I am the CTO for an early-stage FinTech startup, and am looking to connect with architect-level developers who have managed their own self-hosted instance of Lemmy to help stand up a standalone, non-federated instance on a cloud provider such as AWS or Azure. This would be paid work, can be part-time to fit your schedule, and will have the option to become full-time upon our next round of funding.
Please reply or DM me if you have any interest and would like more details. Thanks!
Jason
Aren’t those specs that would be better served by designing your own tool than introducing a complexe codebase that solves way more than the feature set you’re after and whose knowledgeable people will be difficult to find and hire?
I would say what you really need is to take the time of specifying what are the very concrete features you put in the idea of a community management platform, then see if there is not a simple path to implement them incrementally (protip : remove the “platform” in the label, it immediately looks less scary and it serves no purpose anyway, that’s a word you use to impress investors).
Of course, I say that from an external and naive viewpoint after reading your short description, sorry if I’m far off.
We have a detailed feature roadmap/prioritization laid out. I only mentioned the two most-critical items that I am seeing as real differentiators between the tools we have reviewed. And we have evaluated quite a few in addition to Lemmy: Discourse was (is?) the front-runner, but also proprietary, paid, non open-source ones like Khoros, Verint, and numerous others.
The challenge is that:
a) My business partners are keen on the Reddit style interface, but it must be a standalone instance and white-labeled.
b) Our business case requires near-infinite sub-reddits, which most of these tools can’t provide
c) Our unique user base and business model is the special sauce of our investor pitch, not the tech. In a pinch, any of these tools can work, but we need something that scales in the right way. Replatforming down the road is expensive and impactful to users, whereas spending a bit of time up front to do tool eval is much cheaper. You can’t “fail fast” when it comes to significant strategic decisions like this.
d) We don’t yet have the funding for a full-spectrum, full-time dev team. We can afford one or two tech people part-time right now, with the assumption that standing up a pilot can be done part-time if the person has done it before. Once we are funded though, we can share fixes/features that we build back into the Lemmy community. That level of control is why I like open source tools over proprietary (where you don’t have the ability to modify code or define the roadmap priorities).
Hence we don’t want to build our own tool from scratch if Lemmy can check enough of the feature boxes. But I want to pressure test that, as I am concerned greatly about its overall lack of maturity as a platform (as @FleaCatcher also mentions below).