Discourse VS Lemmy

> Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse

I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.

Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

Discourse is OSS (GPL v2): https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/main/LICENSE.txt. So if someone can figure out a way to get it to work on older browsers, that would definitely be of interest. I'm not sure how trivial this is though (e.g. from looking around there are features it uses like the chaining operator).

The software is discourse, so it may feel a bit different than the old forum (and reddit for that matter), but I've imported much of the original tavern structure and rules.

What about Lemmy? BeeHaw? Discourse?

would discourse work for this at all? https://www.discourse.org/

Because they are all different deployments of Lemmy [0]?

[0] https://join-lemmy.org

Local servers (dietpi, Freedombox, YUNoHost or similar solutions) which can be used to host different solarpunk content and setup instances on the fediverse (like peertube, mastodon, Lemmy etc.)

The entire page is based on Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org/).

I disabled a ton of features and interface parts, as IMO the original lemmy interface is super noisy.

Runs on bare-metal with docker-compose. For the facelift, just good old CSS :)

Jerboa for Lemmy (version 0.0.46): An app for Lemmy, a federated reddit alternative.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy is a social link aggregator very similar to Reddit, powered by fediverse. Think of it like anyone can host an instance for their community, and all instances can interact with each other. For example check out the instance at https://beehaw.org/

The guide is copied below, from https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/

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#### I think this site may break or stop updating soon due to Reddit's API changes. I don't earn any money from this site, and if my calculations are correct it'd cost me a couple thousand dollars per month with their new API pricing, so yeah. If you can, it's probably worth leaving Reddit for other platforms - especially open-source/federated ones like [Lemmy](https://lemmy.world/).

*Note 1*: People are sometimes confused by the fact that there are multiple Lemmy websites like [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/) and [lemmy.ml](https://lemmy.ml/) - don't worry about that. Just sign up on *one* site, and you'll be able to join and interact with communities on *any* other Lemmy site. Choosing which Lemmy site to sign up to is a bit like choosing your email provider - e.g. if you use gmail, you can still communicate with people who use other email services like yahoo or protonmail. The reason there are multiple sites is because _anyone_ can create their own Lemmy instance - so no single person or company controls the '[fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)'. Just choose a popular and reputable one like [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/).

*Note 2*: You can use [lemmyverse.net](https://lemmyverse.net/communities) to help you find communities across the whole fediverse. If you've signed up to lemmy.world, then you can visit 'local' communities like [lemmy.world/c/memes](https://lemmy.world/c/memes) - and if you want to subscribe to or interact with a community on a _different site_, then just add @SiteName to the end of the community URL. For example, if you're signed up to lemmy.world, but you prefer the lemmy.ml memes community, then you can visit [lemmy.world/c/memes*@lemmy.ml*](https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]) to subscribe to and interact with the lemmy.ml memes community.

*Note 3*: Lemmy is based on the same technology as [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/explore). Both services "speak the same language" (that language is called 'ActivityPub'), so you can view and interact with Mastodon content from Lemmy, and vice versa. They're both part of the '[fediverse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse)', but Lemmy provides a Reddit-like experience, whereas Mastodon is more like Twitter.

*Note 4*: It's worth mentioning that Lemmy is young - the Lemmy [devs](https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy) are working hard to quickly improve the software, and server admins have been constantly moving to larger machines to support the influx of new users, so please be patient with bugs and issues. Also, the only way to grow Lemmy is for people like you to spend time on the site daily, interact, create new communities, etc. - please [join us](https://lemmy.world/signup) on this new adventure :)

So I clicked "sign up" and it suggested checking if there might be another instance best suited to my needs, so I followed the proposed link to https://join-lemmy.org/ and got the "join a server"/"run a server" option. After clicking "join a server" and scrolling the list of half added descriptions I just left because it felt like I was supposed to be making a choice about the community I want to join before even checking the damn thing out. Reddit is the opposite, just sign up and explore the subreddits and pick the ones you like. If Lemmy is anything like that, it's not clear at all and my experience turned me away in the exact way the previous poster described. It felt like I had to pick the subreddit first with no idea what was inside.

I mean there never will be if people don’t move. ActivityPub-based alternatives [Lemmy](https://join-lemmy.org/) and [Kbin](https://kbin.social/) are growing fairly rapidly at the moment.

The code base is open source. You can see who is contributing to it. If the founders are steamrolling its trajectory and cherry picking pull requests that align with their personal agendas, then the community can/will fork and start afresh—or the platform will die.