Today I learned about Sublinks (here), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly.

The project is written in Java, which may introduce some overhead but is chosen for its maintainability and familiarity among a wider pool of developers. The Sublinks team prioritizes a more inclusive and less toxic development environment, and the project has already attracted more developers than Lemmy.

While Sublinks is starting with 1:1 compatibility, future plans include implementing additional features that the Lemmy developers have not pursued. This could lead to a divergence in functionality between the two platforms as Sublinks evolves beyond its initial compatibility phase.


README

GitHub stars GitHub tag (latest SemVer) gradle workflow GitHub issues License

Sublinks

A decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving social network.

About

Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform, reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin. It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users. Unique to Sublinks are its enhanced moderation tools, tailored to provide a safe and manageable online community space. Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms. Sublinks is not just a platform; it’s a community-centric ecosystem, prioritizing user experience, content authenticity, and networked social interaction.

Features

  • Open source, MIT License.
  • Self hostable, easy to deploy.
  • Clean, mobile-friendly interface.
    • Only a minimum of a username and password is required to sign up!
    • User avatar support.
    • Live-updating Comment threads.
    • Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit.
    • Themes, including light, dark, and solarized.
    • Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing :
    • User tagging using @, Community tagging using !.
    • Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments.
    • A post can consist of a title and any combination of self text, a URL, or nothing else.
    • Notifications, on comment replies and when you’re tagged.
      • Notifications can be sent via email.
      • Private messaging support.
    • i18n / internationalization support.
    • RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community.
  • Cross-posting support.
    • A similar post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities.
  • Moderation abilities.
    • Public Moderation Logs.
    • Can sticky posts to the top of communities.
    • Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators.
    • Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments.
    • Can ban and unban users from communities and the site.
    • Can transfer site and communities to others.
  • Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments.
  • NSFW post / community support.
  • High performance.

Contact

Contributing

Support / Donate

Sublinks is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.

  • @Fal
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    53 months ago

    None of these are a problem to experienced Java developers however

    You’re kidding, right?

    • @[email protected]M
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      03 months ago

      That is true, if you develop your java application correct, then you have no issues of any kind.

      • Nate Cox
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        73 months ago

        If you just never make any mistakes you’ll live a mistake free life.

        • magic_lobster_party
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          3 months ago

          It’s more that you can avoid many mistakes by programming defensively and having good discipline. For example, you can avoid many memory allocation if you follow RAII and use smart pointers.

          Null references can be avoided by avoiding using null (and prefer using optional where it makes sense).

      • @[email protected]
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        3 months ago

        if you develop your java application correct, then you have no issues of any kind.

        No issues of any kind? That’s absurd. The idea that you can “just” write “correct” code in any language and then you won’t have “any issues of any kind” is not any developer’s experience ever. Humans are just not reliable enough for that.

        • @[email protected]M
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          -13 months ago

          Yeah because of that i said IF you develop your java application correct…

          If that is correct, than you have no issues of any kind. That statement is correct. But like you said, no one is perfect, but rust would be a more difficult language than java and less documented. For a stable, predictable and reliable software your programming language needs maturity, stability and a community to support it. Most of it rust doesnt have.

          • @[email protected]
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            3 months ago

            Okay but if you develop your Rust application correctly, then it’s obviously also correct. It doesn’t matter what language you use then.

            rust would be a more difficult language than java and less documented

            That is just like, your opinion, man. I disagree. I’d rather not have null references and exception-handling if I was going for stability. Rust also has very nice documentation.

            your programming language needs maturity, stability and a community to support it. Most of it rust doesnt have.

            Okay, Rust is not as old as Java. This is true. But at this point, you cannot say that Rust is immature, unstable or doesn’t have a community.

            The community online is huge, bigger than most other communities. If you want a number, see for instance the number of active users on /r/rust versus /r/java. I checked it now and it was 1096 versus 195. Nobody is hyped about Java any more, it’s an old language that many people don’t like. Check also for instance how many people like Java or Rust in the StackOverflow developer survey. ~87% of Rust users love using Rust while only ~46% of Java users love using Java - that means that there are more Java devs that would rather not use Java than Java devs who want to use Java!

            Rust has very strong backwards-compatibility guarantees (just like Java). It’s very stable and things mostly “just work” if it compiles (unlike Java).

            I would call Rust much more reliable than Java, and I think most people who have tried both would agree. Exception-based error handling just makes it notoriously difficult to cover all error cases.

            Anyways m8, unless this somehow sways you I think we need to just agree to disagree. I would encourage you to actually try the language and see for yourself and see what I mean though.

            • The wild card
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              3 months ago

              That is just like, your opinion, man. I disagree.

              The dude ?