I’ve been looking for a free Reddit alternative and preferably one that was federated. I’m not really sure how federation works with this though. A lot of similar sites are just personal projects that people made as a hobby that lack a lot of important features or the interface was really ugly.

I haven’t seen how to moderate communities though but the Github page says this can be done, which I consider important since I want moderation to be done by communities and users rather then admins. If there’s a quarantine feature similar to Reddit that would be useful too so I don’t just have to ban communities.

  • @GenkiFeral
    5•3 years ago

    There are certainly 50X more groups I am interested in compared to ruqqus or votal.net and that fills me with glee.
    I am turned off by the leftist bent, though. I realize that a person’s mindset is often reflected in politics, but that isn’t always the case. I get really tired of politics and religion, because both are full of hypocrites and both lead to fighting because ideologies so often lead to intrusiveness. Forcing a person into a box also seems very wrong to me. I hate the Right and Left equally for that reason. I belong to ME, not to YOU or to society! But, i didn’t sign up for most politically-motivated groups, so this should work out fine for me. I thought this would be connected to Element, Jitsi, Mastodon, irc, XXMP, and other federations, but I am not seeing icons with links, windows, or menus for that. I am very new to the federated concept and it is rather over my head - though, it is something I hope to understand, because it represents freedom to me.

    • @Adda
      3•3 years ago

      I can understand what you mean by that. I am not interested in politics myself, so I do practically the same as you. From my experience, if you subscribe just to communities whose posts you want to see and show only posts from the subscribed communities, there should be no problem whatsoever with seeing politics-related posts, if that is what you prefer. It is great one has the option to choose what they want to see. In my case, it is tech-related stuff and not a single political discussion ever for me.

      The reason you do not see anything from other platforms is simple: The federation currently works only with other Lemmy instances, not with other ActivityPub compliant platforms. Federation with other platforms is in the works. Firstly federation with Pixelfed (work in progress), then possibly with other platforms. Hope you have fun and enjoy your time here :)

      • smallcircles
        3•3 years ago

        There is a brainstorm topic for federating Lemmy and on the technical end a new discussion on standardizing Groups across different apps.

        Connecting protocols and apps together, improving interoperability is a hard subject. It goes very slowly, because individual developers need to be willing to spend the time and effort, and - most importantly - find others willing to do the same and collaborate. In the grassroots communities that are behind all this such organization is very hard, and amounts to “herding cats”. I wrote about this yesterday in The Fediverse Saga.