Between (old) reddit, phpbb and smf… the old reddit model wins by a landslide in my opinion. I’ve used all of these over the years and absofuckinglutely HATE phpBB and SMF, with SMF earning slightly less hatred than phpBB.

I’m also old enough to have downloaded .QWK files for offline BBS forum reading/replying and even connecting to the internet over a FidoNet-internet bridge. Lemmy did the exact right thing in copying reddit’s format.

I mainly use it to generate unit tests and it frequently makes shit up that clearly won’t work. Like directly invoking non-exported functions that I deliberately choose not to export, because they don’t need to be exported.

If you work where I work, their solution is to just #include "the_file.c" so they have access to all the functions/variables I painstakingly marked static specifically to prevent them from trying to unit test the internals.