Is it gonna reach anywhere or die out like kbin and the way it is going i would say mbin ? They are also trying to dip toe in the microblogging platform as well and trying to use lemmy clients and that confuses me as they are promising some features lemmy doesn’t have so how would that and the microblogging part work out on lemmy clients . Also srry if i am at the wrong /c/ and just point me in the right way .
My pessimistic side is saying that it’s a lot of effort that could’ve been spent on making Lemmy better instead. If everyone organised around Lemmy, nobody would need to migrate and stuff. If it’s due to the devs, could just fork. It seems like the primary motivation is to switch from Rust to Java and switch out the devs at the same time. I don’t agree with moving away from Rust and I don’t think the devs are as out of touch as some people say (but maybe I just haven’t been informed yet).
My optimistic side is saying that this will be good for both projects, as either can thrive independently and Lemmy and Sublinks servers will obviously continue to function together, just like Lemmy and the other Fediverse servers are currently doing anyway. More choice is never a bad thing and maybe some competition can be good for the whole space.
I think only time will tell what happens with both projects.
They picked Java specifically because it will make it easier for them to get more contributors.
I’m not convinced that that is actually true (that it will bring more contributors, that is). We’ll see, but we have yet to see it.
Rust is an extremely hyped language online these days (just check the size of !rust@programming.dev and !java@programming.dev for example). If we talk about contributors, I don’t think it’s a bad choice. Yes, more people right now know Java (apparently not on programming.dev though? 😅), but probably a lot more people are interested in learning Rust than learning Java (Stack overflows survey suggests so). In the (not close, to be fair) future, there could easily be more Rust devs than Java devs.
Besides, in my humble opinion as a professional software engineer, Rust is just a better language than Java. It has native speed and much lower memory usage, but more importantly, it’s more reliable and robust than Java (better/more complete error handling essentially). This shouldn’t be surprising - Rust is a much newer language that has been able to take all the good stuff from many different languages from the past.