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.
Which one would you pick? Cockroach?
Probably a big data oriented NoSQL database like ScyllaDB. It provides eventual consistency with fast and efficient reads and writes, but high availability, which seems like a perfect fit for the case. CockroachDB favors consistency in place of availability which doesn’t seem to be really a priority for Lemmy instances. You would rather have some upvotes, posts and comments missing sometimes than not being able to load the rest of the data.