Lemmy is in serious need of more devs
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.
They aren't in serious need. The lemmy and lemmy-ui projects have 4-5 regular devs as I can see it. It's just only 2 people being listed. I believe they are also working on getting help managing lemmy.ml.
As I see it, neither of them spend their time on jerboa either, it has two other regular devs.
A lot of the issues that are created are either duplicates, unimportant or useless suggestions. But there are still some major design decisions that are being actively discussed.
Nutomic and dessalines are just the only paid full-time developers of the projects.
There are some pretty serious bugs, though. One serious bug is that when a registration application is denied, the applicant has no way of knowing, it doesn't send an email like it does for approvals - you can find out more here: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/1096. Another serious bug is after rebooting, active/hot have trouble updating, which makes Lemmy appear much less active than it actually is: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3076
These are just two serious bugs I know about, they are practically tier 0 bugs IMO, and I'm sure there's even more serious bugs that are even more serious than these two.
I'll admit that those are serious issues. With that said, one of them is in progress of being solved by one of the maintainers and a volunteer instance host. But yes, it could use more people
There's the ticket about clearing deleted messages after 30 days (right now it's keeping every deleted message in the DB until account deletion which is bonkers to me), and i recall seen a couple other rather important ones when i was looking for one relevant to federation options (which i DID NOT find, and which would have prevented the defederation of those two instances). So yeah, there's non-urgent tickets and duplicates and whatnot, but there's important stuff too.
Interesting.. lol didn’t know that. I feel like it should be configurable per instance
Remember, Lemmy is RECENT, many things are still in development, that's why i said that the Reddit shitstorm was bad timing, should've happened in a couple years or so :P
With the clearing deleted messages after 30 days, I take it that would also delete the username visibility after 30 days too, or would it still leave the username of the deleted comment even after 30 days?
That probably must be another ticket, this is specifically about it keeping the contents of deleted messages in it's current state, which is not good.
Ah I see, fair enough, thanks.
Who are the other devs if they’re not listed?
The ones listed are the ones with write access as far as I'm concerned. The others just work with pull requests. You can go try see for yourself. No matter though, of course more developers is desirable, but my takeaway is that it isn't as serious as OP makes it sound like
If a commit is brought in via PRs, they will be listed as contributors. It is at 153 contributors with 2 main ones. Not too shabby.