I've been working on learning Rust and getting familiar with Lemmy code in my spare time. I would guess there are other devs in the same position that would like to contribute, but it takes time to get up to speed. There will probably be many new contributors in the near future.
Rust Programming
I'm a Rust developer but most of the issues are on the frontend UI IMO.
- Constantly refreshing post feeds on the homepage
- Posts changing while you’re commenting
- Momentarily showing you logged in as someone else
- Long delays in comments and votes being applied - sometimes forcing you to refresh the page with no confirmation
- Wasted side space on the built-in themes on desktop
I wish there were a simple UI like Hacker News - https://github.com/IronOxidizer/lemmy-lite was one attempt at that but it isn't maintained or finished.
I don't think the instance-level "silencing" from Mastodon is a good idea tbh. It leads to more free-loading of content hosting and less of a federation.
There's definitely tickets that are backend. Stuff about connecting similar communities, a different way to load new instances so you don't have to wait a few minutes with no indication anything is happening (I don't know if there's a ticket for that one, but there should be).
Edit: The ability to move to another instance, automatic rendering of c/community@whatever as a link.
Im not a rust dev (yet, would like to in the future) so I just saw the original post show up on my feed and though it might be a good idea to crosspost it here where the rust devs actually are. If I knew and had experience with rust I would for sure work on contributing, but alas I dont. :(
Also, yes I agree a lot of the issues are in the UI
I think InfernoJS, Typescript, Bootstrapv4 and CSS experience would be more useful right now, at least to improve the official UI.