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.

    • matcha_addict@lemy.lolOPEnglish
      61·
      10 days ago

      My issue with Friendica is it consumes more resources, making it much more expensive to host, especially at scale.

      • haverholm@kbin.earth
        5·
        10 days ago

        It also has way more features, which might exain the extra resources. I’m sceptic but would love to proven wrong that Lemmy would fare any better with a bunch of FB-like features tacked on?

      • misk@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        10 days ago

        With ActivityPub every AP client works as AP-based platform frontend if you try hard enough. No idea how Friendica would do but I use a separate Mastodon account to stay up to date on some low traffic Lemmy communities because it’s more convenient.

  • Fitik@fedia.io
    13·
    10 days ago

    I think the Friendica might be close to what you’re looking for, it’s not the Lemmy UI, but you can both follow Lemmy communities and different people from there, it’s feature-rich like Facebook, and the feel is pretty similar as well

  • Steve@communick.newsEnglish
    101·
    10 days ago

    What you’re looking for is Friendica.
    Don’t try to screw things together with a hammer.

  • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
    8·
    10 days ago

    It may be interesting to see what lemmy could look on a radically different UI. Everything I has saw is just changing forms of element, size of text and background colors.
    Such a project could be interesting if it allow to see threads we don’t have in typical UI. For example, I would love to be able to add local thread from distance instances. I have a jlai.lu account and a slrpnk.net account. It would be nice to see both instances thread on a same UI and it is “only” a matter of pulling existing content from a list of instances.

    • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
      3·
      10 days ago

      Maybe, it could do even more with Piefed that allow topic-oriented threads rather than the sub-local-all triple of Lemmy.

      • Snoopy@peculiar.florist
        0·
        10 days ago

        @pseudo
        True. We could do more with two tab :
        - a live chat for mastodon where we can follow people
        - a forum for lemmy

        That would be my ideal software. :)

        • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          10 days ago

          But in this case, I don’t think it is only about making UI. Or it would be making UI for a twittovers software rather than threadiverse software.
          Don’t you think?

          • Snoopy@peculiar.florist
            1·
            10 days ago

            @pseudo it would be making a software that contain both software separated with a tab. And the ui will improve its navigation.

            Have you ever tried a forum with a live chat ? What if we remplace this live chat with matodon post ? ​:blob_coffee:​

  • Kichae@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    10 days ago

    It really wouldn’t be a Lemmy client with a Facebook-like personal profile, pages, and more. You’d need your own backend, and then you’ve got something all its own.

    I know you’re worried about Friendica’s ability to scale, but how big are you expecting to scale your site?

  • mesamune@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 days ago

    Love to see a prototype. I know a lot of projects are like that (Semaphore for an alternative mastodon client). One of the best things about lemmy is that the API is open, so go ahead and make your dream client.