LocalCharts on Lemmy
Owen Lynch
Thu Mar 21 2024
For this post, pretend that I’m not a LocalCharts admin, because if I’m wearing my responsible hat then I don’t actually think this is a good idea. But I want to put it out there so people can think about it.
When I was starting LocalCharts, I considered using Lemmy, which is something like a “decentralized reddit.” The focus for Lemmy is more on sharing links and commenting, and so specifically it supports the “tree” style of commenting. I didn’t use Lemmy because it seemed immature and also because I wanted people to be able to write long posts on LocalCharts, which Lemmy didn’t seem quite appropriate for.
But now that we have to LocalCharts forest for serious mathematical writing, it’s not as important for the forum to have super long posts. And while I am very grateful to the discourse staff for making it quite easy to run this forum, I don’t love how bloated discourse is, (see How web bloat impacts users with slow devices for a discussion of how the discourse developers just assume that everyone has a first-world computer with a first-world internet connection). Additionally, it would be cool to have LocalCharts on the “fediverse”, integrated more into stuff like mastodon.
Does anyone have opinions on this? Again, wearing my “responsible admin” hat I would say that the choice of platform is not so important, and it’s more important to maintain continuity, but maybe the benefits of Lemmy are very attractive to the community?
Eigil Rischel
Fri Mar 22 2024
I’m very sympathetic to the motivation of using software that works well on slow devices. Do you know that Lemmy is more performant than Discourse? (Discourse is hardly unique in having really bad performance).
I like the idea of decentralized social media stuff, but I’m not sure it’s such a high priority for this forum (it’s not totally clear to me what the advantage is of, for example, having closer mastodon integration).
Owen Lynch
Fri Mar 22 2024
It’s true, I haven’t actually seen the performance numbers. I know that lemmy is built on a Rust backend, but the thing that really matters is frontend speed, and I know that lemmy’s frontend is just a bunch of typescript like anyone else, so
. Lemmy does support multiple frontends; maybe there is a html-only one?
Eigil Rischel
Fri Mar 22 2024
There is a glorious phpBB-based frontend: GitHub - LemmyNet/lemmyBB: A federated bulletin board, although it seems to have been abandoned.
Owen Lynch
Fri Mar 22 2024
There is also an exciting new ui GitHub - LemmyNet/lemmy-ui-leptos, which is written in Rust (!!), and supports full server-side rendering with progressive enhancement. This is the first I’ve heard of leptos, it seems like a Rust version of laminar which is a Scala library I like a lot.
Br Co
Sun Dec 08 2024
My pet-peeve with Lemmy was that in its pursuit to be functionally-identical to Reddit, they missed an opportunity to make it better and did not consider how they might be affected by decentralization. I think the idea of subreddits already discourages inter-discipline/inter-interest discussion, putting it on a fediverse despite permitting inter-server discussion, is lacking in inter-topical discussion and also makes discussion too sparse. I like how https://lobste.rs/ uses tags instead of subcommunities, doesn’t pigeonhole discussions into mutually-independent communities (a post can have multiple tags, so it encourages people subscribed to one tag to talk to people subscribed to another tag), if someone could work out the details of a federated version of that, it could be an interesting take on voting-based social news.