Hey everyone! I talked a bit in the January Newsletter about us expanding the admin team but figured I would do a post specifically about the development team so I can go more into depth about it.
Currently in the admin teams around half the people are in infrastructure and the other half are in community with 1 person in development making the split around 4/4/1. This means that currently ive been the only one doing the development work so figured I would do a post looking for some more help
Whats the development team
The development team is in charge of development projects for the instance for users to interact with. This ranges from adding in features to the software we use (e.g. lemmy, sublinks) that the instance needs, to making supporting development projects such as events, bots, a support page, etc.
What would joining the team mean?
If you want to help out and join the team theres a very wide range of possible things that could be worked on depending on what you enjoy.
For frontend currently theres some supporting sites being built such as a team page, a support page, a donation page, etc. as well as the frontend for sublinks which will become the instance default UI at some point. Primary languages used are JavaScript and TypeScript and sublinks uses Next.js
For backend the backend of sublinks is currently under construction. Primary languages used are Java for backend and Go for federation. We also have another thing we will be hosting soon that is currently being rewritten to use C# for the backend
(for people who dont know what sublinks is its a lemmy alternative being built with the help of a bunch of different instances and lemmy alternative frontend devs. Being built with a compatible API so will be easy to swap out to it when it reaches parity with all of the apps and frontends still working)
If youre also interested in making some misc thing that might not fit in either of these but could be cool for the instance feel free to join as well. For example some supporting bots or a tool for users to use (e.g. post scheduler (this already exists but this kind of thing))
How much time would I have to commit?
Theres no real hard time limit you need to fulfill. Were all volunteers helping out here and anything helps. If youre mostly busy during the week but have time to fix a small bug on a site for a couple hours thats perfectly fine
Im not great at coding, can I still join?
Yep! Anyone is free to join regardless of level and if you need some help I can guide you through how to develop using the technologies we use or can get some other developers to help out if its more backend related since im primarily frontend. Certain tasks are available on some of the projects that are fine for new coders to do
How to join?
If youre interested feel free to dm me or comment below and I can add you to the development team spaces. The admin team in general primarily chats on our discord server https://discord.gg/kwyxvYEYt4
this post is being pinned in the instance for 24 hours
We had a lot of debate about the license. I’m curious if you can argue why MIT is wrong and why we should use AGPL. AGPL was the original plan, but I was convinced to change it to MIT by @[email protected].
I replied to lazy guru below but basically I feel as though his argument about stifling innovation is a sorta win some lose some reason and allowing instances to go proprietary isn’t conducive to an open ecosystem. Basically the only way as a user to ensure you’re not inadvertently running proprietary code you might not want to run would be to host your own instance. Additionally to piggy back on that hosting your own instance might not be as feature complete due to wide spread use of proprietary or custom extensions used by other instances. A Lemmy extension betters the entire Lemmy ecosystem, a sublinks extension only betters the sublinks instance that developed it(unless they decide to contribute it back and hopefully they will)
As AGPL contains copyleft clauses it protects both you and your users by requiring reciprocation via source code accessibility.
Main difference/addition of GPL:
If I remember correctly this addresses the patent trolling loophole that drug companies often exploit.
btw I AM NOT A LAWYER