Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

_elena , 3 hours ago

@elena @elena 👷🏻‍♀️ OP here, testing out if Mastodon replies federate 👷🏻‍♀️

jerry , 1 hour ago

If I can help with your tests in some way, let me know. I manage most types of fediverse software including Fedia.io, though I’ve not yet tried piefed. I think your question is prompting me to give it a try.

elena OP , 26 minutes ago

Thank you so much Jerry, I really appreciate! 🙏

I'm really enjoying Fedia.io and I'm delighted that my Mastodon (thread) mention showed up in my Mastodon notifications. It's the first time I managed to get it to work on the "Threadiverse" (the same experiment failed on Lemmy and PieFed).

Interestingly, the same thing didn't work for my Lemmy.world account or Friendica.

The lesson so far: Mbin threads on Fedia.io federate mentions on Mastodon but not Lemmy or Friendica. But I bet mentions in comments federate. So retrying this here: @elena and @elena

And apologies in advance if I'm using the wrong language to describe this, I'm a newbie 😅

jerry , 5 minutes ago

I’m not surprised about friendica. I will ask the mbin developers to take a look. I will also take a look at lemmy - I know federation works with lemmy.world - I get enough reports about their users here to know that for sure :) I just don’t know how mentions are handled.

kenkenken , 3 hours ago

Threadiverse? I didn't hear this name, I think it can be confused with Meta's threads.net. But I don't like Lemmy, and don't want the network to be named after it. For example we don't call Fediverse as Mastodonverse.

As for Mbin, UI looks good, a feature showing similar threads is useful. But it is quite new yet, many important options are missed in the preferences yet.

Bezier , 3 hours ago

I think the name has been there longer than threads(.)net. But yeah, at this point it’s too easy to confuse if one doesn’t know about it already.

ciferecaNinjo , 2 hours ago

Yes indeed.. “threads” in the generic sense of the word pre-dates the web. And threadiverse is a few years older than “FB Threads™”. That’s what’s so despicable about Facebook hi-jacking the name. It’s also why I will not refer to them by Meta (another hi-jacking of a generic term with useful meaning that their ego-centric marketers fucked up)

_elena , 3 hours ago

@kenkenken I totally agree with you, the term "Threadiverse" makes me cringe because of the Meta connection... but it's what people have been calling content aggregation projects on the Fediverse. I didn't come up with it 🤷‍♀️

Really liking #Mbin so far and happy about its interoperability

sabreW4K3 , 3 hours ago

Threadiverse was used prior to Meta’s joining of the Fediverse.

otter , 3 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

I’ve used the term “threadiverse” for a while and it’s been in use from before Meta threads was widely advertised, but I agree that it can be confusing now

It would be nice to have a descriptor for the format. For example, Mastodon & Misskey are ‘Microblogging’ platforms. Lemmy, Mbin, Piefed, and Sublinks are _____ platforms.

meldrik , 2 hours ago

Lemmyverse = a federation of Lemmy instances. Threadiverse = a federation of Lemmy, mbin instances etc. Fediverse = all the software that uses ActivityPub.

jay , 45 minutes ago

What kind of options do you feel mbin is currently missing?

kenkenken , 33 minutes ago

Sorting order preferences.

collectifission , 3 hours ago

@elena @_elena @elena I have most experience with Lemmy which does what I need it to and what I expect from it, which is: being able to post long format texts with the occasional pictures. I maintain the community over at https://feddit.nl/c/nuclear

ciferecaNinjo , 2 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

tl;dr:

• Lemmy ← shit show for years
• (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
• piefed ← never heard of it

I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.

mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.

The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.

Cloudflare filters lacking

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.

ProdigalFrog , 2 hours ago

There’s Proton, an actively maintained desktop ui alternative for Lemmy.

Chozo , 1 hour ago

I feel like there's too many things named Proton right now.

Rozauhtuno , 1 hour ago

No love for neutrons ;-(

kionite231 , 55 minutes ago

They carry negative charge :(

Dave , 40 minutes ago

It’s actually called Photon.

Dave , 40 minutes ago

It’s actually called Photon.

admin , 1 hour ago

What’s the usecase for cloudflare filtering / blocking LW?

I’m aware that the latter is a huge risk in what is supposed to be a decentralised solution, but I’m not sure why you’d need to filter hundreds of communities for that (rather than defed 1 server).

Dave , 27 minutes ago

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums.

Lemmy lets you block whole instances, it was introduced in 0.19.0 (which was released just before Christmas, but many instances didn’t update until 0.19.3 was released around the start of the year due to federation issues with 0.19.0).

I don’t get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though. If your instance doesn’t use cloudflare, then you won’t access through cloudflare. I’d actually be really interested in understanding why this is something you’re looking for, rather than just the ability to block an instance such as Lemmy.world.

r00ty Admin , 46 minutes ago

I think there were historically interoperability issues, and there used to be (my version of mbin is quite old), and maybe still are issues federating dislikes (which stems from the way they were seen in kbin, which straddles both thread based and mastadonesque sides of the fediverse). But overall there's aren't the larger federation issues there used to be.

Right now, the choice mainly comes down to the interface you prefer, and if you perhaps want a limited ability to work with mastadon type posts. Since you can follow mastadon users and see their posts within the mbin interface.