Great summary!

That's not true, I wrote a blog post about it: https://jasongr.im/blog/why-i-started-sublinks/

I tried that the but API lacked a lot of features that they were too busy to add, like proper pagination to find the latest changes, etc. I started a project like that first called socialcare.cloud but have since shut it down in favor of Sublinks.

Java isn't my preferred language. I did learn Rust to try to contribute but found the code base in less than ideal state and the process of contributing to risky. They don't always accept all PRs. I also have low faith in the success of Lemmy due to it's poor QA process and it's major lack of features.

I believe Java is the best option for this type of application, I almost did it in PHP. My goal was to attract as many people as possible to want to contribute. It's worked, I have a ton of people contributing in some way, Sublinks roadmap is clear and organized, and we have a super-motivated and driven team.

We won't fail.

I'm the founder of Sublinks. I'm happy to answer questions. You can find me on Mastodon @sublinks@utter.online. You're right about the dev blog. We have a weekly Sublinks team meeting, the results of that could go into a weekly dev update. I've just been more focused on coding than community stuff. I'll do better.

People were reaching out to me to try to understand these details so I just made a blog post to just point people to.

We have 13 contributors with Sublinks so far. I expect more will come after the announcement.

The Photon developer is assisting with the development of the new front-end :)

I'll get it on there on the sidebar. Thanks a lot for the feedback. The demo site has been up for so long that I didn't think of it when I announced it.

1. I referenced the Rust code to determine what was sent and received. We're implementing better code logic; we're not just copying their API. We want to be compatible to attract users and support all the hard work used to create Lemmy phone apps.
2. Java is for the core Sublinks API/core. Golang is being used for the federation service that operates independently. Once it's done, it will be platform agnostic if someone else wants to use the federation service for their fediverse project. They communicate through a message bus.
3. Yes, we plan to do the new API correctly. We will support Lemmy's API for as long as it is relevant, primarily for mobile apps.

Multiple domains aren't possible yet, but that doesn't mean we cannot add it later.

I'm unhappy with the Lemmy roadmap, development speed, and quality. I wanted to contribute but found it difficult to. I did the next best thing and created a somewhat drop-in replacement with a much larger community of developers who are willing to support it.

You can see the complete Sublinks roadmap here: https://github.com/orgs/sublinks/projects/1. The first release of parity (v0.10) will use the existing Lemmy front-end. All releases after that will no longer support the Lemmy UI because that's when the enhanced features start to roll in. We don't want to support or fork the current Lemmy UI.

Exactly, we already had 13 contributors working on it before it was announced.

I'm past the refund period. I wish I knew this sooner.