Could lemmy be used as a private self hosted forum?
And could lemmy be used as a private forum were only registered users and whitelisted users can view, post and comment on the instance. This way you can have a private instance which only paid users of your group or club can join like many membership website forums have.
There is a BB forum frontend for Lemmy that replicates that phpBB forum style. Saw it mentioned in a few comments.
Yes. It has both a whitelist federation only mode and a completely private mode.
Probably, that would defeat the purpose of the Fediverse a bit, but it’s doable
Fully private: Yes. Private but federating? Not really. I’d want that for my single-user-instant, but it’s not really possible. What you can kinda do, is blocking access to all but the federation endpoints via IP (it broke federation when I tried it, but I didn’t have time to try too much, just the hardcoded IP is kinda making it a no-go anyway), but not for being logged in.
edit: Gawdsdamnit, another 2 year old post.
I think discourse is a better forum-like software for that (also federates afaik)
It wouldn’t be Lemmy, you should check out freedit and the plethora of single server reddit clones out there.
There’s a phpbb forum front end you can use. Having it private yet federated doesn’t make any sense though, but yes you can use it completely on its own with federation turned off.
