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
There are no good code bases, only less bad ones.
From some comments I’ve read, it’s at least in better shape than kbin? A few people expressed interest in helping with that project and then went running for the hills after reading through the code.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
I read from one admin that a Lemmy instance is a lot easier to set up and maintain than a kbin instance. It’s initially more complicated to set up and updates are just a super headache to deal with. That sounds like a showstopper. I mean kbin is not going to get too far if it’s that difficult to run and maintain an instance, no matter how good or bad the code.
From a user perspective kbin has a really nice looking interface, though Lemmy has more features. I’d like to see kbin do well. It’s younger than Lemmy so it’s going to be behind, but hopefully the overhead in running an instance can be resolved.
The best code base is the repo I just created and haven’t committed anything to.
Just clone this one. Guaranteed the best repo ever! https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
No the answer is that it is written in a modern language, is in its infancy and needs a lot of work to be really great, but it’s based on a certified protocol ActivityPub, that Mastodon and other “fediverse” systems use. It’s going to be really great, eventually.
“It depends” is a reference to an inside joke between developers. I agree with you that it could be really great, whether or not a code base is “good” or “bad” is just a complicated and highly subjective question to answer
