this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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Developing a Lemmy client to have a Facebook-like experience? (Personal profile, groups, pages, etc) (lemy.lol)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

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.