The Fediverse and the Journey through Rust

I've mentioned this here and there through Beehaw. I would like to start a freeform roleplay (collaborative writing)/play-by-post instance. I had considered which software to use. There aren't that many options. It really boiled down to Lemmy and kbin. With regards to backend, one's in Rust, the other's in PHP. There are other aspects for consideration as well, but right now Lemmy is leading. Strictly personal reason, I intended on learning Rust in the near future. Might as well start now so I can start making the modifications a RP/PbP instance would need.

What Does a RP/PbP Instance Need?

To be fair, this is my own opinion. There could be more, maybe one of these aren't actually needed. For now, this is what I'll start with!

Dice Roller

This is more important for the play-by-post side. An RPG play-by-post forum, RPG Crossing, actually has a dice macro where it will add a note of tampering if the user tried to change the roll. I feel this could be useful to keep all the players honest.

Linear Thread View

I honestly don't think the current threaded view lends itself well to a RP or PbP post. Unless the GM wants to run a West-Marches style PbP game, or the organizer for the RP wants the post to represent a specific location where each top comment is a start of a story.

But for the other kinds of posts, I would like to have the option to sort them as Chat, Old to New. Maybe call the sorting type “Novel” instead?

Other Considerations

There's definitely other things to consider, like how will the community be divided? Should the site be set to what Lemmy's docs called “blog mode,” so only the mods of those community (GMs?) can start a new post and players can join? Is there a way to prevent people from commenting in posts or communities that they're not a part of?

Would it be easier to just write my own federated forum software that caters to the tighter control required?

I guess I will have to try and see!