Mastodawn

Lemmy as a discussion forum

https://leminal.space/post/22098635

Lemmy as a discussion forum - Leminal Space

Are there communities, free software/open source or otherwise, using Lemmy as their forum software? Nowadays, many use Discourse, some are on Zulip, and I just don’t care about the Discord ones. Would Lenmy not fit the same purposes? It is federated and easier to participate in, like mailing lists - no need to sign up per forum. Matrix is too, but it doesn’t seem to be made for long-form writing. I believe Discourse was designed based on experience with community dynamics, and Zulip is well-designed too. Would something with federated participation like Lemmy not work as well?

Björn Jun 27, 2025

Sure. But network effect is a bitch.

theLetterJ Jun 28, 2025

Isn’t that where it’d shine? An organization could host their own Lemmy and anyone who has an account on any other instance can interact

Björn Jun 28, 2025

Sure. But from the point of view of most people everyone (especially gamers) has a Discord account and nobody has a Lemmy account. Even a Mastodon account would suffice. But compared to Discord nobody uses these.

theLetterJ Jun 28, 2025

Oh, yeah, that part.

katy ✨Jun 27, 2025

i miss actual forum software :(

i think i still have a vbulletin v3(?) zip from when i had a license back in the day

N0x0n Jun 28, 2025

Vbulletin where fun to configure and tweak ! Some private trackers have still those old vbulletin vibes!

Novi Sad Jun 27, 2025

There is forum software that integrated in the fediverse. Most often I’ve heard about NodeBB, which is open source and one can self-host it for free; there is even a YunoHost package.

GitHub - NodeBB/NodeBB: Node.js based forum software built for the modern web

Node.js based forum software built for the modern web - NodeBB/NodeBB

GitHub

Life is Tetris Jun 28, 2025

I remember glancing at NodeBB (in my ignorance, I am averse to node.js). Activitypub seems to be an integration in it rather than its basis.

who Jun 27, 2025

I’m not aware of any such communities that run their forum on Lemmy.

I think it could fit, although Lemmy’s design as a link aggregation site gives it some rough edges for the purpose we’re discussing. For example, the search functions are a bit awkward to use, there is no support for subtopics, and file upload support is (from what I’ve seen) very limited.

On the other hand, Lemmy’s use of Markdown makes it more comfortable for text formatting than BBCode, which is the HTML-like markup used on many forums.

Nutomic Jun 27, 2025

In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use, is there anything specific that can be fixed? You are right about subtopics, and also Lemmy normally doesnt show discussions organized by topic on the frontpage. That can be changed though with different frontends like lemmyBB.

GitHub - LemmyNet/lemmyBB: A federated bulletin board

A federated bulletin board. Contribute to LemmyNet/lemmyBB development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

who Jun 27, 2025

In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use,

Generally, I find that it requires too many clicks.

To search for things I’m usually interested in, I have to click a link to reach the search page, wait for it to load, select a target type from a drop-down box, select a scope (usually “Subscribed”), and select a date range, before entering my search.

(I could enter my search before selecting all those other things, of course, but it won’t help me, and it will put extra load on the instance host by triggering multiple extra searches before the one that matters to me.)

Also, in certain cases like searching for a community by ID, there’s a weird glitch where the search yields no results at first, but clicking the Search button again gets the expected results.

is there anything specific that can be fixed?

Yes, I think the user friction could be improved in several ways.

I haven’t made a list of potential improvements, but just off the top of my head, it would be convenient to have a simple search box in each community’s sidebar. Reddit had this back when I was using it, and it made checking for duplicates before submitting an article much more convenient than it is here.

brisk Jun 27, 2025

I’ll second the community sidebar search. Almost all of my searches are searching for something from a specific community. Old habits die hard and I always end up navigating to the community, then going to search and finding myself having to search for the community again first.

Nutomic Jun 30, 2025

Thanks this is very useful feedback. Especially the search box in community sidebar would be very useful and easy to add. Formatting for community ids should also be easy to improve. A bit later when I have time I will implement these things, and then make a post in the Help Design Lemmy Series regarding search.

By the way basic reading is working for me in Tor browser with JS disabled. Though buttons like switching Local/All, sorting and of course forms like register, login and search are not supported. We could use contributors to help fix these things.

[Help Design Lemmy] How to improve the Joinlemmy Donation page? - Lemmy

This is a follow-up to my previous post asking for design suggestions for the new donation dialog [https://lemmy.ml/post/27969031]. It gave a lot of valuable feedback which is why I’m making another similar post. This time it’s about the donation page on join-lemmy.org [http://join-lemmy.org] (linked above). What can be done to improve the texts and design? For a start I already changed the text to the same one from the donation dialog. Here more space is available, so a longer text with more details could be written (possibly below the donation buttons). What do you think about the available donation options? Do they work for you or would you prefer to donate through a different platform? On the other hand it is possible that the number of available options is already too confusing. Would it help to add a short description for each button? Below are lists of contributors, translators and sponsors. They haven’t been updated in two years and no one complained, which indicates that they don’t serve as motivation for people to contribute or donate. So I would remove that whole section which will leave a lot of free space. What else can we put there, maybe a list of reasons why people should donate? By the way I plan to make a recurring series of posts like this. The next ones will likely cover onboarding for new users, the reports page and more. If you know a catchy name for this series you can also comment it below. Edit: The changes are now deployed, but you are welcome to make further suggestions. > Help Design Lemmy

who Jun 30, 2025

Thank you!

Nutomic Jul 2, 2025

feddit.org/post/15127223

[Help Design Lemmy] Search Improvements - feddit.org

In a recent discussion [https://lemmy.ml/post/32355919/19527965] it was mentioned that the search function in Lemmy is awkward to use and could be improved. As a result I already made two small changes: - Change community selector to use [email protected] format (#3218 [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3218]) - Search field in community sidebar (#3217 [https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/pull/3217]) [https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/a67f55db-ce23-454a-a1a3-a83e3541e016.png] Are there any other UI or UX changes you can think of to improve searching in Lemmy? Im mainly looking for frontend changes, such as reorganizing the input positions, changing default values etc.

Foster Hangdaan Jun 27, 2025

I’m open to the idea of using Lemmy for discussions, and feature requests, for my open-source software projects. I self-host Forgejo and it currently lacks a discussion feature. But, unfortunately, none of my projects are popular enough to deserve a discussion board. 😭

Forgejo – Beyond coding. We forge.

Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.

Nutomic Jun 27, 2025

You can setup a Lemmy community and link it in all your project repos. Sooner or later people will show up.

Foster Hangdaan Jun 28, 2025

Yeah, you’re right. I should start now instead of waiting for popularity to kick in. I’ve begun to create one community, per project, on my Lemmy instance.

PlexSheep Jun 28, 2025

The sad thing about forgejo servers is that our stuff might be popular if the projects were not so isolated. I want federation so bad but I feel like I was waiting for years now

Foster Hangdaan Jun 28, 2025

I think the Forgejo project should be given some leniency when it comes to the deveploment of its federation. After all, no other software forge has achieved such a feat as of this date, not even the likes of Gitlab.

The good news is that we don’t have to wait for Forgejo federation. We already have software, such as Lemmy, that can supplement as a federated discussion and issue board. To maintain an audit trail, just cross-link posts between Forgejo and Lemmy instances as needed.

leetnewb Jun 27, 2025

This was a lemmy frontend: github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB

GitHub - LemmyNet/lemmyBB: A federated bulletin board

A federated bulletin board. Contribute to LemmyNet/lemmyBB development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

thingsiplay Jun 27, 2025

Lemmy is a far better platform for discussions than Discourse in my opinion. The tree like sub-reply threads in each post (the Reddit concept) is preferable over a single thread of replies. You don’t need to cross quote and for readers no need to read the quote to see who and to what the reply is about. I don’t like Discourse discussion platforms at all.

However, Discourse has a few features that fits well for a discussion platform. I like the tags and Trust system of it.

manicdave Jun 28, 2025

Discourse already has an activitypub plugin

meta.discourse.org/t/activitypub-plugin/266794

ActivityPub Plugin

:discourse2: Summary Discourse ActivityPub allows you to publish Discourse posts via ActivityPub so they can be read on services that support ActivityPub such as Mastodon. 🛠 Repository Link GitHub - discourse/discourse-activity-pub: Adds ActivityPub support to Discourse. 📖 Install Guide How to install plugins in Discourse If you’re unfamiliar with ActivityPub start by watching this short video: When you’re ready to get started setting up the plugi...

Discourse Meta