After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon's that people mentioned Lemmy doesn't yet have. Not only i didn't find it, i also saw that there's about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it's maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it'd grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don't have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected.
I'm a sysadmin, haven't coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven't ever touched Rust, so can't help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy.
The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that's PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
I'm not a dev, but I do have SOME coding experience and have been wanting to help with some open source projects, if nothing else but for the experience. Rust has been on my "to learn" list for like a year now. I def have a lot to learn, but the best way to learn is to get your hands dirty. I'll take a look at the Github page and see if there's any low-hanging fruit I can try to tackle lol
EDIT: I'm pretty sure I can help with some of these. My coding skills are out of practice, and idk any Rust yet, but I'm a fast learner. Currently learning how to use git to fork a repo, add code, and create a PR, then I'll go learn some Rust syntax and get to work! I'm actually really excited! I've been wanting to figure out how to contribute to FOSS projects since I started daily driving Arch Linux like a year ago, and this is a great opporunity for me to learn!
If anyone has any development tips for a noob like me, let me know! I'm going in pretty blind here, so any advice is appreciated!
Just a general tip: don't use your distro version of rust (Lemmy) and nodejs (lemmy-UI). Instead, install them using a version manager, which allows you to switch to different versions of rust or nodejs without being tied to whatever version your distro have in their repository. This is very useful during development when you often need to try different versions to debug an issue (e.g. is this bug only happen on certain compiler version?), testing an upcoming beta features, etc. This apply to most programming languages as well, such as Python, PHP, Go, etc.
For rust,
rustupseems to be a popular choice. For nodejs,nvmandasdfis quite popular.asdfeven support both rust and nodejs.Not just that, it’s the official way of installing and updating your Rust toolchain, maintained by the Rust project themselves.