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.
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?
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.
I think the Friendica might be close to what you’re looking for, it’s not the Lemmy UI, but you can both follow Lemmy communities and different people from there, it’s feature-rich like Facebook, and the feel is pretty similar as well
Ok…now make a FOSS myspace. I hearn of SpaceHey, but apperently that’s not open source, and there’s no guarentee that it’s not one massive spying operation.
Maybe Hubzilla?
It’s cool too, but it’s more like it’s own thing
It really wouldn’t be a Lemmy client with a Facebook-like personal profile, pages, and more. You’d need your own backend, and then you’ve got something all its own.
I know you’re worried about Friendica’s ability to scale, but how big are you expecting to scale your site?
No.
Love to see a prototype. I know a lot of projects are like that (Semaphore for an alternative mastodon client). One of the best things about lemmy is that the API is open, so go ahead and make your dream client.
