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.
Yeah but Lemmy is a link aggregator with social media elements like comments and “likes”, it’s more post based than people based, you can’t follow users for example etc, there are fediverse equivalents of Facebook like diaspora or friendica, even mastodon is more people people oriented than Lemmy
Following users can be simulated by the client. Behind the scenes, every user will have their own community, and their personal posts will go there. If you follow the user, the client would make you follow that community behind the scenes.
But I suppose you would need to prevent other users from being able to post there, I did not consider that. Lemmy does not have that kind of permission control. So maybe this is not viable … hmm
There’s no benefit to trying to be clever with this by manipulating something not fit to task when there is already an existing solution.
Just use one of the Fediverse Facebook alternatives if you want a Fediverse version of Facebook.
The argument that I want to test is that Lemmy is as up to this task as LemmyBB being a phpBB experience but with a lemmy backend. I am proposing something like that.
The reason not to go with the other alternatives is that lemmy seems to do much better on resource utilization, which would make it much easier to host and scale.