Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy

by adamnemecek • 7 years ago

319 99 7 years ago

github.com

olah_1• 7 years ago

sharing some others in case it helps

- https://github.com/mariusor/littr.go

- https://gitlab.com/tuxether/anancus

mpnordland• 7 years ago

Another, decentralized, project https://getaether.net/

rolleiflex2• 7 years ago

Yup, creator of Aether here. Small difference, this is federated, Aether is decentralised. Far as I understand this is more like Mastodon where some people host servers that talk to each other. Aether is more like a decentralised Usenet, every user is a server.

stevenicr• 7 years ago

Love the processes in this aether project with the voting for mods and such. Wish there was an easy way to clone it and create a subspace aether system that was not attached to the others. I have some user groups that would use this kind of thing - but they would quickly try to game the mod voting thing in many ways, wreck all kinds of havoc trying to get things blocked / banned and ruined - and so we'd need a function for a high level set of super mods and a way to prevent the coming toxic soup from running over into the main project. Took a look at the open source page on there and there is a bunch of stuff, it's impressive, but too complex for me to try to piece together. Perhaps something like riot matrix is more like we need, and to find some way to incorporate the mod voting kind of system as some kind of addin to a self hosted instance of matrix kind of thing.

muvek4• 7 years ago

Where the hell is the source-code? Can't find it anywhere linked on the website..

microcolonel• 7 years ago

The quality of this seems high, from the frontend on the dev instance. All actions are effectively instantaneous.

Good work!

rum3• 7 years ago

It works really well and looks great.

Very nice work!

cabalamat2• 7 years ago

Nice project!

(I'm also doing a Fediverse project -- MeowCat https://github.com/cabalamat/meowcat2)

muvek4• 7 years ago

Do you have a public instance? Does it federate yet?

cabalamat2• 7 years ago

No to either question yet.

zmlzm• 7 years ago

Cool, written in actix!

twic4• 7 years ago

Cool, or not cool, depending on whether you ever got over the unsafety scandal around Actix.

nine_k• 7 years ago

Nice!

What I haven't found in the docs is how federation would work.

smacktoward• 7 years ago

Via ActivityPub — see https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md.

For more general info on ActivityPub itself, see https://activitypub.rocks.

s_y_n_t_a_x3• 7 years ago

The code quality is amazing. Good job.

saberience3• 7 years ago

On the contrary, I thought the code was terrible quality. If someone wrote this code at my company they would be fired, or more likely not hired in the first place.

nvssj• 7 years ago

What makes you say so? Can you give examples?

MarvelousWololo• 7 years ago

That's a terrible, sad and rude comment that does not belong in HN. Instead of just criticize you could offer a constructive review. I hope English is not your native language and it has a less aggressive tone in the translation.

twic4• 7 years ago

Given the response to this, i would be interested to hear why you thought the code quality was amazing. We seem to have two people with different ideas about code quality, and perhaps we would all learn something by investigating that difference.

s_y_n_t_a_x3• 7 years ago

I was mainly commenting on the frontend as I'm not well-versed in Rust, my dissenter seems to have a problem with the backend and the organization of the project, which seems unfair since it's in it's infancy, you can always restructure a project and reorganize code. I was commenting on the code, not the files.

As for the frontend, it's all typed, and very minimal. Very rarely do we see frontend code that does just what it needs to do and nothing else. The fact that they achieved a "React-like" (Inferno) environment and managed to keep the frontend under 80KB is a feat.

That's not to say it's perfect, but it's not finished. I was just very surprised to be able to jump right into the code and see what was going on without wading through boilerplate.

ummonk• 7 years ago

Looks like it uses ActivityPub - https://github.com/dessalines/lemmy/blob/master/docs/API.md

Nice.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

Serious question: from a user perspective, isn't spam going to be insanely bad in the Fediverse? How do you stop spam without a central authority?

kitotik• 7 years ago

Similar to an email service. You rely on the node operators to manage it.

theamk• 7 years ago

So delegate this all to a few large blacklists (spamhaus)? And block all residential users by default?

kiriakasis• 7 years ago

There can also be spam servers that publish blacklists like with emails

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 7 years ago

Yeah, and look how well it works in the email world.

antpls• 7 years ago

Federated bayesian filters or local machine learning ?

You could have a personal (stored on device) Bayesian filter that learns from your preferences, and a shared one to block spam spotted by your contacts

As other people suggested, I don't think it should be at the node operator level, for freedom of speech concerns

johnchristopher• 7 years ago

Don't know why you are being downvoted. Thunderbird was marketed as having a bayesian filter a decade or more ago.

zaarn3• 7 years ago

As someone running a federated server (mastodon); you get more problems with local spam than with foreign spam.

Most instances will quickly shut down any spam, so it doesn't really fill the federated timeline that much. Local accounts are something you as an administrator need to act on, so they are the annoying ones.

In my experience, instances that allow spam are rare and the get quickly blacklisted by everyone from showing up in the timelines (there is luckily a neat middleground between blocking the instance entirely and not doing that; allow local users to subscribe to that instance, which is my default action for all instances that aren't hosting illegal material for me).

zbqxu• 7 years ago

It doesn't look like that might scale at all. In other words, it works because Mastodon is a very small, niche community.

Good thing is that the Mastodon instance owners use shared block lists for servers that are currently used to ban free speech instances; that infrastructure could also be used to create a collectively managed list of instances that are full of spam.

jononor• 7 years ago

Might be offset by way fewer ads, influencers and platform-driven notifications. I find that those things are the main sources of spam on say Twitter or Instragram.

Deimorz• 7 years ago

It doesn't look like there's any federation right now, the test site (https://dev.lemmy.ml/) says "Federation into the ActivityPub network is on the roadmap."

matousd• 7 years ago

I have also reddit/HN clone running on https://esourcenews.com with code on github (written in python - Flask https://github.com/matoous/newz). Although this one is not federated I added tools such as automatic RSS feed import.

thejohnconway• 7 years ago

Oh. Activity pub is complex and difficult to implement. The test suite is down.

Leaving it to last makes me worry that it won’t happen.

muvek4• 7 years ago

Check out https://gitlab.com/mbajur/prismo/.

theoh• 7 years ago

I'm not convinced by ActivityPub. A lot of people seem to think that it's cool but the documentation makes it look like it's just a schema for social media applications. It might be an obvious move to try to standardize social media platforms because they all involve roughly the same kinds of user activities. Interoperability is cool, I agree. But the ActivityPub documentation has a whiff of the old XML/"semantic web" hype about it. It's verbose, unnecessarily object-oriented, and it doesn't seem to advance any kind of new or interesting vision for the architecture of these interconnected systems.

I get that somebody probably needed to do this work of standardization. As a project it seems to lack imagination, though. There is nothing to get excited about as far as I can see. It's just a consolidation of very familiar social media functions.

muststopmyths• 7 years ago

off topic but ~20 years ago Lemmy was a beautiful,native vi clone for Windows. I wish the author had kept it going or made it open source. Vim has such an ugly GUI.

aerique• 7 years ago

So... Usenet?

fsiefken• 7 years ago

Very nice! I am curious how this would compare to Discourse feature and usability wise.

It would also nice to have a NNTP gateway to these webforums. VBulletin had one.

pojntfx• 7 years ago

Wow, this is awesome.

sureaboutthis• 7 years ago

I don't understand what this is. At first, I thought it was a scraper for links which is the only reason I go to reddit at all. Such a thing would help stop me from getting sucked into the 80% of reddit which is nothing but a smelly pile of poo.

So what does this do?

nicoburns• 7 years ago

This is a reimplementation of a reddit-like site. But open source, and with ambitions to work in a federated (as opposed to centralised) way.

You could use this code to host your own Reddit (or you will be able to once they project is more developed).

5trokerac3• 7 years ago

One suggestion: if you want the federated crowd to jump on board, then choose another font provider than Google, which uses their font links for tracking.

goodells2• 7 years ago

Thanks for pointing this out. I guess this is something I had assumed Google does by serving the fonts for free, but I never really bothered to look into it. Going to remove all Google Fonts references from my projects now.

drivebycomment2• 7 years ago

Google claims they don't track with fonts: https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#what_does_using_the_...

Whether you believe them or not is up to you of course.

orthecreedence2• 7 years ago

Keep in mind you can download the fonts and host locally. You don't have to let Google host.

lazarljubenovic• 7 years ago

Source?

mattchew• 7 years ago

Nice! I hope this gets traction.

Communitivity• 7 years ago

Mastodon has been responsible for helping drive a lot of growth in the federated app space. PeerTube for videos, and perhaps a dozen other services (see https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/06/why-activitypub-is-the... for some of them).

I also recently found the early but promising Plume project for operating a federated blog ( https://joinplu.me/ ).

Icing on the cake? Quite a few of the federated projects are written in Rust.

0xb100db1ade• 7 years ago

Federated blog?

Is that any different from a regular website?

bisby• 7 years ago

I would assume it is just a regular website with some backend for federated discovery.

I don't read many blogs but I would assume having tags or a "more like this" that search across the fediverse could be useful?

Are those things that people have in blogs?

FraaJad• 7 years ago

Is there a rust implementation of mastodon? The dependencies for the current implementations are too brittle IMHO.

swills• 7 years ago

Perhaps rustodon: https://github.com/rustodon/rustodon

rthomas6• 7 years ago

There's a fairly popular project written in Elixir called Pleroma. It's not Rust, but it's a lot faster and lighter than Ruby.

ptman• 7 years ago

There's honk https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/honk-preview (not rust, but go)

bartimus• 7 years ago

I think a project like Diaspora failed because they chose to write it in Ruby on Rails. Ruby is nice from a purist point of view. But you'd want to build something like this on top of a language which is popular, accessible, has a low learning curve and can be easily deployed anywhere.

forgotmypw3• 7 years ago

Your site is blank without JS...

Lemmy: Federated Alternative to Reddit in Rust

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