That seems like the exact same design as new reddit.
Similar UI, but really different UX.
Yeah, I didn't think the Lemmy project would go very far when I first saw it. But the implementation is very impressive (performance seems comparable to HN), and the self-hosted model seems like it could be quite amenable to communities staying in control.
How do you make such a thing distributed? Seems to be using a database. If you host on one domain, how does it send the changes to other nodes?