I'd like to create a safe space without distraction and a focus on specific topics.
But as soon as a user from my instance posts or reacts to something outside of my instance, a lot of data gets transferred and everyone from my instance will see the post in the "All" timeline.
This could lead to a lot of distraction pretty fast, especially people with ADHD could lose track if they see some interesting stuff from other instances. I want to avoid this and give them a safe space to be able to focus.
The only way I figured out was to deactivate federation at all. There is only one button in the settings.
But I would like to keep the feature that people could comment from other Fediverse tools like Mastodon, Kbin, Peertube, etc., but it doesn't work anymore, if federation is deactivated.
Is there a way to keep away all federated content from other instances, which got in touch with my users (proactively cross-posted stuff is okay), but keep the feature so people from other instances could post something?
And it would be okay if my users comment on external posts, too, but not all people on my instance have to know it or get distracted by it.
Thank you for your help :)
Lemmy is pretty immature as code to actually run in production. It may be well over 4 years old, but the whole thing seems to have very little in the way of information that a server operator can look at to check the health and problems under the covers. It also doesn't deal with unrecognized data very well and hides a lot of errors in a log where the messages are often not very much of a hint what is going on.
Lemmy surely is unique, as I almost never see people using it actually criticize the code for quality assurance and testing. More often than not, I see people cheering and defending it. I've had to look through this experience and code as it is more run like an art project or a music band than any serious focus on data integrity or performance concern.
Do you know a good programmed forum software? Because one of the reasons I chose Lemmy was, that it was content based, like a classical forum and that's what I need.
But the second thing what I need is, to be able to access the posts/comments via an API, like REST to process them.
I am at a point where I will throw away the work of the last 3 weeks to get some useful software, because it looks like Lemmy will just create unnecessary work, which could have been avoided, if it would have been clean programmed.
I already checked phpBB, it doesn't have a REST API :/
I haven't looked into forums software in a long time, but Discourse is what I hear often recommend.
Not really a fan of Discourse. It has a lot of nonsense implemented, like a lot of achievements, which pollute the notifications and distracts from what you want to do. I find it as distracting, as the "all feed" of Lemmy, which shows everything a user of your instance touched, which is a weird concept imho.
Fair enough then! I guess in that case maybe Lemmy with federation disabled is your best bet? I know you mentioned not doing this in your original post, but since if you were to use a standard message board software, it's unlikely to have federation implemented (at least, I don't know of any that work with ActivityPub) so you wouldn't be losing anything more than with the other approach.
You could even go with lemmyBB which is Lemmy, with a standard forums interface.
The problem if you deactivate federation is, that people think, they can post with their Mastodon account, but it fails.
But another problem is, that if you deactivate federation, all the federated content stays in the "all feed" and people might still post there. And federated communities show up to after deactivation. This is sloppy craftsmanship, again, and I could cry, if I see stuff like this, or did I just missed how to get rid of federated content after deactivating federation?
I tried to install lemmyBB, but the README is pretty broken and I couldn't even find someone, who has this front-end running. I already opened an issue on github and it looks like lemmyBB only works with an older version of lemmy :/
Maybe I just copy my first posts, which got ghost data federated (from older installations), so the posts get a new id and people are able to post comments again (which can be seen by me). So at least one problem will be solved.
I haven't looked around at alternatives.
Lemmy has a lot of front-end app development going on and I think that's one of the big strengths. The API can be bloated with a lot of duplicate data in JSON responses but it is usable.