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?
We call them threadiverse or forumverse.
They are very different.
Currently Lemmy lacks lot features compared to PieFed and Mbin.
Anyway, i recommend you testing them so you can get a better understanding on their pro and cons :)
Thanks for saying mbin is good software 👋😊
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.
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.
Flagactivity, 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.
There have been discussions about how to implement this before. But it has to be done in a way that is agreed by other threadiverse software. Unless they actually provide profiles for these fake actors there will be problems since some software will look up the profile info to cache it, even for likes…
Personally I’m of the opinion of a standard header to mark a favourite message as a private one and use a random ID that the originating instance can use to validate the message as genuine. But, this needs to be adopted properly by all.
I think we should move away from “threadiverse software” and embrace a transparent social web.
If we want to be transparent, we need to stop creating these leaky abstractions. Votes are not private. A vote on Lemmy is just a
Like, a downvote is just adislike. Instead of pretending this information should be private, we should make it clear to the users that they should only react in anyway if they feel comfortable in sharing their opinion in public.That depend, what your are trying to achieve.
Your point is valid. PieFed point of view is also valid. There are circumtance where voting is better private than transparency. As for myself, i would completly remove the voting system because it is useless.
Why are you voting ? Do you like the cat picture ? The article ? The title ? We will never know. So what’s the point of voting since we don’t know its reasons ?
Why it is at the top of my timeline ? And what about minorities ? Let’s imagine 10 deafs people 1000 hearing people. If ya 1000 hearing people downvote a post because you don’t want to see a post with sign language…
Don’t overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it’s a negative addition, you vote it down. That’s all that there is to it.
I never downvoted any posts, you may check my alts. I don’t do that. I simply ignore or tell users or repport.
Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.
At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.
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!
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.
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.
Yeah, that’s what I mean. I’ve written a series of blog posts about it.
Development wise, how do you see piefed develop into the future?
any chances of it just dying?
There is always a chance of open source projects dying off, but if there’s an active user base who enjoy the software it will usually not die easy.
Mbin is a good example of this. It started out as Kbin, which was a project dominated by one very active developer who made the whole thing on his own. Unfortunately he did not prioritize getting other people on board, and he then suffered what seems to have been pretty severe health problems. Last thing we heard from him was a picture from a hospital bed. I hope he’s alright.
Thankfully, as what he had made was open source, Kbin lives on in the form of Mbin. If you check my domain you’ll see I’m still on a site called “kbin.earth” rather than mbin - this is why.
PieFed’s developer is better at taking other developers onboard. If you check out !piefed_meta@piefed.social you’ll see monthly development updates. The head developer (Rimu) runs the show, but seven other people contributed last month alone.
If Rimu decides to quit, other people can and will take over as long as there’s an interest. PieFed has the added advantage here of being written in Python, which is a language many people know.
So it should be pretty robust, all in all.
As for the future, PieFed just now launched app support. I guess one thing to look out for is the emergence of alternative user interfaces.
Developments are happening fast and the developers are quite creative. It’s fun to follow. :)
Like with what happened to Kbin, I think it’s great that we have 3 ongoing projects doing roughly the same thing. So if one is them dies out, we can just swap to the others. As a user invested in the threadverse, I think this is a net positive.