Preamble

I strongly believe Google and Facebook have no place in a University or any other public institution.
As I started my somewhat-technical master, it was disappointing to find out that the students were organized around a loose connection of WhatsApp groups and a very stale Google Drive folder.

This was unacceptable to me and I started to look for something new. I didn’t think a bunch of 20-somethings would be partial to something in the style of phpBB or vBulletin, so I went with something more modern - a link aggregator. Later on I added a Nextcloud shared folder and an Etherpad (to replace the stale GDrive)

Lemmy, in version 0.9.9 as I hosted it seemed to be simple and clean but sleek(-enough) and very functional.

What is Lemmy

Lemmy is a link aggregator for the Fediverse (an interconnected, open source alternative to mainstream social networks, in this case reddit). But it also offers many improvements over classical commercial link-aggregators.

Hosting it

I went with a docker solution. The UI is separated from the backend, so it can be modified and deployed separately. This is exactly what I did. Touched up the themeing lightly, added a noindex meta tag, since it was a closed community and deployed it on my own. It was a fun exploring this, as I’ve previously only been on the consuming end when it comes to docker.
I got a domain, set up nginx and an SSL certificate and we were off to the races.

If it catches on, the federation functionality allows for creating similar communities for other programms in my university and interconnecting those. This is a bit of a pipedream though…

Beyond the university website

After spending days getting “my hands dirty” with Lemmy’s code, I felt really involved with the project, even though I had very little idea of RUST and my efforts were mostly on configuration, deployment and community management.
Nevertheless I wanted to help, got very involved in the community, helped wherever I could - translations, donations, issues, user support, moderation. And am now trying to also contribute code towards the project. You’ve got to start somewhere, right?