Lemmy

Subscribe to forums, post links, vote, comment: on the surface Lemmy works the way Reddit or Hacker News does. Underneath it is different, because anyone can run a server and every server federates with the rest across the Fediverse, so an account on one instance can follow communities and reply to people on any other.

The server is written in Rust on Actix and Diesel, with a TypeScript and Inferno interface. It installs through Docker or Ansible and runs on arm64 hardware, a Raspberry Pi included.

The feature set covers what a working forum actually needs.

• Moderation: admins and community moderators lock, remove and restore content, ban users, and every action lands in a public log.
• Threads: live-updating comments, full positive and negative vote scores, cross-posting, and a similar-post search when you write a new one.
• Notifications: replies and mentions arrive in an inbox, optionally by email, alongside private messages.
• Feeds: RSS and Atom for the All, Subscribed, Inbox, User and Community views.
• Account control: you can erase your data entirely, replacing every post and comment you made.

Each instance sets its own moderation policy, so running one means deciding what your corner of the network tolerates. Signing up asks for a username and a password and nothing more, and development is funded by donations and an NLnet grant rather than advertising.