After the (temporary) defederation announcement of earlier i checked the Lemmy repo to see if there was already a ticket on the federation limiting option like Mastodon's that people mentioned Lemmy doesn't yet have. Not only i didn't find it, i also saw that there's about 200+ open tickets of variable importance. Also saw that it's maintained mostly by the two main devs, the difference in commits between them and even the next contributors is vast. This is normal and in other circumstances it'd grow organically, but considering the huge influx of users lately, which will likely take months to slow down, they just don't have the same time to invest on this, and many things risk being neglected.
I'm a sysadmin, haven't coded anything big in at least a decade and a half beyond small helper scripts in Bash or Python, and haven't ever touched Rust, so can't help there, but maybe some of you Rust aficionados can give some time to help essentially all of Lemmy.
The same can be said of Kbin of course, although that's PHP, and there is exacerbated by it being just the single dev.
Here is a thing I found helpful in my >10 years of programming career: break your problem from top to down (aka Top-Down programming).
Consider this problem: I want to send a post card to my friend.
Now let's break down this problem into several steps:
Next, each of those problems can be broken down even further.
Obtain a post card:
Now each of those steps can again be further broken down into even more sub steps:
Visit a store that sells a post card:
You see where I'm going? Break your problem down into actionable pieces you can solve in the programming language of your choosing. How deep you go depends on what programming language to use. If you're using a High Level programming language such as Python, you usually don't need to break down the problem too deep in order to solve it. But if you're using a Low Level programming language (e.g. assembly), you're going to need to break down your problem very deep into actionable pieces that can be solved in assembly.
Hope that can help you.
Thank you so much for your thought out response! I've been encouraged to give Rust another shot, and I'll certainly be taking this advice to heart.
One thing that I've noticed in many careers is that the ability to break things down is a mark of expertise, to know what things can be broken down to, and I'm hoping going through something as granular as Rust will help expose what many of those things are. It's what made Javascript oddly frustrating, is that granularity felt less like providing me with options, and more like riddling me with extra hurdles.
I'm excited to take another crack at it (as if I need another time sink, lol), and hopefully some day I can help contribute something of worth.