We all know about how Reddit closed-sourced back in 2017 and will be killing off third-party apps this July, what will Lemmy.ml do to avoid facing the same fate? Reddit started off like this (open, aiming for freedom) and it all went downhill from there.
I haven’t checked Lemmy, but I’ve heard some projects intentionally tag a few easy low-priority features that are recommended for beginners to try and tackle. I’ve made some really minor CSS theming changes and basic frontend layout edits, the kind of thing which is pretty safe and doesn’t require expertise. Small things, but with a noticeable effect (especially when we had most of the Lemmy sites all using the same theme, so making slightly custom themes went a long way towards making it clear they are related but distinct)
I checked, and yes - there are issues helpfully tagged as “good first issue” in the Lemmy Github repo. So if anybody reading this, that could be a good start.
As nutomic, the maintainer of Lemmy explained in this post, currently the most pressing issue is slow SQL queries which is a performance bottleneck. This might contribute heavily of the overloaded servers, so the project in need of some SQL experts to take a look at optimizing these queries! Link to Github issue