Hey everyone! I talked a bit in the January Newsletter about us expanding the admin team but figured I would do a post specifically about the development team so I can go more into depth about it.

Currently in the admin teams around half the people are in infrastructure and the other half are in community with 1 person in development making the split around 4/4/1. This means that currently ive been the only one doing the development work so figured I would do a post looking for some more help

Whats the development team

The development team is in charge of development projects for the instance for users to interact with. This ranges from adding in features to the software we use (e.g. lemmy, sublinks) that the instance needs, to making supporting development projects such as events, bots, a support page, etc.

What would joining the team mean?

If you want to help out and join the team theres a very wide range of possible things that could be worked on depending on what you enjoy.

For frontend currently theres some supporting sites being built such as a team page, a support page, a donation page, etc. as well as the frontend for sublinks which will become the instance default UI at some point. Primary languages used are JavaScript and TypeScript and sublinks uses Next.js

For backend the backend of sublinks is currently under construction. Primary languages used are Java for backend and Go for federation. We also have another thing we will be hosting soon that is currently being rewritten to use C# for the backend

(for people who dont know what sublinks is its a lemmy alternative being built with the help of a bunch of different instances and lemmy alternative frontend devs. Being built with a compatible API so will be easy to swap out to it when it reaches parity with all of the apps and frontends still working)

If youre also interested in making some misc thing that might not fit in either of these but could be cool for the instance feel free to join as well. For example some supporting bots or a tool for users to use (e.g. post scheduler (this already exists but this kind of thing))

How much time would I have to commit?

Theres no real hard time limit you need to fulfill. Were all volunteers helping out here and anything helps. If youre mostly busy during the week but have time to fix a small bug on a site for a couple hours thats perfectly fine

Im not great at coding, can I still join?

Yep! Anyone is free to join regardless of level and if you need some help I can guide you through how to develop using the technologies we use or can get some other developers to help out if its more backend related since im primarily frontend. Certain tasks are available on some of the projects that are fine for new coders to do

How to join?

If youre interested feel free to dm me or comment below and I can add you to the development team spaces. The admin team in general primarily chats on our discord server https://discord.gg/kwyxvYEYt4

this post is being pinned in the instance for 24 hours

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.

For anyone interested in the project the matrix space for it is here https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online and the repositories are here https://github.com/sublinks

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 @[email protected]

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 :)

Hint: Larger than bits

We upgraded to 0.19.3 which should fix a bunch of bugs including the need for us to restart the servers every day

• The site now receives reports from mastodon and kbin
• Admins can see votes in the UI (could previously do so within the database but this makes it easier to moderate votes)
• Post views have a secondary sort of published date added so things that have the hot rank of 0 arent returned randomly
• Max title is based on chars (previously it was bytes)
• Mastodon federation (aka posts showing up when people follow the community in mastodon) has been fixed

Pulled some updates for some of the alternate frontends were hosting!

Photon

(https://p.programming.dev)

• Community and instance sidebar got overhauled to declutter them a ton

Voyager

(https://v.programming.dev)

• You can now create crossposts
• Unread item color got changed
• Updated login + sign up flow
• Autofill crosspost titles
• A new setting has been added to show posts youve hidden so it shows in the community it was posted in rather than being hidden everywhere
• User and community autosuggest when you start typing the relative links for them (!community@instance and @user@instance)
• Account switching anywhere
• Guest accounts

Place to discuss anything relating to notepad++ whether that be getting help, posting news, showing off features, etc.

For people who dont know what notepad++ is, its a free source code editor for windows https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Links:

• [email protected]
• /c/notepadplusplus
• @[email protected]

A community for sharing comics related to programming (xkcd, monkeyuser, wizard zines, etc.)

Links:

• [email protected]
• /c/comics
• @[email protected]

A community for sharing comics related to programming (xkcd, monkeyuser, wizard zines, etc.)

Links:

• [email protected]
• /c/comics
• @[email protected]

Finally fixed the issues I was having with mlmym and we now have our fourth alternate frontend in the instance! This one is similar to old reddit if you prefer that sort of browsing experience. I know some users requested it in the past

Frontend is up at https://old.programming.dev

We now have the four main alternate frontends hosted. The other three are currently in the site sidebar and ill be adding mlmym there as well now

Hey everyone! Got time to write up an update so figured I would update on events that have been happening around Pangora

Im going to be working on severely changing how the project is handled

Theres another project thats been getting made and rather than work on a separate thing than them ive decided to merge my work on pangora into their project

After that pangora will be soft forked (in both the front and back ends) for specific niche customizations but the majority of the development will be done in that other projects repository

They havent announced it publicly so ill let them be the ones to do that but if youre interested in helping develop it (or if youre an admin of an instance) feel free to reach out and I can add you to a chat for it (main languages used are java, typescript (next.js), and go)

In other news for the project I made a couple supporting sites

• https://badges.pangora.social/ - used to generate badges to show instance community or user stats
• https://recap.pangora.social/ - used to see a recap of your stats for the year

Overall this means that rather than work on a beta for the frontend ill be working on the other projects frontend to get pangora into there. Expect things like a beta when that other frontend is done and I can fork it properly

Hey everyone. Some of you may have seen the recent announcement with blahaj to defederate with the instance. Ive been handling things privately and wanted to do an announcement to catch you all up on the results of that

#1: Background knowledge

Realized that not everyone knows how the instance is structured so figured I would do a little section in the front to go over that (especially for visitors reading this from other instances)

We currently have 8 admins in the instance. Of those 2 people are currently lead admins (snowe and I). Majority of admins are part of the community team but not all of them (people are split between infrastructure, development, and community). I was planning out a team page similar to what lemmy.world has to go over this with a bit more detail and that should be coming in the future. Main thing though is its intentionally structured so one person doesnt solely have power (hence the two leads). If one person ends up messing up theres the other lead and the rest of the admin team to talk with them about it and help them do better in the future.

#2: What happened?

There was a thread in lemmy.ml about the hogwarts legacy game winning a steam award. For reference for the following images + description, snowe is the other lead admin for the instance apart from me and the other people are various other users

There was a conversation that ended up essentially devolving into a slap fight within this post (ive purged the entire conversation so people dont stumble onto it in the future but ill post images here with them for archiving reasons and to explain it)

^ These comments were what initially started it. Essentially it was an argument about the hogwarts legacy game being or being not transphobic

^ Later in the argument

^ One branch that ended up getting started due to the frontend snowe uses on mobile not showing pronouns (how most instances handle it currently is its appended to the end of the display name but some frontends choose to ignore the display name and just do the username instead)

(edit: changed the word triggered to started to make it more clear what definition of triggered I used. Forgot that tends to not be common usage)

There are other branches but it is a very large amount to screenshot and dont want this to completely flood this post. Everything should be available in the modlogs still if you want to dig a bit deeper or I can send other screenshots in the replies on this post if youre interested in what was said for certain parts

#3 Aftermath

Due to the argument above blahaj chose to defederate with programming.dev which was going to take effect 48 hours after their announcement on it. (This is due to the person in the conversation being one of our lead admins which is ultimately understandable as they represent the instance)

snowe has sent a message apologizing to ada (the lead admin for blahaj). I dont know the contents of what was said but if they want the two of them can choose to publicize it.

One of our admins should not have escalated the situation and participated in this slap fight so on behalf of the admin team here were sorry about that

Internally we have a guidebook for admins to follow for the various aspects of the instance (moderation, applications, etc.). Ive refined this guidebook with a couple new rules for admins that should be taking effect in the future

• admins will be required to have two accounts, one for admin activities and one for non admin activities. This is how some admins have already been interacting in the fediverse and basically makes it so comments done on the non-admin account should not be taken as that admin speaking on behalf of the instance. Generally the admin account will be things done relating to admin duties (e.g. my posts here in meta) while the non-admin account is other various conversations. Admins can be as anonymous as they want with the non-admin account similar to how our users here can be as anonymous as they want with their accounts
• im adding in some guidelines for tone while chatting for the admins so comments made that are on behalf of the instance should be respectful and not devolve to slap fights

Like I said before in #2 ive also purged the entire conversation to avoid people stumbling onto it and seeing a slap fight with an admin that has since apologized. As the community exists on lemmy.ml I cant fully do this due to how federation works in lemmy but the mods in the community have been doing the same which should federate.

This should not have happened in the first place and we as an admin team will be better going forward

I hope the blahaj instance sees our actions and chooses to reverse the defederation decision but at the end of the day its their instance and they can choose whoever they want to federate with (note federation is done directionally. I will still leave our direction of federation open)

Edit: Blahaj stopped their defederation (shown in an edit on their announcement) so the two instances will still be federated both directions going forward

Another edit: its a work day, its midnight here, and some comments here are also devolving into slapfights. Ive locked the post since this has already taken up most of my free time to try to handle and moderate this. My dms are always open if you want to dm me regarding the situation

We now have our third alternate frontend setup, voyager. This one is a mobile first frontend

https://v.programming.dev

Mlmym coming next (old reddit style) but ive been having issues with it so unsure when

Continuing with alternate frontends for the instance, we now have the photon frontend hosted at https://p.programming.dev/

Voyager should be coming tomorrow