The software that is used to run bakchodi.org is called Lemmy. I am one of its developers, along with @dessalines. We have been working on the project full-time for about two years. In this post i want to explain how it works, and what makes it different from platforms like Reddit.
Lemmy is a free and open source project, which means that anyone can create their own web forum with it. There is no company behind the project. Thats how it can work without advertising, tracking or payments. Development is instead financed with donations, primarily from the NLnet foundation, but also from normal users.
Federation is arguably the main feature of Lemmy. You can think of it like email. It allows different servers to communicate with each other. For example, through federation you could follow communities on other instances like !linux@lemmy.ml or !canada@lemmy.ca, and interact with them. Unfortunately, federation is not enabled yet on this site.
By the way, i noticed that some users are suggesting to change the name to something more serious (to be honest, i dont know what bakchodi means). Changing the name is one possibility, but its also possible to create another website using Lemmy, and connect them both via federation. This has some advantages like separate admin teams, possibility of having different rules, and generally would make both sites more independent from each other.
For more information about Lemmy you can visit the official website, read the documentation, and look at the git repositories.
If you want to see Lemmy improve, the best thing you can do is make contributions yourself. This can be done by reporting bugs, writing code, or submitting translations. In my opinion, the biggest problem which Lemmy has is a lack of users, so promoting it would be very helpful (by inviting people to bakchodi.org, or pointing them to join-lemmy.org/instances). Of course you can also make donations.
If you have any questions, I will try my best to answer them.
Can u do a post about security features of your platform? That would go a long way in bringing us more ppl here. And thank you for providing us this platform.
I cant say anything about donations as of now but once we get decent numbers here, we surely can do something about that too.
Hmm not sure what exactly “security features” would be. We had a security audit about half a year ago (part of the NLnet sponsorship), and there were no major problems found. You can see the issues here (also check the “closed” tab). For sure, one advantage which Lemmy has compared to Reddit in security is that there are no external trackers or ads, which get to execute Javascript. Those can be used as an attack vector against users.
For now the money we receive from NLnet is completely sufficient, so donations are not a priority. Different types of contributions to the project are much more valuable.
Many thanks for this answer. Much appreciated
Does Lemmy has advance search like reddit?
No. You can open an issue about that.
yeh Bhi Sahi hai Bhaiya Lekin ek baat puchni thii aap Rehete kaha ho
Hey, thank you for I guess officiating our server in a way by reaching out. Please answer a few of my queries:
Again, thanks for the replies and this platform. And I also tip my hat to you guys for going with Rust. I have hardly dipped my toes in Rust but would love to pick it up and tinker around with Lemmy as and when I get that luxury of time.
On a tangent, what has been your experience with Rust? And why Rust? As in, was it due to prior experience or just features of Rust?
If you want to implement a karma system, i wouldnt have any problem merging such a pull request, assuming that it is programmed well and can be disabled.
Rust was chosen by dessalines who started the project. I’m not sure why he chose it, but i think its a very good choice. Unlike most languages i used before, it doesnt have any null values, which avoids a huge number of errors, and it generally has a focus on correctness that helps to avoid long debugging. Plus its extremely performant.
Can we have a private Chat feature?? Also Thank you for your efforts and keeping your project open source! I hope your platform achieves success soon :)
You can already do a private 1:1 chat with other users. That could also be redesigned to have a more chat-like interface. We also want to implement private communities in the future, but that is complex and will take a lot more time.
For more advanced chat features, i would recommend Matrix which is open source and can be selfhosted. By the way, i forgot to mention that our development chat and others are also on Matrix: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy:matrix.org
Is a $5 vps run lemmy just fine initially, say, for 1000-10000 users?
Yes, lemmy.ml is bigger than that and runs on a 10€ with lots of resources to spare.
@nutomic@bakchodi.org Thank you for the response. One last question, could users use the API to make smaller companion apps?
Of course. There are already various open source apps for Lemmy which you could contribute to (so as to not duplicate work). But its also possible to fork them, or write new apps from scratch.
Appreciate your responses. I will check it out. :)
Are you also involved in the creation of bakchodi.org?
Not at all.
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