Some days ago I created a “community” for OCaml on Tchncs (a Lemmy instance): c/ocaml.
I’m looking forward to seeing your links or comments.
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Lemmy is part of the Fediverse and has a Wikipedia page at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(software)
@Haudegen - Anything we should know about Lenny/Techncs? They’re new to me.
This looks pretty neat! I commented from my Mastodon account over to one of the threads. https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/191476
Is there any way to post need links from Mastodon other other ActivityPub clients as well, or does that require registering on the Lemmy instance?
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I did a quick search about this, and it seems you need an account to post on Lemmy.
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A short summary of my understanding of Lemmy (I presume knowledge of Reddit):
Lemmy is a software comparable to Reddit. There are many installed instances, each of them can define their own rules. For example, there are instances where no NSFW content is allowed.
The instances can exchange content via an internal protocol. This assemblage of servers is called “Fediverse”. The Fediverse is not exclusive to Lemmy servers, for example Mastodon (which resembles Twitter) is also part of the Fediverse.
I chose the instance Tchncs to create the OCaml “community” (that’s what they call their subreddits) - but it’s also accessible from other servers in the Fediverse. A short description (taken from Lemmy Server) is:
This instance is general purpose but it tends to attract techy people. It is hosted in Germany.
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I once got ‘nuked’ (for being a bot and even after discussing he wouldn’t reconsider) as Milan called it, so I would recommend hosting with more control, e.g. under discuss.ocaml.org. Is lemmy hard to host?
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Another bit of context that may be helpful to some is that there is a large protest occurring at reddit right now (see this ArsTechnica article for context), with many communities deciding to make themselves private in protest and/or to migrate to non-reddit alternatives such as Lemmy.
If there should ever be a more “official” Lemmy community for OCaml, I’ll gladly surrender the community name.
oh, sorry, I apologise, I never meant to replace this forum - I totally forgot about this URL!
What I meant is some name under .ocaml.org - (but surely not discuss).
What I meant was: should someone create a dedicated Lemmy instance for the OCaml project, I’ll gladly give up the name “OCaml” on discuss.tchncs.de and guide the Lemmy users to the official “Community” (~= Subreddit).
PS: Calling these Subreddit things “Community” really makes it awkward to talk about them…
Why not choosing bigger instance? So far Lemmy World looks like the biggest, most stable and fastest growing one.
Compared to the Reddit UI Lemmy interface is a fresh breeze and as fast as supersonic aircraft.
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I chose an instance for my account, missed the OCaml community and created it.
Please don’t overestimate my “planned approach”.
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being the biggest is a downside IMO.
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Rust opened their community here, it seems: https://programming.dev/c/rust
There are other languages represented here as well: https://programming.dev/communities
This is still a dormitory (programming.dev) and not the own house (ocaml.org). IMO good for a signpost but not as home.
Also .dev is run by Google, isn’t it?
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I’m still forming a view on how we should manage these distributed services properly under ocaml.org, since it’s a fast moving space.
Some quick considerations (for which I don’t have answers yet):
- Should we splinter our own community under ocaml.org? We have this discussion forum, and also the caml-devel mailing list, and GitHub discussions (activated sporadically per project). While it’s of course natural to have multiple external chat services (IRC, Discord, Slack, Matrix, etc), without some bridging model it’s difficult to keep track of everything. When this discussion forum was originally launched, a key requirement was that its mailing list mode was sufficient to act as a bridge to email (the previous method of comms). If we add in more fediverse services here, then what’s the equivalent bridge?
- Keeping these services running over time: The ActivityPub protocol has questionable resilience in the face of a server outage, since every message is tied to a particular URL/key pair. I looked into this a couple of years ago with an excellent student project on ActivityPub resilience and backups, and it’s complex. I’d be much more comfortable first with an APub aggregator for the various services first so we can at least have backups. For the video service, I did a personal deployment first, got familiar with it over a few years, and then proposed it for watch.ocaml.org in the pandemic when we really needed that service due to remote working.
- Integrating with other communities: The programming.dev is part of a bigger ecosystem, and if we put Fediverse services under ocaml.org, then we’re declaring a more isolationist policy. Is it better to interact out there among other languages in a bigger community? If there were a better mirroring story (i.e., can we mirror some “sub-lemmys” to an OCaml service, like Matrix supports), this would be easier to solve as you could have both setups.
I’m following the ActivityPub-in-OCaml developments with interest – I’m hoping to see answers to many of these things emerge!
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In my opinion services like Lemmy and Reddit are places to post and collect interesting links for non-experts. If you are really into OCaml, you’ll be on discuss.ocaml.org, IRC or on the mailing list. If you look at /r/ocaml on Reddit, you won’t find many “deep” discussions there (IMHO).
For me it’s more about advertising than about discussion. It’s a place where you pick up new users and point them to discuss.ocaml.org.
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programming.dev looks cool and I wouldn’t mind gradually moving from reddit to there . But I am not a heavy fediverse user right now, so I would prefer if other people did the work of requesting a community.
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