Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by LockAndLol on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:11PM (#23665080)

> Aether is a relatively large app with an Electron and Go toolchain, at 100,000+ lines of code. Getting it to compile requires setting up a correct build runtime with the latest versions of Go, Node (for Electron) and C dependencies and development environments. Expect the initial set-up to take a few hours. Be patient!

Is Electron a hard dependency or is there a core lib that can be wrapped by the GUI framework of choice? And several hours of initial setup is pretty scary . Maybe providing a dev docker, snap or flatpak could get devs up and running much faster than that.

Other than that, I love the idea of a decentralized forum. If there are specs I'll have a look at them to see how the intricacies of operating something like is were solved.

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Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by rolleiflex on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:19PM (#23665121)

Actually, we have recently improved on this, it’s probably now less than half an hour of setup, at least on Linux. The new guide is on the Github repo: https://gist.github.com/nehbit/4a8c3d81d543e85c9df974f521732...

We use Electron exclusively for GUI. The real app is a Go binary with a GRPC API. It’s all fully isolated, so if you don’t want to touch any Electron, you don’t have to. Use the API to build a CLI app, for example.

To be more specific, we have two Go binaries that we ship, one is the aether-backend that talks to the network, the other is the aether-frontend that compiles the content coming from the network into a social graph. Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.

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Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by 0x6c6f6c on Sunday June 28, 2020 @10:03AM (#23668746)

There's a fully JavaScript implementation of gRPC[0] that you may be able to use should you implement a web app using Service Workers[1]. This would be installable for browsers in a manner that should provide long-lived access to the network.

0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@grpc/grpc-js 1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Wor...

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Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by LockAndLol on Sunday June 28, 2020 @03:22PM (#23671333)

> Both are properly isolated and talk to each other only over declared GRPC APIs. I’ve tried very hard to keep it hackable that way.

That's a great architecture! I look forward to hacking on it when I have the time!

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