People tend to contribute to the projects they already have the skills for.

People also tend to pick up new skills when they have a driving incentive to do so, like supporting a project they have a vested interest in seeing improved.

You need to learn the language’s structures

Most of the bread and butter ones have analogues in other languages you should readily understand. More language-unique structures are rare; the more niche they are, the lower the odds your ability to contribute in a meaningful way hinges on your understanding of them.

you need to learn how the compiler works

You really don’t, though? Modern compilers, particularly the Rust compiler, are designed to abstract away as much of the details of compilation as possible. If the project really does need to tickle the compiler a certain way to get it to build, it will almost certainly have a buildscript and/or a readme.

you need to learn the libraries that the FOSS project is using

This is true regardless of the language in use. I’m not sure why you brought it up.

you need to learn the security pitfalls for the language

I would imagine most of these language-specific security footguns are either A) so specific that you will never hit the conditions where they apply, B) are so blazingly obvious that code review will illuminate what you did wrong and you can learn how to fix it, or C) so obscure that even the project owner doesn’t understand them, so you’d be at minimum matching the rest of the codebase quality.

Mind, I am not insinuating that one can simply bang out a whole new submodule of a project in an unfamiliar language with minimal learning time. Large contributions to large projects can be hard to make even when you’re a veteran of the language in use, as the complexity of the project in and of itself can be its own massive barrier. But not every contribution needs to be big. And for most contributions, I don’t believe the language is the most significant barrier to entry. It’s a barrier, sure. But not the biggest one.

I’d wager it’s not having a significant impact on the volume of contributions to Lemmy in particular.

This is a tremendous amount of cope. Implying there are Lemmy users just lining up to contribute PRs if only it wasn’t written in Rust. Give me a break!

If someone was competent enough to author code that’s fit to pull into a project like Lemmy, they’re more than capable of translating those skills to Rust. No language seeing modern significant use is so esoteric that a reasonably seasoned developer couldn’t make something competent in it within a week of starting to learn its syntax. Maybe a day, even, if the language you are trying to learn is highly similar to one you already know.

Yes.

I noticed my authenticator app (KeePassXC) offers the ability to customize the TOTP parameters (SHA function, time step, code size). But no combination of settings seems to produce a valid code.

I assume Lemmy uses the suggested defaults in the RFC 6238 standard?

Connect, Sync, and Boost all told me to go kick rocks.

Evidently, whatever happened, it doesn’t seem to be an issue with your platform.

I seem to have been screwed over by TOTP.

Hearing that this update was supposed to make borking your account harder to do when setting it up, I enabled it. Put the secret in my authenticator app, got my six digit code, and away I went.

Now, a few days later, having changed nothing on my end, Lemmy.ml won’t accept my TOTP code. My session token on desktop is expired so I can’t remove it now.

Currently my only lifeline to this account is my logged in session in Voyager, which, as far as I can tell, cannot access the TOTP setting. (Or any profile setting, for that matter… am I just stupid?)

No email to recover from, either. That’s on me, I guess. Ugh.

Not sure what my recourse is, if I even have any.

Thank you for the suggestion of Voyager, I have installed it and it looks quite nice!

Creators of Lemmy, owners of this instance, and creators of the Jerboa app are all the same people. As I understand it, Jerboa won’t be getting an update until they’re happy with the stability of the update to Lemmy itself. Lemmy is getting all the focus first. Also, no sense in pushing a client update for a server update that itself is not finished.

Getting really annoyed at that error toast in Jerboa, though, not gonna lie. And not being able to post on mobile. At least I can still read posts and comments, though. Hopefully the patch will release soon.