After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon’s that people mentioned Lemmy doesn’t yet have. Not only i didn’t find it, i also saw that there’s about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it’s maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it’d grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don’t have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected. I’m a sysadmin, haven’t coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven’t ever touched Rust, so can’t help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy. The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that’s PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
They probably could use more manpower to some extent but everyone here’s forgetting The Mythical Man-Month; just chucking more bodies at a software project doesn’t necessarily speed it up any more than nine women can have a baby in one month.
That said I’m happy to do the odd bit here and there if there’s any call for it, either for lemmy itself or BeeHaw.
You’re right of course, but there’s tons of individual features which can be worked on in relative isolation. The devs need help with moderation tools, performance, frontend, etc. With 200+ open issues I’m sure more developers making proactive pull requests can make a difference.