Is Lemmy the leading candidate for a viable reddit replacement? Are there any other serious efforts in this space?

HN has such an insane depth of talent that I am surprised I haven't seen a few ShowHN posts that read something like:

"Hi guys, I was bored last weekend so I thought it would be fun to build a reddit clone as a single Rust binary with an imbedded bespoke graph database. It uses a fine tuned LLaMA model for optional auto-moderation. So far it's handling sustained 1.6M / posts sec on my 2015 MacBook Pro. If I have some time this next week I will add distributed mode with Raft or CRDTs. Hope you guys like it."

The people who would enjoy building a reddit really don't want to run a reddit. The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

Why would building it require running it? It's just software. There can be a separate installation of it per community. Like WordPress, or any old phpBB forum.

> The people who want to run a reddit, shouldn't.

The people who want to run something that's like Reddit.com, shouldn't, sure.

I don't see why e.g. a YouTube content creator shouldn't be able to have "a Reddit" (i.e. a single-subreddit installation of Reddit) in the same sense that they have "a blog" or "a Discord." The whole point there is that it's a cult of personality, so the moderation incentives align with the user expectations.

I also don't see why a community like /r/AskHistorians wouldn't be excellent at running "a Reddit" of their own. (In fact, that would be much better than currently, as they could run a very heavily modified fork of Reddit that uses a moderation queue for comments; requires that toplevel comments on posts are either follow-up questions [according to some LLM] or come from verified historian accounts; allows questions to be merged; etc. ...Hey, wait, that's just StackExchange!)

Also, did you know that LessWrong.com used to be "a Reddit"? That is, it was a single-subreddit fork — I believe the only one ever allowed, as some one-off gesture — of the proprietary Reddit codebase. It worked pretty okay for that community! (Though it never received updates from "upstream", so it code-rotted, which is most of the reason they moved away from it. This wouldn't happen in an open-source Reddit project.)