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Fediverse @lemmy.ml elena @fedia.io

Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin

I've been researching for the past week Threadiverse projects (Lemmy at first, then PieFed and now Mbin) with the goal of testing out their interoperability with the rest of the Fediverse.

Apologies in advance if this is the third post you see from me - this one is my first in Mbin.

I wonder if you have any insights regarding the differences between the 3 - advantages/disadvantages and opinions on your favorite project?

I'm also interested to see if Mbin manages to federate mentions (unlike Lemmy and PieFed who falls short). So for the purposes of this test, I'm mentioning:

Thanks and happy to be here!

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58 comments

  • 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.

  • @[email protected] @_elena @[email protected] 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

  • 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.

  • I started on /kbin (MBin's predecessor) because I liked the UI and the philosophy. But then I wanted to host it myself and it being written in PHP I really didn't want to host it myself, I've been burned by PHP software too many times in the past.

    Therefor I switched to Lemmy which was a nightmare to setup in the beginning because there was no documentation on how to do it. I still got it working after some time and was fairly happy with it. It was reasonably fast, the UI is good enough and it had a lot of 3rd party apps working with it so I could choose some other frontend on the phone for example. But over the last year every update made it more and more heavy to run as a single user instance. And then the current update made it so I couldn't run it on my small VPS anymore because it would create such a load that all the other services I'm running on it (Mastodon, some Websites, PeerTube, Matrix, etc.) would go down because of it.

    So I switched to PieFed. So far it has been amazing for me. It's written in Python so it's super easy for me to understand and to fix things which I don't like. It has a simple theme engine which made it very easy for me to adapt a theme to how I want to have it. But the biggest advantage is that it's so easy on the resources, I can run it as a single user instance and it does not affect any of my other services running on the same server.

    So there you have it, if you don't have too many resources available on your server I would go with PieFed. The developer is very approachable and aligns with my values more than the Lemmy devs.

  • @[email protected] @[email protected] 👷🏻‍♀️ OP here, testing out if Mastodon replies federate 👷🏻‍♀️

    • 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.

      • 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: @[email protected] and @[email protected]

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

  • Testing out comment federation, please don’t mind me 🙈

    Pinging @[email protected] @[email protected] and @[email protected] (because, why not) 🙈 as well as @[email protected] and @[email protected]

  • @[email protected] I send you a message on mastodon!

  • 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.

    • 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.

      • I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

        Suppose an instance has these users:

        • Victor who uses a VPN
        • Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
        • Terry who uses a Tor
        • Norm who uses the normal clearnet
        • Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

        And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to [email protected]. Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

        The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

    • There's Proton Photon, an actively maintained desktop ui alternative for Lemmy.

    • 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).

      • Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

        • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
        • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

        CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

        When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

        So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

58 comments