Sublinks will live alongside Lemmy, just like kbin does today. Some Lemmy instances might switch to it under the hood at some point, but as a user you probably woudn't even notice the change

To expand on this, some kbin instances have already similarly changed to mbin, and no one noticed.

Oh okay, it got me confused and made me feel concerned because I don't want to end up losing the community I created here.

as a user you probably woudn’t even notice the change.

That's not entirely true. The default UI for Sublinks is being developed to be dramatically different than the default UI for Lemmy. It's unclear if the Lemmy UI will be made available by lemmy.world if they change to Sublinks. Its also unclear if lemmy.world will simply redirect to sublinks.world.

It's also unclear if lemmy.world will use sublinks as sublinks currently doesn't exist in a form that's usable for lemmy.world. And it may turn out that what is built doesn't work as intended and lemmy.world will continue to use lemmy indefinitely.

I just tried to follow that link and it appears someone needs to notify the website owners about this error message I'm getting from it and I'm using LibreWolf for my browser for privacy reasons.

Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to kbin.run.

• The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
• Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.

I like lemmy but also I've been following the drama from the sidelines, so I think the focus on Rust vs Java has nothing to do with the choice to create a lemmy alternative.

The reason sublinks exists is that the lemmy devs have made some large technical and PR mistakes that have led to multiple larger instance admins losing faith in them.

There was the Beehaw debacle where nutomic told the Beehaw admins that they should go to a different platform and take their "entitled" "demands" with them. It's not surprising to see various alternatives to lemmy springing up as a result of the devs telling people to do so.

There was the illegal content spam incident which required instance admins to interact directly with the image database in complex ways for each image to remove the content from their servers, and I believe lemmy.world disabled submitting images if you are using a VPN or the tor network as a result. The lemmy devs have made some bafflingly derisive comments about that incident.

And then there's the recent update that has broken federation of bigger instances, which is an ongoing issue. Communities are having to move instances to help with this bug which should have been caught in testing the update.

So sublinks seems to be some folks deciding that they can do it better.

Choosing Java is one way that they think they can do better. The argument goes, significantly more people know Java than Rust. Lemmy has had some problem getting extra help as a result of this limit, so hopefully sublinks will have a much larger pool of talented devs who will step up and submit code.

Sublinks isn't the only one, too. Piefed is the python Lemmy alternative that's cropped up recently and I believe there are some others in other languages.

Whether any of them can do it better remains to be seen, but it does seem like the Rust fans are struggling to understand that language choice isn't always the most important part of a project.

I'm working on the frontend for it rather than the backend so I'll comment more about that

But a new project allows for way easier change of the base aspects. For example im currently working on a theme system thats allows for dynamic themes created at runtime as opposed to it needing to be built in. Also a components library. If this was added onto lemmy ui it would involve massacring the current structure of the UI to essentially make it a new project anyways

Originally was working on the stuff in a new UI on my own but I've merged that into what's happening with sublinks since they're making a new UI anyways as well and would let more of my UI changes to get connected up to the backend easily and shared across multiple frontends

In terms of technologies it also allows the federation code to be completely separated out from the api. Federation is currently its own project so it can be scaled separately and its made in go

Also allows for more organizational changes since we have more control over how the project is structured and the structure of how we talk to each other and decide on changes is different than how its done with lemmy (having a matrix space we talk to each other and there being weekly meetings as well)

Moderation tools is the first milestone after parity but theres also other milestones as well in terms of changes made that differentiates it from lemmy visible on our task board thats public on the github repo

Normal thats theres going to be multiple of the same type of software as people have different goals of what it should be and how it should be organized. Bevy and godot both exist in the open source gamedev space. Theres 7 misskey forks that all mostly aim to do different things but share the misskey api (and a lot of them also use the mastodon api). One of which (iceshrimp) is currently having a rewrite to change the tech stack and make it easier for them to add features

Also the moderation tools could've been Java and connect to the Lemmy database/API (maybe with some pull requests to add to Lemmy's API), which to me sounds a lot better than saying fuck it and rewriting everything, it could've lived in its own repo anyways

I'm trying my hardest to not assume it's the classic "Java engineers are scared of other languages" meme

It literally is. The main maintainer didn’t want to learn Rust.

Do you know how far the development is? (just curious)

Java /s