Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:
https://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 and gaming and memes and niche cartoons and soil science).
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 a better architecture that makes up for it.
Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using https://piefed.au/ more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they're not secretly kiwis?
Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin/kbin all provide APIs that let you pull data (communities, posts, users) from their backend. A client knows how to connect to the API, pull the data, and present it to the user. Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin all have a default client they ship with, but the Lemmy client only speaks Lemmy, the PieFed client only speaks piefed, etc.
Blorp, among other multi platform clients, speaks Lemmy and PieFed. Blorp can be self hosted, but it’s not a backend like Lemmy, PieFed, etc. Blorp reads/writes data via these APIs, but it doesn’t store any data on a server. The connected API is responsible for data storage.
Idk if I explained that well. Does that make any sense?
Another way to think about it is email. Gmail is both a email server and a client. Blorp is like using a 3rd party email client that connects to Gmail AND Yahoo.