Skip Navigation
Lemmy Apps @lemmy.world
Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Mlmym (also known as old.lemmy) isn't maintained anymore, and features are starting to become unusable as instances are migrating to newer versions. Would someone be interested in forking the project?

24 comments

  • Were there any updates on this? Did anyone end up forking it?

  • Maybe petition the Lemmy devs to not pointlessly break API v3 since they're moving to v4?

    • Isn't the whole point of having different api versions to not break compatibility, so apps can continue using v3?

      • Yep, and that's how we do API versioning at work. One app is on like API v9 now, and I think we support back to v5 or maybe even v4.

        Their justification is that pre v1.0, you can break whatever you want whenever you want. But when you've got a large community of people developing for the ecosystem over several years, it's kind of a slap in the face to keep breaking the API. I appreciate that 0.19.0 - 0.19.11 has been fairly stable, but breaking v3 while also rolling out v4 is just inexcusable.

        I get that v3 will eventually need to be deprecated and apps move to v4, but you'd think they'd put all their breaking changes in v4, let v4 stabilize and run concurrently with v3, and then drop v3 a few versions down the line. Except a few paid apps, I don't think most of us are doing this full time and have other things to deal with.

        But what do I know? It's not like I do this for a living. Oh, wait...

  • I have some interest in trying to take that on if it's really unmaintained now. I use mlmym and want to make sure we continue to have an interface that works w/o JS. I have relevant web programming experience, but not with Go specifically.

    @nnrx@lemmy.world FYI, if you're still here.

    • That would be great!

    • I've started changing some smaller things over on Fedihosting-Foundation-Forks/mlmym. I don't really have time, motivation or Go knowledge to fully maintain and develop new functionality there, especially as I don't use it myself, but I'm currently planning to keep it on life support at least and see if I can at least fix some stability issues.

      I also already forked and updated go-lemmy, which should now support the latest Lemmy 0.19.11 APIs.

      Currently the primary focus for this is to have builds for old.lemmy.world, but I wouldn't be opposed to have this used as a generic repo if other people want to contribute. I'm currently not planning to intentionally break things in a way that would prevent usage outside of Lemmy.World, but unless there are other people interested in contributing as well, I will primarily just focus on ensuring compatibility with the Lemmy version we are running.

      • Thanks. I'm still learning both Go and the codebases involved. I'm pretty limited on free time where I've got both large enough blocks of time and energy to concentrate effectively on this. I'm also not very enthusiastic about taking on the administrative aspects of running an open source project -- I'm only really interested in keeping a JS-free version of Lemmy usable -- so contributing changes to a common community fork you've already got up and running sounds good to me!

        I do have some specific issues in mind that I'd like to implement fixes for once I'm up to speed. In particular:

        • There is improper filtering when a user submits a comment which results in certain text being stripped from the message instead of escaped properly. I'm not sure if this is an issue in mlmym itself or one of the libraries it uses, but I'd like to track it down and get it fixed.
        • Federated image links to non-lemmy websites sometimes show up as image_proxy links from the poster's instance. This is a really annoying issue that results in misleading domains showing up next to posts as well as breaking image display in the post itself.
        • Comments sorted by 'new' (and maybe other modes?) don't paginate properly.

        I may take on some other issues after that, but those three are what I want to fix most right now.

  • Playing devils advocate. Lemmy isn't reddit and the only reason people used old reddit was because new reddit was unusable to them.

    As with new context and new front ends that Lemmy has, no one with the technical skills seems to care about this enough and blaming Lemmy Devs for not tiptoeing around unmaintained software so development grinds to a halt isn't fair. It's like saying "they don't want to support it, and I don't, but you shouldn't spend your free time doing so".

    • Lemmy isn’t reddit and the only reason people used old reddit was because new reddit was unusable to them.

      The comment in the OP shows that at least one person cares.

      Mlmym also has the "show images" button that the default Web UI doesn't

      no one with the technical skills seems to care about this enough

      That's what this post is trying to solve

      blaming Lemmy Devs for not tiptoeing around unmaintained software so development grinds to a halt isn’t fair.

      I'm not blaming the Lemmy devs (I should rephrase if the post comes as such), the goal of this post was mainly to find someone interested in keeping mlmym up-to-date, not to blame anyone

    • New lemmy isn't nearly as bad as new reddit, but I still prefer old because it's more compact. The formatting on new vs old displays 7 vs 12 posts on one screen, which feels like a lot of wasted space. I know, first world problems and all that

    • Lemmy isn't reddit and the only reason people used old reddit was because new reddit was unusable to them.

      If “because new reddit was unusable to them” is a polite way of saying “because new reddit is a bloated, buggy, and worthless coding disaster” then I agree completely.

24 comments