First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?

Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.

*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.

I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.

I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.

How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?

  • Snoopy@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    We call them threadiverse or forumverse.

    They are very different.

    Currently Lemmy lacks lot features compared to PieFed and Mbin.

    • Mbin support mastodon, tag, change link to link’s title, customization…sorry i don’t know well Mbin but it is a good software :)
    • Piefed support tag, flair, multicommunity, temporary filters, i read the article, block downvote from people who aren’t subcribed to community…
    • Lemmy was there before PieFed. So it was my first software they have lot apps, lot UI.

    Anyway, i recommend you testing them so you can get a better understanding on their pro and cons :)

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Piefed also has this Mastodon-esque tendency to implement features that only work on their system and are not interoperable with the rest of the ActivityPub software. Which is the kind of thing that is only “nice” until they are a minority player, but could make them one of the most hated systems if they start getting significant users.

      • aasatru@kbin.earth
        0·
        2 months ago

        I don’t think this is accurate for either of the two projects to be honest.

        PieFed made sure to make their API as close to Lemmy’s as possible, and they created feeds so that it would be as easy as possible for Lemmy to integrate in the future.

        Vibes between the developers of the two platforms seems good enough.

        No need to make up drama where there is none.

        • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago
          • The flair part does not federate.
          • They send fake (non-existing) actor ids for votes to obfuscate the identity of the real user. It is “compliant”, but completely against the spirit of a public social network.
          • Every proposal that I’ve seen from them had ActivityPub as an afterthought. Creating “Feed” as a type of Actor, using a special formatted type of message to share ip addresses of abusers for “spam mitigation” even before considering a simple usage of the Flag activity, etc.

          I am not saying they have bad intentions. I am just saying that they prefer to develop things that work for them first and for the rest of the Fediverse second.

          • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Your points seem phrased unnecessarily adversarially. Flairs are a brand-new feature, but if it helps, polls were added a year ago and those federate - not to Lemmy of course that lacks them entirely despite repeated requests to add them for many years, but to other federated platforms that have them e.g. Mastodon.

            I’ve always disliked the spirit of “anonymous voting”, and am glad that they discontinued that.

            I do not see how what you are saying is all that different from Lemmy.

            It is easy to criticize from afar - it is hard to actually build something. But PieFed is managing!

            • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              0·
              2 months ago

              To be completely honest, my dislike of AP server software is not restricted to PieFed. I think all of them are an evolutionary dead end and I wish we stopped wasting our time trying to emulate closed social networks.

              • OpenStars@piefed.socialEnglish
                0·
                2 months ago

                Hrm, interesting. This seems a strongly minority opinion though: people enjoy talking, whether it be focused on non-anonymous user-centric short-form content like Mastodon or Friendica, or topic-focused threaded forums like Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed + nodebb + flarum.

                But if you mean only the implementation, you could very well be correct, knowing so much more than I about such. “Most people” simply want stuff delivered to them for free, not really thinking about how it gets done. I appreciate that you actually take the time to care:-).

                I will add that I for one have no desire to visit a non-closed social network, such as 4chan, bc the amount of spam and trash seems likely to be insurmountable. That said, we need not be limited by what Reddit would do, and that is actually one of the chief things that I appreciate about PieFed - that it is moving beyond what Reddit offered, and is desiring to continue much further along those lines, rather than convert into purely profit making.

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    The term I’ve heard is Threadiverse (i.e. Fediverse with threaded discussions), but that was coined before Threads launched so it’s a little awkward now.

  • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Lemmy, piefed, and mbin are all similar pieces of software that run on a server.

    They are each capable of hosting a small social network website with a similar reddit-like format. They all also support the activitypub standard, which means that they can be linked together, so that when you go to one of those social media sites (lemmy.world for example) you can see any other site that they’re “federated” with, even if that social media site is powered by a different software that supports activitypub (I’m on lemmy.world but I can see communities and posts from piefed.social)

    I generally call lemmy, mbin and piefed “fediverse platforms” because they’re each a platform that you can make a fediverse account on, but that usage is a bit imperfect, since each individual site could also be described as a platform, and is where your account is actually hosted. You could be more specific and call them “fediverse/federated link aggregators” if you wanted to specifically refer to the ones with a similar format to reddit.

    These pieces of software are different because they’re built in different ways (different languages and underlying structure), have different priorities, and as software projects are run in different ways with different leadership, all of which is how you get differences in features and implementation. Lemmy is the oldest of these similar platforms, and as such is the most established. In the open source world it’s very easy and common to end up with a lot of fragmented similar projects. Its both a blessing and a curse.

    There isn’t perfect language for all these things because in the grand scheme of things, it’s a rather new way for social media platforms to work, so the language around how to describe or refer to these things hasn’t really “settled”