Welcome to my little experiment with Lemmy. I’ve said a few times that maybe Lemmy might be a structure that would work for our community and I decided to finally start one.
Lemmy is federated with ActivityPub, so you can make an account here or in theory you can use an account created on another server for Mastodon or Lemmy.
This is just an experiment for now. If we like it and it works, I’ll figure out how to set it up in some sustainable way. But for now, consider it more of a sandbox than a permanent reliable structure.
– Elaine Lindelef
Thank you for setting this up, Elaine! I was thinking about how you connected me to Haynet back when it was just a mailing list. It’s hard to believe that was more than 32 years ago now!
I named it ModelHorse but even that is still tentative. Maybe it should use ponydom or something else snappier as its official name. Still super experimental!
It would be more consistent to be named PonyDom, but perhaps it should be “The Kingdom of Ponies”
Welcome friends! Very curious to hear what people are thinking. And if it’s something that doesn’t appeal, that is also welcome feedback.
The look and feel is pretty easy to change, and I can make new categories at will - just didn’t put time into those things yet.
In theory, the tools make it possible to download all of your own posts and save them as well as moving them to a new Lemmy instance. This is probably the most attractive point to me given how many resources we’ve lost in the annals of time. The full download to a local file doesn’t just work with a button but I believe that is in progress.
So, friends, what are our thoughts so far? Note: you can sort the comments if you prefer more recent or chronological order or you want upvoted ones at the top.
Color scheme and layouts are all configurable. I can even make it look like a phpbb forum. There are a couple of open source apps you can use for it right out of the box too. Here are some of the off the shelf options: https://join-lemmy.org/apps
One thing that it doesn’t seem to do super well right now that I think we’ll miss is embed videos. You can link to them but not embed. In theory a link out isn’t that big a deal but in practice I think we all know that it is. I know there are other communities that feel this lack and it’s possible that I may be able to fork that capability in.
This is all open source software, meaning I have access to the code to make even quite deep modifcations. In theory I have the resources to make it what we want it to be, and this is a joint experiment with my partner who is also interested in possibly leveraging this tech for his project. The question is, could it turn something we would make time in our lives to visit and use given our other options? Is the tech appealing enough that we might get a critical mass of conversation?
If you want to use this on a phone, there are several apps for Lemmy that should be able to connect to it. I am experimenting with one called Voyager. The link in the comment above gives you a few to look at, or search Lemmy on your device’s app store.
I found the apps and am using Voyager for now - having a mobile option significantly improves the chances that I’ll actually be a participating member!
This looks pretty good on Voyager but I notice it is a little more awkward to reply. It was also tricksy to get it set up with an existing account login but I figured it out eventually. This is a test to see how well comments work
