Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:

piefed.social/topic/gaming

I hate having to choose between visiting each community individually or seeing all my subscriptions in one place (I’m not always in the mood for news, gaming and memes).

Took a while to find the sourcecode , for some reason my search engine doesn’t want to show codeberg:

PieFed A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask.

  • Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.
  • Easy setup, easy to manage - few dependencies and extra software required.
  • AGPL.
  • First class moderation tools.

Feels like lemmy. Smells like lemmy. Talks like lemmy. Technically isn’t a ‘variant’ but an ‘alternative’ because the code isn’t a fork, but from my lazy ass user perspective it’s totally a variant.

Image vs link posts are more clearly presented too. On lemmy I have to squint at the icon in the corner of an image to work out if clicking on it will make it bigger or take me to a different website. Inconsistent and fiddly, especially when I’m tired.

Anyone here tried hosting it and can comment on whether it’s a PITA or not? It’s an interpreted language so the presumption is it would be crap, but for all I know it might have better overarching architecture that makes up for it.

Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using piefed.au more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they’re not secretly kiwis?