End of January Updates - Sublinks, Community Stats, New Community Head, Hexbear, Expanding the Admin Team, & Something Releasing Soon
Hey everyone, have a lot of updates on things occuring around the instance so figured would compile them all into one post. Will be pinned for 24 hours in the instance
Sublinks
In the past a bunch of you may have seen me working on a new frontend for the instance called Pangora. That has been merged into another project called Sublinks which should let progress go way faster (was previously 2 people who contributed to Pangora vs now 18 in Sublinks)
Sublinks is releasing with a lemmy compatible API and we should be switching over to it once it reaches parity. As the API is lemmy compatible all alternative frontends and apps will still be usable when we swap over.
The backend is using Java, the frontend is using TypeScript with Next.js, and the federation is using Go
New Community Team Lead
Ive been prepping to stop being the community lead for awhile now so I can focus on the development side of things and ill be transitioning fully over the course of the next month into being only on the development team. The new community team lead will be @recursive_recursion@programming.dev
With me focusing on development I should be able to develop things for the instance a lot faster so you should see some new things popping up soon :)
Hexbear
Hexbear handles federation by votes and they recently had a vote and removed programming.dev, lemm.ee, and aussie.zone from their allowlist. Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations
Community Stats
Types of Communities
Lively: 5001+ members
Active: 201-5000
Moderate: 51-200
Quiet: 11-50
Dead: 0-10
Stats
Lively: 0% (-1% from last month) (theres still 1 lively community but the total communities pushed it down to 0%)
Active: 7% (~)
Moderate: 12% (+2%)
Quiet: 26% (-8%)
Dead: 55% (+7%)
Total: 243 communities (+55 from last month)
Overall the amount of communities has been getting significant expanded and starting out near the bottom in terms of active users. I assume these are going to start climbing up within the next month and there should be a boost to moderate and quiet. Moderate still has been growing and active has been holding on to its 7% even with the amount of new communities
Expanding the Admin Team
We have a new thing releasing soon and in preparation of that we are expanding out the admin teams. If youre interested in helping out in the instance (development, infrastructure, or community) feel free to reach out
New Release Soon
Speaking of the new thing releasing soon it should hopefully be released sometime within the next month as a subdomain here. For anyone who wants to beta test it its theoretically up now if you're able to find it. Good luck :)
Alternative to lemmy being developed (but is also using activitypub so the two federate and its compatible with the lemmy api so frontends like sync, boost, photon, etc. will still work). When version 0.1 releases itll essentially have parity with lemmy features but with a better UI and then the next updates will be adding more things for moderation, federation, etc.
People from our instance, discuss.online, lemmy.world, etc. have been working on it
Will mostly be decided when that happens (and sublinks should be giving a lot more tools to work with for federation and moderation). Within the instance itself we didnt have any issues with hexbear users though
Pangora is getting merged into sublinks-ui. Ive been moving over stuff I made for it and adapting it to their codebase. Was planning on soft forking sublinks into a new version of pangora but might not need to tbh, all my stuff I wanted is getting added into sublinks
lemm.ee I dont know (probably their politics compared to hexbear's), aussie.zone was due to some comments by their admin. programming.dev was due to the situation with snowe thats a bit back in meta. The votes for aussie.zone and us were tied half for federation half against
Found the new thing, looks interesting and will give it a try! Would it be possible to use SSO with a Lemmy account from programming.dev? Sure that would help adoption/usage and additionally support 2FA automatically.
Edit: I see it supports 2FA already in settings. If not possible to SSO with Lemmy then it might be nice to recommend 2FA in the signup flow.
Would be a bit of work to connect up the logins of the two softwares since they both handle people and logins differently. So probably not something supported on release but I can try to see if I can do something