I know that Lemmy is open source and it can only get better from here on out, but I do wonder if any experts can weigh in whether the foundation is well written? Or are we building on top of 4 years worth of tech debt?
There are no good code bases, only less bad ones.
The only valid measurement of code quality: WTFs/minute
Is Lemmy less bad or more bad than a typical open source project?
From some comments I’ve read, it’s at least in better shape than kbin? A few people expressed interest in helping with that project and then went running for the hills after reading through the code.
It’s probably not the only reason, but Rust is a much more attractive language/platform for devs to work with than PHP. (Source: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-admired-and-desired-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages)
It’s also more scalable, because it’s a compiled multi-threaded technology, while PHP is interpreted and mono-threaded.
Mother. Of. God. Did they really write Kbin in PHP?
I may be talking shit because I’m not a PHP coder, but the times I’ve seen it, it was a nightmare.
Which… makes sense. The creator of doesn’t like coding.
I actually hate programming, but I love solving problems. I really don’t like programming. I built this tool to program less so that I could just reuse code. PHP is about as exciting as your toothbrush.
So PHP it born out of a dislike of coding. In turn the documentation is all over the place and inconsistent.
Makes sense. And JavaScript is born out of a dislike of coders🤣
There are good PHP codes out there as well…
PHP is really old isn’t it? I remember using phpBB forums some twenty years ago. They worked really well, but that’s going pretty far back.
It is, but it aged pretty well.
Devs wanted to store state in objects, so it became object-oriented. It also gained a really solid full-fledged web framework with a strong community, with Symfony; and some strong micro-frameworks like Laravel.
But it will always be interpreted and mono-threaded, and therefore never a good choice for high-scale solutions. Facebook has to invent a brand new language (Hack) and runtime (HHVM) that was close enough to PHP so they could spend millions spending their PHP codebase to it, in order to make it compiled and multi-threaded, and make it scale.
PHP is an interpreted language which is inherently slow compared to a compiled language, such as Rust which is very fast. Modern PHP isn’t so bad kinda but I’m guessing a guy who hates programming and decided to start a new PHP project in 2023 isn’t really optimizing anything. Also, you’ll never get anyone you help you write PHP because gross. It’s a dead language with a small community of masochists and maintainers of legacy projects.
It would be like if you saw someone building a fighter jet and thought “hey, I can do better!” and then started getting your paper mache out to start playing air plane designer.
That’s PHP for ya
I read from one admin that a Lemmy instance is a lot easier to set up and maintain than a kbin instance. It’s initially more complicated to set up and updates are just a super headache to deal with. That sounds like a showstopper. I mean kbin is not going to get too far if it’s that difficult to run and maintain an instance, no matter how good or bad the code.
From a user perspective kbin has a really nice looking interface, though Lemmy has more features. I’d like to see kbin do well. It’s younger than Lemmy so it’s going to be behind, but hopefully the overhead in running an instance can be resolved.
The best code base is the repo I just created and haven’t committed anything to.
Just clone this one. Guaranteed the best repo ever! https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode
Hey, my code base is fantastic if you ignore all the stuff I had to inherit, did in a time crunch, or didn’t understand what I was doing!
If you think four years of technical debt is a lot, wait until you hear about Microsoft Windows.
I couldn’t imagine.
It’s decent, but it isn’t scalable, at least not yet.
Right now the entire Lemmy backend is one big “monolith”. One app does everything from logins and signups to posting and commenting. This makes it a little harder to scale, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it split out into multiple micro services sooner rather than later so some of the bigger instances can scale better.
I’d love to know where the higher level dev stuff is being discussed and if they’ve made a decision on why or why not microservices.
There’s no reason that a monolith can’t scale. In fact you scale a monolith the same way you scale micro services.
The real reason to use micro services is because you can have individual teams own a small set of services. Lemmy isn’t built by a huge corporation though so that doesn’t really make sense.
You definitely can’t scale a monolith the same way you can scale a micro service
You can easily scale a monolith. You typically horizontally replicate any web server (monolith or not) to handle whatever traffic you’re getting. It shouldn’t really matter what type of traffic it is. Plenty of the world’s biggest websites run monoliths in production. You know how people used to say “rails doesn’t scale”? Well they were wrong because Rails monoliths are behind some huge companies like GitHub and Shopify.
The lemmy backend is also quite lightweight and parallel so it’s cheap and effective to replicate.
In my professional experience microservices are usually a dumpster fire from both the dev perspective and an ops perspective (I’m a Site Reliability Engineer).
I can’t say I disagree… Poorly implemented microservice architecture is the bane of my existence. Well implemented, though, and it makes my job so much easier.
Granted, my SRE team has all public facing production infrastructure built using an IAC process, if something causes too much trouble, it’s easier to quarantine and rebuild the offending node(s), and can be complete in under 10 minutes.
The biggest problem is far too many developers ignore the best practices and just shift existing code into smaller services. That will never give you either performance or stability benefits. Honestly, it will probably make any issues worse. Microservice architecture is a huge shift in thinking. The services need to be fairly independent of each other to really make any gains. To get to that point will always take a whole lot of work. That being said, there is nothing inherently wrong with some monoliths, but the benefits of splitting out as much of the higher traffic and resource intensive work should never be overlooked.
the same way
Microservices can oftentimes cause more performance issue than they solve, as soon as they need to start talking to each other. Here’s someone with more experience than me explaining how it often goes wrong.
There’s nothing stopping you from putting a load balancer and running multiple instances of a monolith connected to one database. Then the database will also become a bottleneck, but that would still happen with microservices.
Exactly, and nothing prevent a monolith from doing vertical slicing at the database level as long as the monolith is not crossing its boundaries. This is the only scaling part that is inherent to microservices. If the issue is the horizontal scaling, microservices doesn’t solve anything in this case.
Also specifically on what I understand of the Fediverse, you want something easy to host and monitor since a lot of people will roll out their own instances which are known issues when running microservices.
This is a discussion I’m also interested in. Migrating a monolith to microservices is a big decision that can have serious performance, maintainability and development impact.
Microservices can be very complex and hard to maintain compared to a monolith. Just the deployment and monitoring could turn into a hassle for instance maintainers. Ease of deployment and maintenance is a big deal in a federated environment. Add too much complexity and people won’t want to be part of it.
I’ve seen some teams do hybrids. Like allowing the codebase to be a single artifact or allowing it to be broken by functionalities. That way people can deploy it the easy way or the performant way, as their needs change.
That’s what I’m thinking. Microservices could be a huge pain in the ass, but a hybrid approach would make things much better. Smaller instances wouldn’t be a problem, but the larger instances would be able to separate out components.
To keep it possible to run monolithicly would probably need a lot of work, but it’s possible to do and would probably be the best approach.
Gitlab is a great example of a piece of software that has multiple deployment strategies like that.
I have a friend that’s a lot more technical than me and he said that Lemmy’s codebase is kinda messy and relies on libraries that are still in beta and have not been tested well in the real world (since Rust is a relatively new language). This was a few months ago though, I’m not sure how much things changed since it’s been getting a lot more support and rewrote the front-end. The good news is it’ll get a lot better as more developers contribute to it.
I think a lot of people assume that because it’s written in Rust that means it has to be super stable but that really isn’t the case.
Rust, babyyyyy
Someone mentioned they had started out using websockets instead of http. I guess they’ve since migrated, but that design choice makes me wonder about the qualifications of the devs to make that kind of choice.
Websocket was deprecated with 0.18.0 which is the latest official release, but a lot of instances are on the release candidate for 0.18.1. because of some major improvements. My login instance is on that one which is great for me because I’m using a desktop browser and it looks way nicer. A lot of fixes too.
Websocket is easier to implement so that’s probably why they started with it. It has heavy overhead and doesn’t scale well so that’s the down side. It wasn’t trivial for them to move to http. Websocket was probably a better starting point for them at the time, but they did realize its shortcomings and deprecate it in time to support growth. I don’t know if I’d hold that against them.
It’s probably decent, but it is also worth noting that Lemmy was never really expecting the massive explosion of activity it currently has quite so soon.
The current code base was probably good for a small number of users/instances, but everything isn’t doing quite as well now that there are thousands, or even tens of thousands rattling about the place.
If you think four years of technical debt is a lot, wait until you hear about Microsoft Windows.
We need to rewrite it in Rust.
oah!!1
I’d go for an Elixir alternative to Lemmy/Kbin, but I’m just a shill for that lang who’s easily sold on others’ experiences with its deployment
I’ve been waiting for an Elixir version for a while now
Haven’t seen much traction on the few projects I’ve been seeing, but still holding out hope. Maybe I should get off my ass and start actually contributing
Someone mentioned they had started out using websockets instead of http. I guess they’ve since migrated, but that design choice makes me wonder about the qualifications of the devs to make that kind of choice.
Why’s that?
Web sockets are meant for applications where it’s important that you receive updates fast in a push fashion. E.g. collaborative editors like Google docs or a chat application. To scroll Lemmy or open a specific Lemmy post you don’t need that at all. You can just fetch the data once and have users refresh manually if for example they want to fetch the latest comments on a post. Using websockets for that type of application just puts unnecessary strain on the server.
Maybe they wanted a different type of user experience. But yeha, maybe that’s something Reddit could pull off because of their infrastructure… And they don’t even do it because there’s not much user value to it.
Although reddit does use some websockets so you can see how many users are also seeing the post at the same time.
But not websockets for EVERYTHING.
