Programming.dev has a soft fork of lemmy that is being developed so that we can focus on things that the instance needs (such as actual code blocks). This will still get changes made to lemmy but just have the new features on top of that. If a feature is general enough to be in lemmy itself we can try to get it pushed upstream.
Originally made this community a bit ago under a different name but after I was informed that the name was already in use brought it back up as Pangora! (hopefully no issues this time) A pangora is a type of moth and its also a combination of the words pangolin and pandora.
Im currently working on improving the instance UI in a repository named pangora-ui. No changes have been pushed yet as im stick mocking up designs with no functionality yet but ill be sharing some progress on that and on changes made to pangora in this community. Pangora-UI is a completely different project from lemmy-ui and its being built using Next.js with typescript, tailwind, NextUI, and Framer Motion
Heres the most recent design ive been working on (still a bit rough but you can get an idea of what im going for):
(That search bar says search comments but can be set to search the different categories like all, communities, users, etc. using the dropdown beside it)
If anyone is interested in helping out with development there is a matrix space for pangora here: https://matrix.to/#/#pangora:matrix.org . Anyone you can contribute would be extremely helpful as we have nobody doing this full time yet. Even things like giving feedback on designs I send is great so that I can get more feedback on things as im working on it
The pangora github repositories can be found here: https://github.com/PangoraWeb
Would it make sense to start the Pangora soft fork from Lemmy-UI-Leptos if starting out fresh is desired? If we plan on tracking upstream, seems like it may be smoother to track and contribute to that framework if going Greenfield is the goal.
Pangora itself (the backend) is going to be downstream while Pangora-UI is going to be completely separate but still using the same interface as all the other frontends (lemmy-js-client)
This allows us to have way more control over what the site looks like and can tailor it better. (Plus I have 0 experience in rust and would rather not make a site frontend in it due to that when I can make one in Next.js quickly and that looks much better)
The things that would be contributed upstream would be new features which would pretty much all fall under Pangora-Backend and Pangora-UI is just equivalent to alternate frontends like Photon
