In this post I am speaking as a Beehaw fanatic and not as an admin. That is why it is placed in the chat community. To be clear, I am not speaking on behalf of the Beehaw admin team nor the community as a whole.
Currently, we have $5,430 that is in our collective purse to be used to further this endeavor. When I take a step back, and look at that amount of money, I am humbled. That is hope…it is an expression of where we want to go and what we want to preserve.
You may be wondering where we are with the testing of alternative platforms and any other considerations.
The testing phase, as far as I can tell, is over. We are, I believe, in a stage of digesting all of it. And, I have a feeling, that we are holding out hope that there could be other options we haven’t encountered yet.
I appreciate the patience of everyone involved and I don’t want to make a hasty decision.
Thankfully, we have had persons such as PenguinCoder to rescue us from the huge Reddit exodus and all the technical problems associated with the Lemmy software platform that we rely on right now.
There have been whispers that PenguinCoder could be working on a new platform for the Beehaw project.
Thank you all for grabbing onto our northern star, be(e) nice, and running with it.
@penguincoder@beehaw.org is a pretty active dev for Beehaw, has been very open about his views that the lemmy software is built on very shaky foundations, including the programming language and architecture choices underpinning the whole thing, making moderation unnecessarily difficult and making it hard to comply with legal requirements of hosting such a service, and providing severe limits to scale. It might make more sense to build up a new forum from the ground up, compatible with ActivityPub, than to try to fork Lemmy, or persuade Lemmy’s existing maintainers to start accepting big patches.
I mean Rust is a godsend as a decision for the language to use. Kbin for example uses Php, which means I’ll never contribute to it. Other alternatives would be like Python, Node, or Golang, but why? The first two won’t scale as well on a single node and all will have worse static typing (especially Golang). When I examined the code, it seemed like a standard sql+rust stack. I can’t imagine anything even major needing changing, let alone a full rewrite.
I have no dog in the fight, but Penguincoder has been pretty vocal about Rust being the wrong choice for a web service: slow to develop and modify, easy to make mistakes that take much more work to fix later (and blames this fact for the state of the lemmy codebase). Its greatest strength is the speed of execution, but that doesn’t really matter for web servers, that are basically never CPU limited.
I think the moderation tool examples given sound pretty broken, and it isn’t just Beehaw admins complaining about them. Lemmy.world and a few others have instance admins complaining about how hard it is to remove images from the server (deleting posts/users/comments just orphans the image file without deleting the associated file), how all the moderation functions seem not to contemplate the federation issue (removing an abusive comment or banning a user on one instance does nothing to address that same problematic content already federated to another instance).
All that being said, a rewrite is still harder. Think how much work kbin and lemmy have put in. Think of all the apps that have been developed around them. It’s still sql driven, meaning you can easily write any kind of moderation tool you want in any language of your choice.
I think the Rust vs Golang question is just opinionated, and until there’s something better than activitypub there’s nothing even a fork can really do about those issues, and I’d really want the FSF to deal with those kinds of complaints.