2w ago

Developing a Lemmy client to have a Facebook-like experience? (Personal profile, groups, pages, etc)

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.

18 comments

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.

I thought friendica was the Facebook mockup not lemmy?
- You're right that lemmy never intended to be a Facebook mock-up (and I hope my post did not seem to allude to that), but I was wondering if it could be made to be so by changing only the client but keeping the rest intact.
  My limited knowledge makes me think that lemmy is easier to host, consuming less resources in general, hence why I want to consider it first. But I could be wrong.
  
  Lemmy is easier to host specifically for the reasons that it wouldn't make a good Facebook alternative. Hosting what is mainly text content and links is pretty lightweight.

The thing with Facebook that made it special might also have been who was there. It was and for some people maybe still is a mass adopted platform with your whole extended community within reach. It didn't have polls or reactions for most of the time I used it; that's not what made it compelling.
There are a ton of existing fediverse platforms, includ8ng some that aim to be more facebook-type and your energy is probably more valuable if you contribute to one of those rather than striking out on your own.
I think Lemmy is in many ways at the opposite end from Facebook because it is more of a hive mind whereas Facebook was highly individualized. Like I don't think you can be friends or even follow another account on lemmy?. That's like the most important Facebook relationship. Even mastodon would be closer I think.
If you want to recreate Facebook you'll need to ask the people you valued the most what it would take for them to use a novel open source platform.

Diaspora has been a federated Facebook, there was a point in time when it peaked and after Mastodon and later Lemmy came out, it's a ghosttown. Looks like people didn't need a federated Facebook after all.

If anything, I think an MBin client would be a better target for that approach
- My issue with MBin is similar to that of Friendica. It's more expensive to self-host. Lemmy scales better.
  
  I thought Friendica scaled well.
  You could try to do this with Lemmy, but with only the features lemmy already offer.
  You could also check piefed
  
  Doesn't change the fact that Lemmy doesn't fit the Facebook approach.

Thanks for reminding me to set my avatar and banner

Hi! Pseudo here, back with my Piefed account. I just realised you have access to Guppe groupe from the twittoverse with Piefed. Many there is something to look here about have FB-style group and FB-style pages.
But I don't now much about FB or ActivityPub to be sure.

18 comments