cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57576884
There’s so many ways to interact with the Fediverse. The most popular, by far, seems to be Mastodon, but Lemmy, Misskey, and Pixelfed are also relatively popular. Kbin used to be popular, but it has apparently been abandoned, and is mostly dead at this point.
I recently learned that Mbin is a thing, checked it out, and it looked really cool! Has anyone used it? How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.
What Fediverse services do you actually, regularly use?
For me, it’s mostly Lemmy, though I do hop on Mastodon every now and then.
PieFed is more advanced than Lemmy in several ways, while less so in others.
Like for one it offers fantastic onboarding to the Fediverse via a wizard asking users what topics they are interested in and then signs them up to communities.
And for another, at any time users can view Categories of Communities, such as all things Fediverse, News & Politics, or Gaming, and now users can even create our own customized Feeds - all of this is in addition to rather than instead of the traditional Subscribed and All feeds.
Users can also follow anything - a user, community, post, single comment, etc. - plus stop following comments that you’ve written but no longer wish to receive notifications for.
It’s REALLY cool! The major downsides revolve around it being newer and so a bit less polished, like there’s now a post preview feature but that is not yet available for comment replies.
The codebase is written in Python, so is possible for more people to help out with making changes than Lemmy, written in Rust. Some people wonder if it might not scale as well to larger number of users, but so far that is not a problem and the speed of updates seems well worth that trade-off.
I like the sound of this. Pardon the comparison, but it’s like multisubreddit. That’s one of the big things from reddit I miss. Making my own categorised feed.
It is a feature very often asked for on Lemmy, but with the codebase being in Rust, development work on it is very slow. With PieFed being in Python, it is far easier to add features such as that one to it.:-)
I see… You make a compelling argument, to be honest, and those are some nice features. I really like this custom Feed thing.
I’m definitely delving into Piefed in the coming days.
It is very much worth checking out, yes!
I use it as my daily driver. Some functions, like searching for posts, are abysmally bad - but thankfully that’s the only one in that category. For me who can hop over to a Lemmy alt when I need to, PieFed is a great main. Another downside is that often I receive a notification for something that I cannot see, for a variety of reasons including that I’ve blocked all users from an instance (but hey, on PieFed that’s actually possible in the first place!).
PieFed is definitely still in alpha, though ironically a better experience than Lemmy in many ways for all of that, even though a more frustrating one in other ways. An API is currently being tested using the Thunder app, which should help smooth the usability issues.
My advice: most definitely make a PieFed account - you have nothing to lose there - and also hold onto your older one. You’ll use it less and less often, you’ll see:-). There is a bit of a learning curve though, since PieFed offers so many new features and you’ll want to try out this and that to see what works best for you. e.g. for some lower-volume communities, I have notifications set up to receive every single new post, rather than have to wait to find that while scrolling Subscribed or All. It really helps! (But can be quite overwhelming for higher-volume communities - the better way now could be to create a custom topic Feed, which I haven’t tried yet but that’s awesome that I now can:-).
I love how excited you are about this!
I have a PieFed account. Set it up and browsed for a little, but haven’t found my way quite yet. I’ll try to figure it out this weekend.
I’ll probably post about my expedience on !gondaily@lemm.ee, one of these days.
Excited :D
Yeah the learning curve is real… but fortunately it’s bc there is so much more that can be done, not bc like it’s “difficult” or anything, just that you get to choose how you want things to be.:-)
Like anything, you get better with practice, so yeah, just start strolling through the posts and enjoy!
PieFed really is the best (most often only) answer that I’ve seen to SO VERY MANY questions for how to accomplish something on Lemmy (usually you cannot, unless some app provides that feature). Like how to see posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics: the topics (often if not always tend to) do that, like Arts & Crafts - and another cool trick is that if you ever do want it, News & Politics is always right there just waiting for you, so there’s no longer any need to “subscribe” to those (or maybe subscribe to some of the lower traffic, less contentious communities?), hence you can both have a Subscription feed free of politics (as an example, for someone who wanted that) and still have full access to politics whenever you wanted. It’s a whole new way of browsing the Threadiverse, i.e. even if accessing the same Lemmy communities, you approach it all differently - or, you can, if you want.
It’s so nice to have choices!:-)
:D That does sound nice…
It is nice. I use my older Lemmy account less and less often these days… I am glad that Lemmy exists for people - especially someone just using it as a back-end for whatever app of choice they use as an actual interface - but I am even more glad to have PieFed, which suits so many of my needs (tbf not all) perfectly or at least more so than Lemmy.:-D
What do you think is missing from PieFed?
The search function for content is abysmally bad. Tbf it hasn’t been shown much love yet, and Reddit’s was (edit: hehe, I meant “is”) not great either. Though Lemmy’s is superb, especially newer features will allow restriction to post titles.
Another one: PieFed has a post preview option, but only for posts, not comments. So I either find out about problems (like an image not being displayed properly) afterwards, or I have to open a new tab and try a preview with either Lemmy, or a new post on PieFed.
One annoyance: you can receive notifications for things that don’t exist, or you don’t have access to (e.g. if you block all users from an instance - which on PieFed you can do that! Lemmy’s version is misnamed and so weak as to be misleading to be called an instance block, when it allows content from users on that instance to be displayed, and they can also reply to you, trigger notifications, etc., really it should have been named a community mute rather than instance block, but PieFed’s version is so helpful! - but anyway if you do that, they can still trigger a notification for you, even though you cannot see their actual reply. Another annoyance: if you leave on the default settings for either the auto-collapse or auto-hide features, then it may take you to a space on the page that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual reply, and you have to hunt it down (which if it were removed rather than just collapsed, you will literally never find it). Also if the post or comment OP deletes their content, then the notification should likewise be removed, but right now it’s not.
So it’s not “perfect”. I maintain a backup Lemmy account for whenever the server has connectivity issues (all Lemmy instances do that too), and for whenever I run into one of these issues above.
It also would be nice to more often be able to navigate to the original location of everything, which often works on PieFed but not nearly as readily as the rainbow colored Fediverse icon in the Lemmy web UI.
Even so, these minor issues of polish aside, PieFed is a strong option, hence why I use it as my daily driver, with (next to) zero regrets, again especially for someone who is familiar with doing searching for content in Lemmy.
And new features continue to be added, sometimes weekly but definitely at least monthly. It’s so FAST! And the main dev Rimu is so helpful and friendly, as are so many others I’ve interacted with. I would suggest to make an account and check it out! The worst that could happen is that you don’t enjoy it enough and want to keep using your old one, in which case you’ll still have seen something new, plus have a not-brand-new account to use later if you ever wanted (e.g. you are prevented from sending someone a DM for the first two weeks, which is appropriate imho). However, even though the learning curve is real (bc having access to additional options offers up new ways to structure your content delivery to yourself to be more fully optimal), I am confident that as you see more what it has to offer, you’ll return the older account less and less often (you’ll still need to for moderation activities, especially since mod activities do not federate even among Lemmy instances much less across from PieFed, but for daily driving it’s quite a treat, really!).