There are currently 3 Rust communities across 3 instances: programming.dev, lemmyrs.org and this one (lemmy.ml). I know it's still very early for the migration from /r/rust, but it would split the community if there are so many options and nobody knows which is the "right" one. Currently this community has the most subscribers, but it would make sense if the Rust community finds its new home in one of the other instances.
lemmyrs.org seems like the logical solution if instance-wide rules are paramount and "non-negotiable"
personally I would love a programming-centric instance and programming.dev seems like a good way. Rust is not the only language I'm actively using (unfortunately :)). Maybe there can be community-specific rules that "enforce" the Rust CoC and the Rust community can find a home there?
Either way, the current situation has the most negative impact.
I'd prefer it was this instance, i.e. a top-level instance. What’s cool about running this threaded-links thing from the top layer (multi-instance), is we can have a nice collection of sub-reddits for key Rust topics that are big enough to carry micro-communities of their own, such as:
cli
wasm
networking
embedded
gamedev
security
Other instances can also have a rust community, but they'd be federated to this primary one.
Instances are like their own self-hosted Reddits with communities being the sub-reddits. We have (had?) r/python, r/rust, r/golang along with r/programming; we can do the same here with topic-focused instance (like this one). I can imagine there being instances like lemmygo.org, lemmypy.org etc if the Reddit exodus continues.
You don't need multiple accounts to access communities (sub-reddits) from other instances (reddit). A single account on any instance allows you to access communities from any other instance. The UX/UI is a bit wonky, but it works.
As @[email protected] pointed out, micro-communities like cli, wasm, networking etc can potentially become big enough and/or have specifics that are more suitable to exist on a topic-based instance.
Personally, I don't have any preference. I will simply subscribe to the community which is the most active on whichever instance.
The downside to individual servers, and micro-communities, is the cost and maintenance of lemmy instance. Its more scalable, reliable and cheaper to have a bunch of relatively low-churn communities exist on one bigger instance.
The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data. If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn't mirror or cache... all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.
I'd vote lemmyrs at least for now until a governance and stability model is figured out to ensure these conversations don't go into /dev/null like /r/rust (sort of) did.
If say the Linux Foundation or a similarly large open source foundation (Apache, FSF, OSI, etc) decided to host a larger "open source" server, I'd consider moving there to improve discoverability and lessen the burden on the rust community itself
Agreed, there are advantages of having an own community. Especially until the people running e.g. programming.dev have a proven track record of being reliable.
The upside is that the rust community gets to own its own data.
Well, sure, if you know who the owner of lemmyrs is, and if they follow all the other stuff you talk about here.
If programming.dev decides to shut down tomorrow, and posts and comments made there are gone. Lemmy doesn’t mirror or cache… all that data lives solely on the server ran by somebody.
Correct! Which is why I've already taken great pains to make sure that if something happens to me (owner of programming.dev) that the server continues to run. I already have someone else managing the domain with me, several people have access to the server. Backups occur daily. Is some sort of "legally separated backup where if I die the lawyers can hand over the db backups to someone else and they can take over" what you're looking for? I am trying very hard to make sure that the website does not depend on a single person to keep it running, but it seems like a lot of people want something to happen, but can't describe what that is.
On reddit was very common having multiple communities about same topics, you just subscribe to all. Overtime each would creates its own personality or vanish. It is a natural process.
I'd like to support to merge into one community in the current situation. For me, it means that I don't need to visit three communities every time I refresh lemmy. Besides, I agree with op that new users may be confused by which community to join.
I'd like for the r/rust community to completely migrate to lemmy, and for the r/rust moderators to become moderators of the chosen lemmy instance.
I don't care which instance it will be, although I do like the idea of the Rust community being fully self-sufficient and self-governed by hosting our own instance (but still being interoperable with others). The main downside seems to be that people who are active in multiple communities will need multiple accounts, and creating an account requires
a unique username (too bad if the name you use on another instance is already taken here)
a password you need to save in your password manager
approval by the instance owners/moderators, which makes this not only tedious, but also slow
And if you use a mobile app as well as the web app, you need to login twice after the account was approved.
On another note: The lemmyrs.org instance currently has several "communities", which are more like categories. They might be a substitute for Reddit flairs, which should allow people to filter what they see on their Reddit homepage. However, Lemmy doesn't support flairs, and on r/rust they weren't actually used that much. Most people didn't set a flair when posting something, which kind of defeated the purpose. I think we should come up with a proper solution for this at some point.
Actually you don't need multiple accounts, you only need one in a specific instance and can interact with other instances (My account is registered at programming.dev).
The UX is extremely wonky and I had to look it up, but you can go to the search in the top right of your instance's main page (not the "communities" subpage) and search for communities and filter by "Communities" in the top left
The rust instance can federate with others so users can use the same account everywhere. The OP has an account on programmy.dev, you have one on lemmyrs.org, and I have mine on lemmy.world and yet we are all having a conversation on this thread without issues.
Owning the instance gives admin permissions to whomever is running the server but also the headache of maintaining uptime. If we move this community to programming.dev, the rust community would be “tenants” on a common instance. This option would be a no-brainer for smaller language communities (where my brainfuck enthusiasts at?), but if rust community decides to completely move to Lemmy, it might make sense to have a separate instance.
In terms of raw scaling for Lemmy and pure efficiency, AFAIK, fewer large instances is better than lots of smaller instances that federate with each other.
But the question is less about efficiency and more about trust. I’d rather have this community on programming.dev (first choice) or lemmyrs.org (equally great except for the fragmentation) depending on which admin the community is more comfortable with.
My impression is that it is just someone who created a community for each language they could think of. But if programming.dev is a popular instance that is well managed, then sure. But for now, it seems that lemmyrs.org have more users and momentum.
EDIT: On a closer look, it turns out my first impression was quite wrong. programming.dev seem like a quite well managed place, so I do not have anything against using that as a base for rust if that is what the rust community chooses.
Hi! Creator of https://programming.dev here. I am actually the main mod of /r/experienceddevs and created the instance as a new home for all programming topics. One of the communities I was (am?) most excited about hosting is the Rust community. Along with that I really thought that having a general purpose instance that is easy to type is more ideal than several split communities.
People are more likely to participate if the website is easy to remember and type (e.g. reddit, twitter, facebook) compared to all of these very very hard to remember names (not that lemmyrs.org is hard to remember, but many of the other instances are, and I don't think putting the name of the software in the url is a great idea, but that's neither here nor there).
Finally, I have already put significant work into making sure that even if I no longer want to host or if something happens to me that the community can keep the site running without me! I have numerous admins, a github org, a chat community, we are working on improvements to the server to make it more stable (we rolled out cloudflare today), and hope to commit many upstream changes to lemmy to improve it.
Of course, if any community is going to choose to run their own instance I would expect it to be the Rust community, but also would hope that the community could look at my track record and moderation style and see that programming.dev would be a good instance for them to call home. I frequent the /r/rust sub, even though I am not a rust dev (I've built a few projects, but nothing good), I've always wished I was and I thought this was a good chance to finally become one.
My impression is that it is just someone who created a community for each language they could think of.
Actually it's the /r/experienceddevs subreddit mods who created that instance. I had never heard of the subreddit before though but they had a bit above 100k subscribers
I was wondering if this would self-resolve due to the fact that most people choosing which community to join will tend to choose the one with the most people, driving it even farther into the lead. And the other ones would eventually just be deleted...?
But the thing that will decide this is where the leaders and contributors to rust will choose to post their updates, and take their discussions. So, for now I guess lurkers and regular users will have to follow all and see where this will be.
Agree that one is best I suppose, but on my own little instance I can subscribe to all 3 and interact with all of them just fine. If I had to pick one I would go programming.dev, it would expose rust to programmers not yet using it and would let users on that instance see communities for languages they otherwise might not check out.
its just like reddit, when there are multiple subreddits for the same topic, like r/mantids and r/mantis. eventually new users will probably just pick the one that has the most people and work itself out that way or just join both