Holy crap, there is lemmy but with categories combining many communities:

https://piefed.social/topic/gaming

I hate having to choose between visiting each community individually or seeing all my subscriptions in one place (I'm not always in the mood for news and gaming and memes and niche cartoons and soil science).

Took a while to find the sourcecode , for some reason my search engine doesn't want to show codeberg:

PieFed
A Lemmy/Mbin alternative written in Python with Flask.

• Clean, simple code that is easy to understand and contribute to. No fancy design patterns or algorithms.
• Easy setup, easy to manage - few dependencies and extra software required.
• AGPL.
• First class moderation tools.

Feels like lemmy. Smells like lemmy. Talks like lemmy. Technically isn't a 'variant' but an 'alternative' because the code isn't a fork, but from my lazy ass user perspective it's totally a variant.

Image vs link posts are more clearly presented too. On lemmy I have to squint at the icon in the corner of an image to work out if clicking on it will make it bigger or take me to a different website. Inconsistent and fiddly, especially when I'm tired.

Anyone here tried hosting it and can comment on whether it's a PITA or not? It's an interpreted language so the presumption is it would be crap, but for all I know it might have a better architecture that makes up for it.

Also, would I be considered an aussie.zone traitor if I started using https://piefed.au/ more? Anyone know the people running it to make sure they're not secretly kiwis?