Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.
Read some more about it here (don't click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:
Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.
TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn't, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).
Since the "forums" came up several times: I'd agree. In this case you'd choose something like Discourse or Flarum. Those are non-federated forums. And they offer some nice features, Lemmy doesn't have. A lot of Free Software projects use Discourse. It's more lightweight, has proven to be robust, it offers moderation features that are tailored to the use case, better ways to organize posts, you can mark correct answers, integrate itinto other services and do 50 other things plus install plugins. It's just better and easier to do it that way. And that's why people do it.
It makes no sense. lemmy is a forum + federation. Removing the federated side, why bother with using lemmy or similar software? its like wanting a car to use to solely generate heat with the exhaust. Theres far better options for that
well I'd say since non-federated Lemmy is just a forum with a bunch of stuff for federation that you won't use, there's no point. if you want a forum, then Lemmy is the wrong answer. Lemmy is (or at least is designed to be) an open-source, federated copy of reddit, keeping the good parts while removing the corpo stuff and adding the benefits that open-source and federation bring. with only one instance, it's little more than a mediocre forum.
First link at least is wildly over-claiming the difference. The data they describe is all cached in the browser and occurs once. PieFed uses ActivityPub, so network differences are moot since the same data transfers.
there are already dozens of good stand alone forum products. there would be no need to use a purposefully federating platform where half the code is put to federation. silly.
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