Seems like an interesting effort. A developer is building an alternative Java-based backend to Lemmy’s Rust-based one, with the goal of building in a handful of different features. The dev is looking at using this compatibility to migrate their instance over to the new platform, while allowing the community to use their apps of choice.
From the project website:
Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform , reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin.
But the author of PieFed, written in even more popular language than Java (Python) said:
The thing with the more twitter-style ActivityPub projects is they send activities to individual users inboxes a lot, whereas with the threadverse it’s all shared inboxes. So there’s a fundamental difference in the way they use the protocol which makes scaling those projects much more difficult. My gut feel is that adding full microblog support would increase the size and complexity of the codebase by at least 50% and triple the server load. Maybe much more. It just doesn’t seem worth it.
A feature creep?
(maybe they see a bus factor = 1 as the only issue of /kbin, though)
I think the developer of PieFed is mistaken because the microblogging projects also use shared inbox a lot. My understanding is that for certain classes of posts, they actually just use it over a user’s individual inbox and the remote server is responsible for delivering it from the shared inbox to the user’s timeline.
Huh, this is interesting