Late January, I had to step away from the project for a while to deal with some family stuff. That’s resolved, but try as I might, I just cannot force myself to get back into development mode on this.

I’ve got other projects I want to work on, both hobby and home improvement. I need to focus on the latter, and really want to focus on the former. Like anyone else, my time is finite.

The Hard Truth

Tesseract was written for Lemmy, and I’m tired of porting it to Lemmy over and over again because the Lemmy devs keep breaking the API. Yes, yes, pre-1.0 technically means they can shred the API and break everything from release to release. But when a project is widely used, in perpetual beta, and has lots of other developers developing against it, it’s disrespectful to them to constantly introduce so many breaking changes when it can be avoided. And it CAN be avoided; they just don’t bother.

So where does that leave the project?

Well, potentially completely broken once instances start updating to Lemmy 1.0, and I don’t know that I have it in me to continue. At least, not without help. So if you’re fluent/proficient with Svelte, please drop me a line.

The original plan was to pivot to Sublinks, but development on that project has stalled. Piefed also has an API that also seems to be fairly stable. I may pivot there and leave Lemmy to its own devices. If there exists a somewhat painless way to convert a Lemmy database to Piefed, I am also looking to transition my instance to that.

Bottom Line

I’ve grown disillusioned with Lemmy as a platform and flat out despise its developers. I’m tired of the uphill climb just to keep the basic functionality working because the Lemmy devs don’t care about anything except Lemmy UI. I’ve got other things I need to do, a finite amount of free time, and the Lemmy devs picked the worst time to pointlessly break the whole goddamned API. If you want Tesseract to continue, I’m going to need direct help in maintaining it.

  • Snoopy@jlai.luEnglish
    2·
    1 day ago

    It can remplace lemmy but not for users yet.

    On some part Piefed outperform Lemmy. On some area they miss some options but they are pretty close.

    Here are the missing part :

    • mobile app (interstellar may port it and there is a fork of thunder : pferd)
    • theme (that’s where tesseract can help)
    • cross-posting (coming up very soon, they have finished detection of duplicate post)

    And 4 things that i need the most as a mod :

    • scheduling post (for communities animation)
    • comment/post view + moderation view
    • notification board : post/comment/suggestion/repport aren’t separated
    • pinning a post

    Piefed is better on those areas :

    • moderation tools. I can’t recall all their feature but it’s better.
    • managing duplicate content and “comment fusion” for the crossposting feature.
    • managing notification subcription (you can unsubcribe from an old post of 4 years, or follow any on-going discussion or community (example the support community))
    • feed + topic (multi-communities). Feed is managed by users, Topic by admins and mods)
    • support of the fediverse (mastodon is coming soon)
    • tags
    • managing votes federation per communities
    • grid view for picture communities

    And few more that i missed. :)