hi chapo dev here. the tl;dr is diesel. that's the biggest reason to switch to node. we actually spent the most time discussing which ORM/QB to use lol.

building and testing the queries will be so much easier, then we can implement the query in diesel up in lemmy via the sql escape hatch and a struct to handle the return value if diesel doesn't offer what we need. off the top of my head, diesel doesn't support recursive CTEs, self joins, joins for updates/deletes, no having, group by was just added.

i work on the chapo site. we definitely plan to enable federation eventually. merging the lemmy team's code into our backend is an incredibly time consuming task at the moment, so we haven't done a merge since the frontend and backend on lemmy were split into different repos.

i think if we enabled federation immediately, we're just dropping a huge stress test on other instances. i'd rather us get blocked for content reasons rather than our users' ability to spam the shit out of the site. :grinning face with sweat: