I'm open to the idea of using Lemmy for discussions, and feature requests, for my open-source software projects. My projects are on a self-hosted Forgejo instance and Forgejo currently lacks a discussion feature. But, unfortunately, none of my projects are popular enough to deserve a discussion board. ๐ญ
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2025
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Programming
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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
I think the Forgejo project should be given some leniency when it comes to the development 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-reference between Forgejo issues and Lemmy posts as needed.
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.
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.
There is forum software that's 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.
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.
i miss actual forum software :(
i think i still have a vbulletin v3(?) zip from when i had a license back in the day
Sure. But network effect is a bitch.
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
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.
Oh, yeah, that part.