and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for
He doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he can decide to run his open source project just as he pleases, but it could have gone so much better. People are mostly just disappointed, I feel like.
There is definitely a LOT of half ass activity pub projects floating around. Everyone wants to start a new thing, but few people want to mature and maintain something someone else started.
We need more people doing the latter. We don’t need another half-finished client. We have those in spades.
So I have a story related to this. I teach English in Korea. One time, two 11-year-old students chose kopi luwak as a topic for their in-class (no research) project. I asked what that is, as I had never heard of it. They explained in pre-intermediate English that there is a cat that poops coffee beans. I didn’t believe them at first, because it sounded so silly. But they urged me to look it up. At first, I got confused between ‘kopi’ and ‘coffee’, because Korean has no ‘f’ sound and substitutes a ‘p’ sound. But when I finally found the Wiki page, I was blown away. The fact that this is real would be so funny if it weren’t for all the abuse another user pointed out.
This is less a reason to use Lemmy or MBin over the other specifically: One of the great features of the fediverse is that the content is not siloed off behind one interface. Usage and development can happen on both and any number of other interfaces and all of them will have access to the same content (barring federation issues, but that should become less of an issue as ActivityPub and various interfaces mature).
As for there being enough people to populate interface specific communities/magazines/whatever, you can’t take a snapshot of today and project that into the future statically. The fediverse population is still relatively low compared to commercial social networking sites, but there is enough of a core userbase for new people to accrete onto over the course of time. There is a potential future where the user base flips, or doesn’t but both Lemmy and MBin have large userbases, or another interface that doesn’t even exist yet takes off and becomes larger than both. But it doesn’t really matter because all that’s happening in those cases is people are being offered different ways of accessing the same content that better match their preference.
Bringing it back to the original point, that the content is not siloed means development on various interfaces can happen concurrently to make things not necessarily better than each other, but more suited to different tastes. You aren’t locked into whatever Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever decides the interface should look like.
I remember an episode of QI where someone brought up the fact that Stephen Fry once bought (then) Prince Charles some Kopi Luwak as a present. His response was, “I thought I would get him something he didn’t already have.”
I prefer being on instances with fewer users anyway - it feels a bit more personal. So more users on the larger Lemmy instances is not really an argument in my book.
I like the user experience on Lemmy and Mbin more. Another thing I like about Mbin is being able to boost posts and interact with the greater Fediverse more.
I like the performance of PieFed. It also works without JavaScript, which is nice some times.
What I like about this place is that we can all be on different platforms if we want to - there's no such thing as there not being enough people around to support all the platforms, as they're not competing for users. I'm happy whatever platform the people I interact with use - the important thing is that I can interact with them. :)
Thank you for mentioning Pie Fed, I neverd heard of it until now, but looks great. Clean code, intro video for developers, db structure exolained. Really friendly for new contributors, quite refreshing.
I really like the user experience as well, and @rimu is great at including the community in its development and keeping an open dialogue. It's a great project.
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