What are the forum-like communities that are federated?
-
I mean, we got Kbin, Lemmy, PieFed, NodeBB, stuff like that. What else do they have on the fediverse that's like that?
-
Are those not enough?
-
flarum, Misskey, Friendica, Mastodon, the list goes on - I don't know so much about non-Threadiverse ones but see e.g. https://fediverse.observer/ for more details.
Note that Kbin is (semi-)officially dead - there is only a single instance (in Poland, https://bin.pol.social/) that still uses it, and the last commit of its software was on Dec 20, 2023. Everyone else switched to its fork Mbin that is actively maintained. This community really should update its sidebar text, to drop Kbin and add PieFed and Mbin. Kbin was a great idea at some point - I never would have come over to "Lemmy" with its known reputation as the place where many of the trolls went who were banned from Reddit (it's... sigh... actually true), so Kbin was what convinced me to leave Reddit - and now Mbin carries its legacy onwards, but Kbin itself is extinct (I am not trying to be hyperbolic here, it just literally is, as far as actively maintained software goes).
There was also Sublinks but... its development got stalled by the main dev having a baby (its last commits were all in 2024 iirc).
PieFed is the hot topic though - all praise the PieFed. I admit to some bias in this regard:-P, however it is also backed up by the stats: not only do we get enormous updates practically weekly (often at least a minor one multiple times a week), but by comparison Mbin has about 700 MAUs (Monthly Active Users), compared to PieFed's ~1500 (more than twice that). Which should increase rapidly now that app support is in the process of being firmed up, especially experimental support in Voyager the #1 Threadiverse app. Somehow PieFed has surpassed Mbin and even Lemmy in several featured areas - and astonishingly even that of Reddit (whose development for many years now has focused on increasing profits, not necessarily offering things that their user base actually wanted) - mind you it is still being polished, and some (very few) areas still need heavy work (such as the search functionality). On the other hand, it is written in Python, unlike Lemmy that is in Rust (which very few devs know, or want to know it seems, at least among those willing to donate efforts to the codebase), so feature tinkering is expected to proceed at a rapid pace for as long as people have ideas that they want to see added.
-
I'm just curious
-
Plus PieFed also has a tool to migrate a community from a dying instance to itself. It's not perfect, but it preserves old posts and comments and it's fueled at least some growth.
-
Whoa, thank you! Flarum is federated? I had no idea, that's amazing!
-
Unfortunately it actually isn't. NodeBB (me!) and Discourse are the only two forums that federate.
NodeBB has full two-way support with discovery features, Discourse is mostly broadcast-style (i.e. you can't find Lemmy posts from Discourse)
-
there's also hexbear, I go there for the megathreads mostly
-
Oh discourse federates? Thats awesome
-
Hexbear is a Lemmy instance
-
Is there a federated Discourse? https://www.discourse.org/
I'd like to see that.
-
They had plans for it and afaik even got a NLnet grant, but life got in the way, so it is likely not going to happen soon.
-
there's a plugin for it
!announcements@meta.discourse.org
-
Is there a pretty list of federated NodeBB forums anywhere? I like to check out which ones are listed on fedidb every now and then, but it's not the most convenient list as the topic of the forum is often obscure based on its name.
(I really enjoy being able to follow and participate in communities in forums around the web - thanks for making it possible!)
-
I use fediverse.observer (https://nodebb.fediverse.observer/list)
-
Is there a list of any discourse "instances"?
-
Thanks for the update - it looks like I need to stop spreading misinformation. Sigh, and Loops as well - people like to generate all this excitement but actually delivering is a whole other matter:-(.
-
Loops is newly funded, so that round is still active. I still wouldn't get hype about it until it happens though!
