I’ll mention some dead projects, in case anyone gets an itch to pick them up…
lotide/hitide is a minimalist, text-only platform. It has been abandoned.
https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/.
https://lotide.fbxl.net/
Sublinks was in the works, but it is on indefinite hiatus. As I understand it, the main dev became too busy IRL to continue work.
https://github.com/sublinks
A surprising number of people who seem to have their shit together are either confidently incompetent or are flying by the seat of their pants. You can do at least as well, and probably better.
I assume it’s an intentional trade-off by the devs to reduce the storage burden. If each instance is a complete mirror of all federated instances then hosting becomes that much more expensive.
I have been looking for the same thing for years. I basically want the WTA Hike Finder but expanded worldwide, and with some map integration to show the routes visually instead of having to interpret the descriptions.
Free is good, of course. But I also have some gripes about how Band functions so I’m interested to see what else is out there. Thanks for the Campfire recommendation; I will check it out.
While not being exactly what you are proposing, you could consider mastodon.social and lemmy.world the de facto front page for each service. They are by far the largest and best-known instances in their respective networks. Many new users start at those instances, get their toes wet, and then branch out.
I’m not arguing that’s how the network should be structured, though.
Here are a few things off the top of my head.
Deleted accounts leave orphaned posts/comments, which still exist on the site but can be difficult for admins to find and remove: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5525
Private message reports don’t go to all the right people: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4436
We should be getting some vote analytics in the future, which will be great. Lemmy seems to have a significant number of vote manipulation accounts that only exist to upvote/downvote in unison, but they are currently hard to find. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/5669
I really should open an issue to improve the reports queue. It’s tolerable if you mod an individual community or a smaller instance, but it is unusable as an admin on a really big instance like .world. There is no way to search or sort the reports. You can filter by posts or comments but then it only shows you 20 entries, which is a weird and unhelpful limitation. All reports have equal priority; there is no mechanism for users to flag reports that should be escalated to admins. And, if something is heavily reported, there is no way to batch resolve the reports after you address the issue.
10/10 very much recommend doing this for your significant other.
After digging into it, we banned the two sh.itjust.works accounts mentioned in this post. A quick search of the database did not reveal any similar accounts, though that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
If you like Photon, you might like Tesseract. It’s a Photon fork.
dubvee.org
tesh.itjust.works
tess.lemmy.ca
tes.leminal.space