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.
One of the first things I did when I learned about Lemmy and joined an instance is see if I could contribute in some way, shape or form.
But unfortunately it’s written in Rust, a language in which I have 0 experience and 0 knowledge. :(
Maybe you know more about web or android development, then you could look into contributing to the lemmy-ui or jerboa.
Yesterday I was annoyed at wide code blocks being wrapped, instead of having a horizontal scrollbar, so I took 20 minutes of googling and hacking around with my minimal css skills and wrote a PR, it’s already merged and will probably show up on instances soon.
Very nice!! Congratulations!
Yes that’s definitely one the things I am leaning towards. On my main “gripes” with Lemmy right now, is the lack of keyboard shortcuts (think of stuff like, CRTL+enter to send a reply for example). So I wanna see if I can add that in the frontend repository.
Sounds like a cool project!
Make sure to check the issues/PRs, it looks like people already worked on CTRL+Enter.
Oh damn! That’s nice! But that means I have to find another thing to do :P
If you are familiar with programming in general, you should be able to use those skills in Rust. Also, there is front end developing to do. I haven’t looked into what tool kits they use for the front end, but I imagine CSS, HTML, and JavaScript/TypeScript knowledge would be useful.
Yeah, of course you can learn a new language. But it’s only moderately helpful for a FOSS project for random people who don’t really know the language and really don’t know the project to just dip their toes in and commit something.
Often this causes more work that it helps.
I agree with you on driveby PRs don’t help much at all. And I’m not going to pretend I’m going to sink the time required to understand how lemmy works and give quality PRs, and I don’t expect you to either. I just wanted to say, don’t let the language be what stops you.
True that. I just meant, if you are really good in that language, a driveby PR might at least be mildly useful, while if I as a Java dev start messing with a project in a language I don’t know, chances are pretty low that I’ll be able to produce something worthwhile.