I spend a lot of (far too much) time browsing the depths of Reddit across various topics. One of the subreddits I subscribe to is r/Rust as I'm interested in Rust but far too noobish to be able to do anything with it. Because of this I regularly browse Github for projects based on it to be amazed by the things people can create. I stumbled across Lemmy (this was months ago). Back then there wasn't really much to look at. But now...
What really interested me about Lemmy was their desire for federation.
Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Raddle, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
The federation feature is still under development so it's not quite there yet. It's got a long way to go but it's also got a hell of a lot of features finished off too.
The default dark theme needs some minor tweaks in my opinion as the separation of comments isn't quite enough. I've only tried one or two of them so far but most are retina burning birght.
The search is obscenely fast, returning results pretty much instantly after pressing Enter.
While it may not have much content on there right now which probably contributes to such a great response time, it's still damn impressive.
They have been making some fantastic progress lately and I'd love to see this thing grow a little more and given a chance to thrive. I really think it has promise. You can head over to the "official" instance here: https://dev.lemmy.ml/