[nosecreek]

Asked this on another post as well, but is there something similar to phpBB, but using the Reddit/HN “tree” style for comments? I miss some of the old forums I used to be part of, but do think the tree style definitely has it’s advantages.

[dragontamer]

Lemmy.

Except Lemmy also adds in the Fediverse stuff, so there's a bit of drama with Beehaw.org and whatever. But as far as Hacker News types go, you probably should just sign up at programming.dev and have fun. (Programming.dev is its own Lemmy).

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"Lemmy" is roughly the threaded-chat style PhpBB-like web-app where you can create your own users and create your own subreddits (now called communities), and talk with everyone.

The Fediverse part comes in because programming.dev talks to beehaw.org, and both sides can crosspost, cross-comment, and seemlessly communicate with each other. But Beehaw.org is scared of new-users (such as those from Lemmy.world), and has cut off Lemmy.world visitors from their site.

So there's a bit of drama to resolve in the "greater Fediverse". But as far as "unique new instance", programming.dev is probably what you want.

If this whole federation / sharing of posts / sharing of communities works out, great. If not, programming.dev can sit by itself in a silo like the old phpbb forums.

[nosecreek]

Lemmy definitely looks interesting and I should really give it a shot, but while the fediverse stuff adds a lot of value I think it also makes it a lot more complicated. I think the tech stack matters too - running old forums on a LAMP stack made them pretty easy for a lot of people to setup on cheap hosting. When I go the "Run a Server" section in the Lemmy docs it immediately starts talking about Docker, etc. which I think is a much bigger barrier to entry for those who want to host an instance.

[dragontamer]

A word of caution: Lemmy has a serious number of bugs in its web front-end. A lot of "spinning forever" bugs instead of reporting errors, and other such issues.

I don't know how solid the backend is, but instances are crapping out on ~10,000ish users on smallish dedicated servers, suggesting severe bottlenecks in the code. Current discussion seems to suggest RAM bottlenecks and a lot of swapping.

Lemmy wasn't quite ready for the #RedditBlackout. But I think its still in a "workable enough" state to experiment with. Some communities (ex: Beehaw.org) are worried about growing faster than needed (human-side scaling, not machine side). Since Beehaw.org is trying to recruit specific kinds of people / posting patterns.

So I guess what I'm saying is... Lemmy tech stack is good enough for Beehaw.org. I dunno if its good enough for Lemmy.world (which is very "Reddit-like" in open enrollments / ease of community making).