awful-systems
codeberg.org
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led organization that aims to help free and open source projects prosper by giving them a safe and friendly home.

the software we use to run awful.systems, which @dgerard@awful.systems suggested I call Philthy (and I agreed!), is seeking contributors.

like upstream Lemmy, this consists of a Rust backend and a Typescript+React frontend. contributions to both are welcome; use this thread to discuss ideas and collaborate.

here’s some contribution ideas off the top of my head (but all reasonable contributions are welcome):

  • (frontend & backend) actually rebrand to Philthy, to prevent confusion between us and upstream Lemmy
  • (frontend & backend) rewrite README.md to emphasize that this is a fork
  • (frontend) make the page header and footer more configurable; remove various links that aren’t relevant to awful.systems
  • (backend) delete posts from Mastodon when they’re deleted on our end
  • (frontend & backend) implement The Firehose, a big admin-only list of the posts and content leaving our instance
  • (frontend & backend, ongoing) merge in changes from upstream Lemmy if there are features you wish our instance had

or make suggestions in this thread!

one major blocker preventing folks from contributing to Lemmy-related development I’ve seen is that a lot of people don’t know Rust. if that’s the case, I can offer the following:

  • the Lemmy codebase is the worst possible place to learn Rust, but I’d love to start a thread for Rust tutorials and shared learning. it’s honestly an excellent language in its own right, so I’d love to teach folks about it even if they don’t end up contributing to Philthy.
  • if you’re good with React and/or Typescript and the feature you want to implement has a backend component, I don’t mind handling the backend portion if I’m able.
  • @selfOPMA
    3•3 months ago

    some tasks I plan to tackle this week:

    • rebrand this fork to Philthy and replace the README with more of a stub (to be expanded upon later)
    • rename our repos to philthy, philthy-ui, and philthy-js-client if doing so won’t break other developers. I’ll need to see what Codeberg does when repos are renamed.
    • we currently have a single-user testing instance at making.awful.systems. this effort likely won’t finish this week, but I’d like to come up with a plan that’d use Codeberg’s Woodpecker CI to kick off deployments to that test instance whenever we’ve got new code in main. there are still some open questions around how to coordinate the versions of lemmy, lemmy-ui, and the deployment flake; I might need to refactor the current test instance to work better in a CD workflow. longer term, I’d like to be able to spin up a testing container for a pull request on demand, but that kind of thing’s definitely harder to do when you’re hosting it.
    • run nix flake lock --update-input lemmy-translations in lemmy-ui to pull new translation strings from upstream (should hopefully fix some missing UI labels I’ve noticed)
    • @selfOPMA
      3•3 months ago

      as always, guidance on all of the above is welcome. if anyone has a strong preference for a CI or a suggestion for a container management framework they’ve used for something similar and enjoyed, or there’s a low-hanging fruit feature or fix I might be able to fit in this week, definitely post it here. my only ask for infrastructural stuff is that it’s a good fit for a flake-based NixOS deployment like awful.systems, and ideally that it works well with Codeberg.