starting out with an unpopular opinion: of all the centralized social media platforms, Facebook was always my favorite.
Why? it is the most full featured. Has threads, reactions, groups, “Pages”, polls, and it even has granular privacy controls (for hiding content from other users, not to be confused with Facebook’s privacy violations and commercial data use).
This makes me wonder, could we have a Facebook-like experience using Lemmy as a backend? similar to how lemmy has a phpBB experience using lemmyBB.
Lemmy already has threads, and communities can represent groups. Pages and user pages can be simulated with communities.
We would be missing polls and reactions, which I can live with. I am not at all mad that we would be missing content algorithms either.
Although we can’t make it identical to Facebook, I think it will get reasonably close and exemplify most of the good parts.
I am thinking to take this project on, but wondering if people have thoughts, if this already exists, or if people would even want to use this.
Friendica?
Does Friendica work as a Lemmy frontend?
With ActivityPub every AP client works as AP-based platform frontend if you try hard enough. No idea how Friendica would do but I use a separate Mastodon account to stay up to date on some low traffic Lemmy communities because it’s more convenient.
My issue with Friendica is it consumes more resources, making it much more expensive to host, especially at scale.
It also has way more features, which might exain the extra resources. I’m sceptic but would love to proven wrong that Lemmy would fare any better with a bunch of FB-like features tacked on?