I ask generally out of curiosity. I was just thinking that as big social media fractures, old school isolated forums might become “cool again”, and that one of the achievements of lemmy might be as a nice platform for simply running a forum for whatever community you want all without needing to worry about federation.
If it turns out that work of federating data is a substantial part of the resource overhead, and that an isolated server would actually be quite efficient, that’d be quite a nice feather in the lemmy cap I’d say. Hexbear seems to have been using lemmy this way for a while and it seems to have been successful too.
Lemmy can certainly be used like an old school forum with federation disabled in the settings. The developers even made a phpBB-like front-end for it: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmyBB
Yea … but I like the reddit-like interface. It’s richer with more options than an old school forum.
Also … they’re running an instance of this somewhere too.