tldr: chapo.chat isn't ready yet.

Don't worry, you'll get to be called libs by the users from lemmygrad.ml Soon™.

[chapo.chat is] running a heavily modified version of lemmy forked months ago, for not just the front end, but the back end as well. Once they’re up to date with the most recent lemmy versions that have federation working, then we can try federation, on the back end at least. Their back end devs are great, but their front end devs contribute nothing upstream, and will have to re-create all the federation-related parts of the lemmy-ui code for their own fork.

Source

EDIT: See @Beatnik's comment

  • Waylander [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Lemmy is like Reddit or Voat - it's a piece of software that lets you set up a link aggregator site. Chapo.chat was created by taking a copy of Lemmy, putting all the chapo-specific data in (like what colour scheme we want, what communities we want, etc) and then running it on a web server.

    But! Chapo.chat has a bunch of volunteer devs who took that base copy of Lemmy and added a bunch of extra bits to customise it for us. At this point, normal (or 'vanilla') Lemmy is very different to Chapo.chat.

    Federating has been the plan for Lemmy for a while. The idea is that I create a Lemmy site and you create a Lemmy site, but the two sites can still share posts and users and the like. Federation wasn't working when Chapo.chat was created, but it is working now. But the Chapo.chat version of the site can't just update to the new version of Lemmy because of all our changes.

    The volunteer devs are working to get Chapo.chat compatible with the other Lemmy sites so that we can interact with them more easily.

    • eiknat [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      we stopped merging upstream for now when they split the frontend and backend. the entire file structure changed so there's that and a seriously large amount of merge conflicts. it's an incredibly large task, lol.

      • Waylander [he/him,they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Software dev is my day job so I'm aware of just how much of a pain in the ass merge conflicts can be. I just figured I'd go for a low tech explanation so it's more accessible. I know you all put in an insane amount of work so we can call each other libs all day.

      • gammison [none/use name]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Any reason why the federation code was not separated from the rest of the codebase?

        • eiknat [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          i assume it's because they're actively developing it and will probably split it out in the future.

      • Waylander [he/him,they/them]
        ·
        4 years ago

        You could subscribe to communities on other Lemmy sites and have them show up on your homepage. You could talk to users on other sites using your chapo account. Other users could do the same and e.g. a vegan lemmy user, who doesn't use this site, could still get !vegan@hexbear.net posts appearing on their homepage.