cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/24889
[Disclaimer: Lemmy newb here]
There are currently 3 Rust communities across 3 instances: programming.dev, lemmyrs.org and this one (lemmy.ml). I know it’s still very early for the migration from /r/rust, but it would split the community if there are so many options and nobody knows which is the “right” one. Currently this community has the most subscribers, but it would make sense if the Rust community finds its new home in one of the other instances.
- lemmyrs.org seems like the logical solution if instance-wide rules are paramount and “non-negotiable”
- personally I would love a programming-centric instance and programming.dev seems like a good way. Rust is not the only language I’m actively using (unfortunately :)). Maybe there can be community-specific rules that “enforce” the Rust CoC and the Rust community can find a home there?
Either way, the current situation has the most negative impact.
Thoughts?
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its just like reddit, when there are multiple subreddits for the same topic, like r/mantids and r/mantis. eventually new users will probably just pick the one that has the most people and work itself out that way or just join both
programming.dev sounds like the best option to me too. But I’m just a lurker
Agree that one is best I suppose, but on my own little instance I can subscribe to all 3 and interact with all of them just fine. If I had to pick one I would go programming.dev, it would expose rust to programmers not yet using it and would let users on that instance see communities for languages they otherwise might not check out.
I’d like for the r/rust community to completely migrate to lemmy, and for the r/rust moderators to become moderators of the chosen lemmy instance.
I don’t care which instance it will be, although I do like the idea of the Rust community being fully self-sufficient and self-governed by hosting our own instance (but still being interoperable with others). The main downside seems to be that people who are active in multiple communities will need multiple accounts, and creating an account requires
- a unique username (too bad if the name you use on another instance is already taken here)
- a password you need to save in your password manager
- approval by the instance owners/moderators, which makes this not only tedious, but also slow
And if you use a mobile app as well as the web app, you need to login twice after the account was approved.
On another note: The lemmyrs.org instance currently has several “communities”, which are more like categories. They might be a substitute for Reddit flairs, which should allow people to filter what they see on their Reddit homepage. However, Lemmy doesn’t support flairs, and on r/rust they weren’t actually used that much. Most people didn’t set a flair when posting something, which kind of defeated the purpose. I think we should come up with a proper solution for this at some point.
I’d like for the r/rust community to completely migrate to lemmy, and for the r/rust moderators to become moderators of the chosen lemmy instance.
If the /r/rust moderators join programming.dev I will immediately make them mods of [email protected]!
A few things:
- Instances are like their own self-hosted Reddits with communities being the sub-reddits. We have (had?) r/python, r/rust, r/golang along with r/programming; we can do the same here with topic-focused instance (like this one). I can imagine there being instances like lemmygo.org, lemmypy.org etc if the Reddit exodus continues.
- You don’t need multiple accounts to access communities (sub-reddits) from other instances (reddit). A single account on any instance allows you to access communities from any other instance. The UX/UI is a bit wonky, but it works.
- As @[email protected] pointed out, micro-communities like cli, wasm, networking etc can potentially become big enough and/or have specifics that are more suitable to exist on a topic-based instance.
Personally, I don’t have any preference. I will simply subscribe to the community which is the most active on whichever instance.
The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.
The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.
I’d vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don’t go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.
If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger “open source” server, I’d consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself
I think it would be really cool if the Rust Foundation had a Rust Lemmy instance!
The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data.
Well, sure, if you know who the owner of lemmyrs is, and if they follow all the other stuff you talk about here.
If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.
Correct! Which is why I’ve already taken great pains to make sure that if something happens to me (owner of programming.dev) that the server continues to run. I already have someone else managing the domain with me, several people have access to the server. Backups occur daily. Is some sort of “legally separated backup where if I die the lawyers can hand over the db backups to someone else and they can take over” what you’re looking for? I am trying very hard to make sure that the website does not depend on a single person to keep it running, but it seems like a lot of people want something to happen, but can’t describe what that is.
Oh I’m not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient… Honestly I don’t know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you’ve got some policies in place already).
I’m more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn’t happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).
If programming.dev meets those things today, I’d say sure lets move there. I think its better to have a lemmy instance for a concept (computer science) than a specific topic (rust), but that’s just me
Oh I’m not saying what your doing over at programming.dev is wrong or insufficient… Honestly I don’t know what your doing to ensure the lemmy server exists long term (though its great to hear you’ve got some policies in place already).
Oh yes, I completely understood you weren’t saying that. I’m asking what we can do to make it more likely for the community to want to be at [email protected]! I want to do as much as possible! The rust community would be a huge benefit to others in the instance, and we think others will be more likely to want to work on the Lemmy project if the Rust community does join. Having programmers alongside each other will be really helpful to us all I think.
I’m more thinking the rust community should evaluate options and vote, or some rust subgroup of the leadership should set criteria to ensure that another reddit-type event doesn’t happen again (the home of this community must be open-source, with data backups publicly available, with a governing body and a line of succession or something, etc).
Yeah I’d love to see this! The data backups being publicly available might cause a problem (then your usernames and passwords have a chance of being cracked 😬), but other than that, yeah I completely agree!
Agreed, there are advantages of having an own community. Especially until the people running e.g. programming.dev have a proven track record of being reliable.
Hi, creator of programming.dev here. What could we do to prove reliability to you? Would open graphs and metrics of the current state of the service help? Would current server costs and how much has been covered by donations help? Would knowing the names of everyone with access to the server, on the admin team, or access to the domain name help?
It seems to me like a user stood up an instance of lemmy and because it has
rsas part of the name you might be treating it like the Rust community’s, but to me, it’s exactly the same as programming.dev, except it has a lot less chance of staying running.
