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?
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:-).
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.
Federation didn't create lemmy.
do you mean basically any forum not based on federation? like 99% of other communities?
Yes, but using Lemmy and not federated.
why use Lemmy instead of just being a normal forum if you aren't going to federate?
That is exactly why I asked. Maybe there is a reason I am missing. I expected some out of the box thinking.
well I'd say since non-federated Lemmy is just a forum with a bunch of stuff for federation that you won't use, there's no point. if you want a forum, then Lemmy is the wrong answer. Lemmy is (or at least is designed to be) an open-source, federated copy of reddit, keeping the good parts while removing the corpo stuff and adding the benefits that open-source and federation bring. with only one instance, it's little more than a mediocre forum.
Lemmy is not a forum, though, any more than Mastodon is. It's a totally different, if relates, form factor and provises a radically different user experience.
i disagree.lemmy absolutely is a forum (subject-based threaded discussion). mastodon absolutely is not.
It makes no sense. lemmy is a forum + federation. Removing the federated side, why bother with using lemmy or similar software? its like wanting a car to use to solely generate heat with the exhaust. Theres far better options for that
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
Thanks!
And sh.itjust.works too!
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.
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
It's neat, but is anyone a really using it?
It's been broken for a while, the devs haven't really worked on it. It may be fixed in the future but it's likely it won't ever be touched again.
I couldn’t fully figure out how to setup my instance so technically I am fully isolated on there lmao
I'm not sure how you'd find them, bc they won't be listed on the join lemmy page