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:
- my Mastodon account @_elena@mastodon.social
- my Friendica account @elena@opensocial.space
- and my Lemmy account @elena@lemmy.world to see if anything happens
Thanks and happy to be here!
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.
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.
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.
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@fedia.io @_elena @elena@lemmy.world 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.
@jeena@piefed.jeena.net
This is great to hear - thank you for your testimony. May I quote you on my blog, if I do a follow-up post about Fediverse content aggregators?
Sure!
What’s your blog URL? I’m always looking to subscribe to interesting blogs.
@jeena@piefed.jeena.net it’s on blog.elenarossini.com (specifically the newsletter / series The Future is Federated)
Testing out comment federation, please don’t mind me 🙈
Pinging @_elena@mastodon.social @elena@friendica.opensocial.space and @elenarossini@pixelfed.social (because, why not) 🙈 as well as @elena@lemmy.world and @elena@piefed.social
