Does anyone have any good alternatives to my hometown, due to all the problems my hometown has? I dont want to get involved and help with my hometown, just stand in the town square and ask where a better town is. Oh, and don’t suggest the neighboring towns either.

If you don’t like Lemmy, or Mbin, or Piefed, your best option might be to wait for Sublinks.

Though it might be more useful to discuss why you find the existing platforms unsuitable, and if there might be ways to mitigate this.

I’m no dev, so I can’t speak to the codebase or mod tools, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to get much better than this right now. Lemmy has its issues for sure, but the community has been surprisingly stable, with little growth spurts here and there, and more healthy engagement than I expected. I get frustrated every so often, and there are accounts that make me want to scream, but that’s normal in any place where strangers interact.

I’m curious what other folks have to say, because if there’s a better alternative that I haven’t heard of, then I’m all in, but it’s been pretty hard to keep Lemmy as active as it is. It sounds like you might be a dev? If so, would you be willing to build the tools you want to see for the services you mentioned? It’d be awesome if folks with skills worked to improve existing open source stuff like Lemmy rather than building whole new ones that don’t have any active communities.

Lemmy and kibin are the alternative

What problems do you have with the lemmy codebase?

Lemmy

Except for the fact that with Lemmy it is still impossible to mention a user in the first post of a thread, Lemmy is an excellent product, architecturally stable, ergonomically well-made and very easy to use.

Mbin (Kbin is dead!) is a very interesting project and perhaps in the future it could surpass Lemmy, but today it has an interface that is still too confusing to be usable. Piefeed, on the other hand, seems to have been developed to reproduce many of Reddit’s toxic dynamics, but the state of the project is so little advanced that any comment would be risky.

To answer your question, therefore, there is no alternative to Lemmy today to improve the user experience.

If instead you want to experience the Lemmyverse (or the Threadverse) by correctly viewing the communities (= the Activitypub groups) without giving up the social experience, I recommend you try Friendica, the most powerful and versatile software in the Fediverse, even if its interface is a bit vintage and the only app is objectively inadequate.

I will admit the biggest issue with Lemmy is the lack of discussion. I blame that on the multiple threads of the same post on different instances/communities.