Hexbear was the only instance with a sizable user base that used to do this, but these days they federate too
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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Do you know why they were not federated and then changed to federation?
I believe they forked from Lemmy before federation existed close to 4 years ago, added things like custom emojis and then only re-merged after federation was implemented then turned it on.
Ah, that explains why their custom emojis don't render correctly anywhere else. I wish that piece of code would get merged into the main version so it'd be less annoying.
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They were running a self maintained fork of lemmy that wasn't compatible, though I don't know if that was the original reason
Hexbear essentially predated federation iirc, then migrated to Lemmy when that became possible. Hexbear is I think roughly the 3rd oldest instance - sorting its posts by Old shows that it is 4 years old, while lemmygrad.ml is 5 years old, and lemmy.ml is 6 years old. Lemmy.ca in Canada and the Finnish sopuli are both also 4 years old, mander.xyz is 3 years old, but Lemmy.world, by far the largest instance with ~80% of all users, is only ~2 years old, being formed at the time of the Rexodus.
Read some more about it here (don't click the link there to follow further - in true hexbear trolling fashion it will simply take you to a picture showing a pig in the act of pooping, you have been warned) and especially here, e.g.:
Two of the sites listed there, Hexbear (aka. chapo.chat) and Bakchodi, do not federate. They are not part of the Fediverse, but they are using Lemmy. Hexbear is actually running their own fork of Lemmy.
TLDR: bc they felt like it, then they didn't, now it seems like they almost do again, bc facts are nearly always stranger than fiction:-).
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Dunno why it seems everyone is misunderstanding your post. It's a simple question. Why all the grief? I'd be interested to know of Lemmy instances that arent federated and where to find them as well.
Yeah, waaaay back in the day there was a couple private message boards I was in for stuff like sports.
Nowadays there's a lot better options for organization, but via one of the big companies which requires accounts and things to happen on their server.
A closed Lemmy server at a discreet address has a lot of advantages compared to a Discord group for example.
I'd never thought of it, but it could be a thing.
Thanks for your comment, I was thinking that I have done something wrong by asking this.
I didn't think your question is as absurd as everyone is acting like it is. It's absolutely a silly thing to do, but I think a lot of the arguments against doing so would also apply to Mastodon, and wasn't it revealed that that Trump's garbage dump was running defedded Masto?
If you find one, I assume there will be many more terrible choices beyond just using Lemmy, and it's not somewhere you'll want to be.
Why is it a silly thing to do? A non-federating lemmy instance is just another content aggregator site like Reddit.
In many ways, it's a better experience than federated Lemmy. It's just harder to recruit members.
Well now hang on. What if you were in 8th grade, and started your own Lemmy instance, with no outside sources, and then invite all your classmates? And then all 30 of you have a blog and you all post individual blog posts.
Seems like a very specialized use of it, and I'm not sure if teens today would be interested in that......but you COULD.
I haven't checked around since the reddit API fiasco, but there were unfederated Lemmy instances. As Diva mentions in more detail, Hexbear used to be unfederated and it was the largest of all instances. Even without federation, it's a viable, actively developed content aggregator. So I wouldn't call it silly, it's a valid choice.
and wasn’t it revealed that that Trump’s garbage dump was running defedded Masto?
Gab is also a Mastodon fork, which was originally defederated before being blocked from most instances and bullied by the remaining freeze peach instances, so they mechanically removed the federation code.
I've also heard some special interest communities on Mastodon intentionally defederate from the broader network for privacy reasons.
Federation didn't create lemmy.
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Since the "forums" came up several times: I'd agree. In this case you'd choose something like Discourse or Flarum. Those are non-federated forums. And they offer some nice features, Lemmy doesn't have. A lot of Free Software projects use Discourse. It's more lightweight, has proven to be robust, it offers moderation features that are tailored to the use case, better ways to organize posts, you can mark correct answers, integrate itinto other services and do 50 other things plus install plugins. It's just better and easier to do it that way. And that's why people do it.
Discourse is more lightweight? It's consistently the slowest loading software that I use and lags everywhere
I thought I did something wrong and it was just me... Alright, take Flarum then, that seems to work on a Raspberry Pi. Or NodeBB if that's still a thing... Why is Discourse so heavy and at the same time that popular?
I guess because it's featureful, easy and they provide a hosted, white labeled service. It's not great, but it's a safe useable bet. Most organizations don't want to worry about it too much
https://beehaw.org doesn't federate with lemmy.world which cuts them off from most of Lemmy-space.
they do federate with others though... so not stand-alone as op is describing
Yeah. I mean 100% isolated instances.
Was it for moderation reasons?
They had their instance and community before most common ones today existed (pre API bs)
Edit: fixed link
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do you mean basically any forum not based on federation? like 99% of other communities?
There are some but they are filled with zoos and pedos
Oof.
there are already dozens of good stand alone forum products. there would be no need to use a purposefully federating platform where half the code is put to federation. silly.
That is the reason I asked if there is a reason that maybe I'm not aware.
no. its the wrong tool for that job.
Those using lemmybb maybe
I couldn’t fully figure out how to setup my instance so technically I am fully isolated on there lmao
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