Are there communities, free software/open source or otherwise, using Lemmy as their forum software?
Nowadays, many use Discourse, some are on Zulip, and I just don’t care about the Discord ones. Would Lenmy not fit the same purposes? It is federated and easier to participate in, like mailing lists - no need to sign up per forum. Matrix is too, but it doesn’t seem to be made for long-form writing.
I believe Discourse was designed based on experience with community dynamics, and Zulip is well-designed too. Would something with federated participation like Lemmy not work as well?
I’m not aware of any such communities that run their forum on Lemmy.
I think it could fit, although Lemmy’s design as a link aggregation site gives it some rough edges for the purpose we’re discussing. For example, the search functions are a bit awkward to use, there is no support for subtopics, and file upload support is (from what I’ve seen) very limited.
On the other hand, Lemmy’s use of Markdown makes it more comfortable for text formatting than BBCode, which is the HTML-like markup used on many forums.
In what way is the search function in Lemmy awkward to use, is there anything specific that can be fixed? You are right about subtopics, and also Lemmy normally doesnt show discussions organized by topic on the frontpage. That can be changed though with different frontends like lemmyBB.