Lemmy is an open-source, federated link aggregator and discussion platform similar to Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News. The software stack used in Lemmy includes Rust with Actix and Diesel for the backend, and TypeScript with Inferno for the frontend.
The developers chose Rust for its performance, safety, and concurrency features, which help in building a reliable and efficient backend. Actix is a popular Rust web framework that provides a lightweight and fast foundation for the server-side application. Diesel is a Rust ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) and query builder that simplifies database interactions. On the frontend, TypeScript offers better type safety and tooling compared to plain JavaScript, while Inferno is a fast and lightweight React-like library for building user interfaces. These technologies were chosen to create a performant, reliable, and easily deployable platform.
I read someone saying that the lack of contributors was due to the software stack being unconventional and takes people a while to get used to it. So I was curious to know what other people would have used.
I think Rust is a perfect choice here. Considering the investments of the Linux kernel, AWS, Microsoft and so on, I think Rust is a future-proof bet.
That said it think the programming language is not everything. It seems to me that lemmy was written under the assumptions that there will be a lot more hosted instances that will fedrate but a lot of load seems to centralize on a handful of instances now (i.e. lemmy.world).
To support these it could make sense to rethink the system design to something that offers better support for high-load and high-availability scenarios.