Ategon

Introducing a new supporting site for the instance, git.programming.dev aka Forge! This is a spot where development on things relating to the instance will be taking place. This includes for each thing having source code, task boards, and issue trackers viewable.

This gives us a spot away from GitHub so we don't have to rely on them for hosting our code. In addition, Forgejo, the software used, is working on federation so eventually features could be implemented to do things such as interact with Forge directly from our instances.

Who is allowed to make an account?

Anyone is free to make an account on the site provided you have not broken our code of conduct and have gotten banned from one of the instances.

What is allowed to be hosted?

Any code that relates to things we do on the fediverse or outside the fediverse but relating to programming.dev is allowed to be hosted on Forge. This includes things such as bots made for lemmy/sublinks, alternate frontends, software we host, tools, etc.

As an example alternate frontends like photon, alexandrite, etc. are free to choose to be hosted on Forge. Software such as Sublinks, etc. can be hosted, and various misc bots and tools such as Fediseer, Automod, etc. can be hosted.

Anything hosted on forge must be able to support the programming.dev instance it is built around. This means that things like bots and alternate frontends for the programming.dev instance must be able to support sublinks.

How can I make an organization on Forge?

If you want an organization on Forge to group a collection of repos together feel free to reach out to one of the team leads or email info@programming.dev.

How can I contribute to a programming.dev repo?

If you want to contribute code feel free to fork the relevant repo and then make a pull request back to it with the changes. If you have an idea for something that can be added to a platform or a bug report open up an issue on the relevant repo in the Programming.Dev org.

If you're interested in contributing a large amount to the programming.dev repos feel free to reach out to me (Ategon) on discord or matrix or email info@programming.dev and I can add you to the development team.

Two of our programming.dev alternate frontends have been updated to their most recent versions.

Voyager (v.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 1.37.4 -> 1.41.0

Main changes:

• You can long press on comments/posts to get the more actions sheet
• Gifs can be configured to autoplay always, never, or on wifi
• When tapping into a post the video continues to play seamlessly
• Videos in the feed have a mute icon you can toggle
• You can now hide self-post thumbnails in compact mode
• You can now set it so you always need to tap to reveal child comments
• Large post voting buttons can be hidden
• Community icons can be hidden
• Link creation now has a dialog for entering link info
• Subscript and superscript support for markdown
• You can now long press usernames to block

Mlmym (old.programming.dev)

Has been updated from version 0.0.36 -> 0.0.38

Main changes:

• Image uploads has been fixed

Share some progress, text or screenshots of some development on your game!

Share some progress, text or screenshots of some development on your game!

This is a place to share high quality news and discussion around technological advancements and changes

Theres a bunch of technology communities currently but they tend to fill a different niche than this one as they tend to be about all topics relating to technology (including legislation, company news, etc.) rather than honing in on tech progress

Things that fit:

• New tech releases
• Major tech changes
• Major milestones for tech
• Major tech news such as data breaches, discontinuation

Things that don't fit

• Minor app updates
• Government legislation
• Company news, layoffs
• Opinion pieces

Links:

• !tech@programming.dev
• /c/tech
• @tech@programming.dev

We finally have a blog site where you can easily see news relating to Programming.Dev! Theres an rss feed if you want to add it to your rss reader and posts from it will be mirrored onto all of our platforms (eventually ideally automated)

Theres a small welcome post I made on there and we should be releasing more things this week that will get announced there and then mirrored here

It turned out that most things I was working on are being completed mostly all at once so there will be daily news posts about new things dropping for a bit. Theres currently 4 things in the queue to be released

Share some progress, text or screenshots of some development on your game!

You may have seen me say in some posts for adding new admins to the team that we use discord as the chatting platform for the admins to all talk to each other

This has now been bridged to matrix so people on matrix can chat from there to the rest of the admin team on discord. This means that we don't require people to use discord to be an admin for the instance anymore, now its discord or matrix.

Also we are still looking to expand the admin teams a bit if you're interested in being on the community team (either for here or our new platform coming soon), development team, or infrastructure team

Hey everyone! I talked a bit in the January Newsletter about us expanding the admin team but figured I would do a post specifically about the development team so I can go more into depth about it.

Currently in the admin teams around half the people are in infrastructure and the other half are in community with 1 person in development making the split around 4/4/1. This means that currently ive been the only one doing the development work so figured I would do a post looking for some more help

Whats the development team

The development team is in charge of development projects for the instance for users to interact with. This ranges from adding in features to the software we use (e.g. lemmy, sublinks) that the instance needs, to making supporting development projects such as events, bots, a support page, etc.

What would joining the team mean?

If you want to help out and join the team theres a very wide range of possible things that could be worked on depending on what you enjoy.

For frontend currently theres some supporting sites being built such as a team page, a support page, a donation page, etc. as well as the frontend for sublinks which will become the instance default UI at some point. Primary languages used are JavaScript and TypeScript and sublinks uses Next.js

For backend the backend of sublinks is currently under construction. Primary languages used are Java for backend and Go for federation. We also have another thing we will be hosting soon that is currently being rewritten to use C# for the backend

(for people who dont know what sublinks is its a lemmy alternative being built with the help of a bunch of different instances and lemmy alternative frontend devs. Being built with a compatible API so will be easy to swap out to it when it reaches parity with all of the apps and frontends still working)

If youre also interested in making some misc thing that might not fit in either of these but could be cool for the instance feel free to join as well. For example some supporting bots or a tool for users to use (e.g. post scheduler (this already exists but this kind of thing))

How much time would I have to commit?

Theres no real hard time limit you need to fulfill. Were all volunteers helping out here and anything helps. If youre mostly busy during the week but have time to fix a small bug on a site for a couple hours thats perfectly fine

Im not great at coding, can I still join?

Yep! Anyone is free to join regardless of level and if you need some help I can guide you through how to develop using the technologies we use or can get some other developers to help out if its more backend related since im primarily frontend. Certain tasks are available on some of the projects that are fine for new coders to do

How to join?

If youre interested feel free to dm me or comment below and I can add you to the development team spaces. The admin team in general primarily chats on our discord server https://discord.gg/kwyxvYEYt4

this post is being pinned in the instance for 24 hours

Hey everyone, have a lot of updates on things occuring around the instance so figured would compile them all into one post. Will be pinned for 24 hours in the instance

Sublinks

In the past a bunch of you may have seen me working on a new frontend for the instance called Pangora. That has been merged into another project called Sublinks which should let progress go way faster (was previously 2 people who contributed to Pangora vs now 18 in Sublinks)

Sublinks is releasing with a lemmy compatible API and we should be switching over to it once it reaches parity. As the API is lemmy compatible all alternative frontends and apps will still be usable when we swap over.

For anyone interested in the project the matrix space for it is here https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online and the repositories are here https://github.com/sublinks

The backend is using Java, the frontend is using TypeScript with Next.js, and the federation is using Go

New Community Team Lead

Ive been prepping to stop being the community lead for awhile now so I can focus on the development side of things and ill be transitioning fully over the course of the next month into being only on the development team. The new community team lead will be @recursive_recursion@programming.dev

With me focusing on development I should be able to develop things for the instance a lot faster so you should see some new things popping up soon :)

Hexbear

Hexbear handles federation by votes and they recently had a vote and removed programming.dev, lemm.ee, and aussie.zone from their allowlist. Weve added them to our blocklist as well so theres no one way conversations

Community Stats

Types of Communities

• Lively: 5001+ members
• Active: 201-5000
• Moderate: 51-200
• Quiet: 11-50
• Dead: 0-10

Stats

• Lively: 0% (-1% from last month) (theres still 1 lively community but the total communities pushed it down to 0%)
• Active: 7% (~)
• Moderate: 12% (+2%)
• Quiet: 26% (-8%)
• Dead: 55% (+7%)
• Total: 243 communities (+55 from last month)

Overall the amount of communities has been getting significant expanded and starting out near the bottom in terms of active users. I assume these are going to start climbing up within the next month and there should be a boost to moderate and quiet. Moderate still has been growing and active has been holding on to its 7% even with the amount of new communities

Expanding the Admin Team

We have a new thing releasing soon and in preparation of that we are expanding out the admin teams. If youre interested in helping out in the instance (development, infrastructure, or community) feel free to reach out

New Release Soon

Speaking of the new thing releasing soon it should hopefully be released sometime within the next month as a subdomain here. For anyone who wants to beta test it its theoretically up now if you're able to find it. Good luck :)

Hint: Larger than bits

We upgraded to 0.19.3 which should fix a bunch of bugs including the need for us to restart the servers every day

• The site now receives reports from mastodon and kbin
• Admins can see votes in the UI (could previously do so within the database but this makes it easier to moderate votes)
• Post views have a secondary sort of published date added so things that have the hot rank of 0 arent returned randomly
• Max title is based on chars (previously it was bytes)
• Mastodon federation (aka posts showing up when people follow the community in mastodon) has been fixed

Pulled some updates for some of the alternate frontends were hosting!

Photon

(https://p.programming.dev)

• Community and instance sidebar got overhauled to declutter them a ton

Voyager

(https://v.programming.dev)

• You can now create crossposts
• Unread item color got changed
• Updated login + sign up flow
• Autofill crosspost titles
• A new setting has been added to show posts youve hidden so it shows in the community it was posted in rather than being hidden everywhere
• User and community autosuggest when you start typing the relative links for them (!community@instance and @user@instance)
• Account switching anywhere
• Guest accounts