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.

  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    4 days ago

    I wish I had even some basic programming skills to help out. I think I made a turtle go in a circle once in 1993 ¯_(ツ)_/¯

    Please let us know if you set up a patreon or the like - I’d be happy to contribute what little I can.

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPMEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I think I made a turtle go in a circle once in 1993

      Tess wouldn’t not benefit from some spinning turtles lol.

      Please let us know if you set up a patreon or the like

      Probably not going to ever do that, but thanks. I’m even still directing donations to the Photon dev since Tess is a fork of an early version of that.

  • Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    7·
    5 days ago

    Sorry to hear. I hope someone with the ability to contribute offers their help. I really like using your frontend.

    • SnoopyEnglish
      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. :)

    • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPMEnglish
      2·
      4 days ago

      I haven’t done a full feature comparison, but it seems pretty close in terms of functionality. Its developer is also a much more level headed person than the people behind Lemmy.

      I think you’re thinking of Pixelfed for photos.

      • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        If your saying we get a lemmy like experience on pixelfed for discussions, I’m willing to spin it up and give it a whirl.

        • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgOPMEnglish
          2·
          4 days ago

          https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/

          Right now, switching is just a tentative plan / wish since I’m sick of chasing the dragon with Lemmy. I need to see if there’s a way to transform + import the Lemmy DB to Piefed along with all the public/private keys, etc before I can plan anything concrete. If it’s not, then I’m not sure if I want to do a fresh start this late in the game (the alternative there would just be winding down my own instance which is not off the table).

          @rimu@piefed.social (the PieFed dev) mentioned something about a DB migration, but it might have just been a “it should be possible” kind of thing (will have to see if I can dig that out of chat).