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:-).
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I need to take another look at piefed. Thanks for the read.
But man the best part is the resources it consumes. Let me remind you that Lemmy puts a load of 12 on the server, when I turn off Lemmy the load with the other 13 web services running on the server is 0.5 and when I turn on PieFed the load is 1.
threaded-discussion server products require far more resources than a simple mastodon, twitter like server. if you want to federate with the threadiverse its going to be resource intensive.
twitter/mastodon is just an old man shouting into the cloud (single to many). the discussion is very limited in scope. forums (many to many) are much more intensive due to the volume of human activity and its nested interactions with said data.
even if you just look at the biggest players thats dozens of servers with 100k users all upvoting/replying/moderating and your instance needs to process that if you want a decent interaction.
I like mastodon a lot. I have basically found my hashtags, people and news sources to follow and so my feed is always filled with content to read. Engagement is fairly good on my instance, at least with popular topics.
But I only have 20 followers in 18 months of being on it so if that kind of thing is important to you then it can be something of a negative. Harder to build an audience without an algorithmic recommendation feature feeding your posts to strangers. I find that to be a positive though.
My biggest problem with microblogging sites is that I have never been able to get a good, interesting content feed out of them without also getting lots of noise. Following hashtags usually gives me a mountain of retweets (or whatever) and trying to follow groups of related people/subject matter experts gives me lots of irrelevant content. Community-style social media forces people to more strictly categorize their content, I think.
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