Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their “Killer Features”
For anyone who wants a quick glance at which platform might be suitable
Mbin has better support for microblogs and Mastodon federation than Lemmy. I also prefer the default front-end of Mbin to Lemmy, but Lemmy has better alternative frontends and apps. I think it’s great to support Mbin as well.
tl;dr:
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Lemmy for apps (shit moderation tools)
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Piefed for fast development rate, responsive dev and great features (no apps at all)
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Mbin for keeping your forum and microblog account in one place (really awkward to use)
Piefed is almost perfect, if it actually had apps then it’d probably blow all of these out the water (in my opinion, of course)
Can’t go wrong with any.
I wouldn’t say mbin is awkward to use, but microblogging is included as a bit of a second thought. It’s still nice to be able to communicate with the fediverse at large.
PieFed feels faster than the others to me. It has good support for various content (like peertube channels), allows for content filtering with keywords, has combined communities, and a lot of other clever stuff.
Yeah it was a poor choice of words. I just see no reason to put my forum account with my microblog account and it just feels wrong how they implemented it. It’s clear they focused on only the forum part and just kinda implemented the microblog part later.
Piefed is amazing, though the fact that there’s no apps or clients at all. They’re hard to make since there’s no API, correct me if i’m wrong though.
I use Mbin (well, Fedia, but same thing), and honestly I do that because of the interface. Lemmy’s UX seems so much worse.
The microblogging thing is… there, but it mostly just serves some random post here and there. It’s fine to be able to have a microblog follow in there if you want, but I think the assumption that you’d centralize multiple AP services in a single app now feels entirely obsolete. That doesn’t get in the way and it’s still a much better client for Lemmy than Lemmy, though.
You’re right on that, the lemmy UI is horrible. Mbin’s UI is the only which has card posts so that’s awesome, but I just don’t see much reason (imo) to use it over lemmy or piefed. Tbf mbin’s always kinda been the weird one but i can respect its existence.
To each his own ;)
I suppose that’s the point of interoperability. I would much rather support an ecosystem of apps doing the exact same thing to satisfy different UX preferences than the excruciating endless talk of “which of these identical instances all plugging to the same service should I arbitrarily joing as an identity-defining statement” you get in Masto.
but I think the assumption that you’d centralize multiple AP services in a single app now feels entirely obsolete
It’s not that I want a single app, it’s that I want a single account with all my posts/data even though I’m using different apps. I don’t want to have to have so many duplicate follows across all the different fediverse apps.
Yeah, but that’s solved through cross-login, which I’ve already seen used at least once in Pixelfed. Logging in with a pre-existing Masto account and importing your follows should have been the default solution, but I understand how the tech may not have been in place.
But that still just creates a new Pixelfed account which trusts the Mastodon account identity, and it must be followed separatel from the Mastodon account. And you can’t enable the SSO between existing accounts, and there’s no account migration on Pixelfed.
You can’t use Lemmy apps with piefed? I thought the API was the same?
No, that’s sublinks which isn’t finished yet.
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One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet is that Mbin supports custom magazine/community CSS like Old Reddit did. Don’t think it’s federated currently though, so it’s local only. There’s also the ability to follow users and boost (retweet) content, which Lemmy lacks.
Judging by recent posts by Piefed’s creator, they seem to be planning to add end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content.
How does the boosting work? Because I was never a major Twitter user, and on Tumblr, the “retweet”. Option makes things a bit of a disjointed mess because (at least with new Tumblr and the app) it treats each share as a separate post and they aren’t linked properly together. So, say someone responds to a comment you made on the reshare ten reshare ago. You may or may not even be able to access it. You may not even be able to find it.
Boosting re-sends the original message, with the original message id attached, and both Lemmy and mbin filter filter out duplicates. On Lemmy, upvoting a post boosts it, and on mbin the functions are separate. Boosting works to get the community/magazine group actor to re-send the post to subscribed remote sites, so if the site you’re using subscribed to a community after the original post was made, it could now receive it thanks to the boost.
So it doesn’t work like it does on Tumblr then. Thank you!
Not here, no. It does on Mastodon and other microblogs, though.
Is piefed any of three listed on their site? Is it like mbin where fedia.io is one execution of it? Or is everyone here speaking of piefed.social, specifically?
Yee, there are multiple Piefed instances, for example there’s also https://feddit.online/ that I know about
Piefed/mbin both have better fediverse integration with other platforms. Lemmy has the numbers and is super fast + apps.
I use Lemmy because there’s a good ad free app (jerboa)
Yeah jeroboa is awesome! They did great work.
Good? Hah
(Written in jerboa, constantly fighting with the keyboard bugs the devs refuse to fix)
Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:
- Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
- But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
- On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it’s version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title’s attached link instead
- However, Mbin doesn’t seem to be able to fetch the post’s body through RSS
- On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
- On Mbin, afaik, you can’t block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
- On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don’t host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
- For microblogging, RSS doesn’t work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
- On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn’t
- Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
- Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn’t
On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because “it just works”, I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy’s functions.
I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down
Would you maybe share your filter as a separate post? Seems handy :)
https://thebrainbin.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/563178/Some-quasi-features-for-Mbin-through-Ublock-Origin-filters
(edit - weird, the link isn’t appearing directly on The/Brain/Bin…)
