Lemmy vs Mbin vs PieFed (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by MITM0@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their "Killer Features"

For anyone who wants a quick glance at which platform might be suitable

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[-] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Lemmy pros: Fast, mature, everyone knows it
Lemmy cons: Shouty communists, atrocious mod tools
Mbin pros: Follow Mastodon people
Mbin cons: (1) Ugly (2) Awkward (3) What the fuck is “Magazines”
Piefed pros: Python, some semblance of responsiveness to what features people actually want in it
Piefed cons: What the fuck is a Piefed

(all is satire, I love you guys)

[-] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I can't emphasize enough how bad Lemmy's moderation tools are. It's not just that they're abysmally anemic (including that you can't perform moderator actions on someone in your community without a comment of theirs to click the context menu on? what??). It's not just that reports don't synchronize correctly across instances (i.e. if you want to moderate a community on another instance, you're at a severe disadvantage). It's that they're wildly fragmented, presented just all over the place like some kind of scavenger hunt.

As I said previously, the context menu of a comment is the only way you can ban and unban users (except that you actually can ban them if you use the API directly).
Moderation has zero hierarchy, so 1) any moderator if they want to can perform a Night of the Long Knives and become the sole moderator (fine for now when admins can quickly intervene, but impossibly stupid if Lemmy ever became bigger), and 2) every moderator has access to all of the tools (including appointing other mods).
You can't view a list of banned users and unban them from there; this gets back into point 1 where you need to dig up the last comment on your community (not easily if you removed it) to unban them.
On Voyager (third-party mobile app), I have more tools than I do on desktop, which indicates to me that the tools are there in the API but just aren't exposed on desktop for some god-forsaken reason.
~~I literally can't even view a per-community modlog on desktop. I have to go out and find the Lemmy.World modlog (usually from a search engine) and then filter by action and pray that it was recent enough that I can find it in the rest of the heap.~~
~~Oh, but don't worry. There's a third-party tool for viewing the modlog, which is just ??? What the fuck?? How is this in some random tool you have to go searching for instead of in Lemmy proper? And even then, this tool has its flaws.~~

Edit: obviously no automod either, although I know that's a much larger undertaking than any of the things I've listed thus far.

[-] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 months ago

You're on LW, newer versions of Lemmy are better in that regard.

https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ is a better frontend for moderation. Allows you to see votes as a mod, and ban users who never commented or posted.

I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop.

There's an orange "modlog" button in the sidebar of every community that shows the community modlog?

[-] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

Whoops! I didn't even notice the Modlog because (at least for me) it's tucked away at the very bottom of the sidebar and nestled between the list of mods and some statistics I don't really care too much about. :P Genuinely my bad, though; I should've looked harder. Appreciate it now that I can finally see it!

[-] misk@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 months ago

On Voyager (third-party mobile app), I have more tools than I do on desktop, which indicates to me that the tools are there in the API but just aren't exposed on desktop for some god-forsaken reason.

Apollo was also better at moderating Reddit than whatever Reddit could put out so you could say Voyager goes above and beyond at cloning Apollo.

[-] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Disagree hard with ugly and awkward. It being less of that han Lemmy is the reason I use it in the first place.

If anything, I'd swap the pros and cons around, because every time I accidentally respond to a Masto post over here and half the functionality is missing I have a few seconds of confused panic before I realize what's going on and drop that conversation altogether.

[-] Pamasich@kbin.earth 3 points 2 months ago

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Mbin supports custom magazine/community CSS like Old Reddit did. Don't think it's federated currently though, so it's local only. There's also the ability to follow users and boost (retweet) content, which Lemmy lacks.

Judging by recent posts by Piefed's creator, they seem to be planning to add end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content.

[-] atrielienz@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago

How does the boosting work? Because I was never a major Twitter user, and on Tumblr, the "retweet". Option makes things a bit of a disjointed mess because (at least with new Tumblr and the app) it treats each share as a separate post and they aren't linked properly together. So, say someone responds to a comment you made on the reshare ten reshare ago. You may or may not even be able to access it. You may not even be able to find it.

[-] Kichae@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 months ago

Boosting re-sends the original message, with the original message id attached, and both Lemmy and mbin filter filter out duplicates. On Lemmy, upvoting a post boosts it, and on mbin the functions are separate. Boosting works to get the community/magazine group actor to re-send the post to subscribed remote sites, so if the site you're using subscribed to a community after the original post was made, it could now receive it thanks to the boost.

[-] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If I am being honest, Mbin/Kbin's concept is much better than Lemmy. I like how you can microblog and just use it like a normal forum, which means you can interact with even more people since microblogs (from Mastodon, for example) don't really federate with Lemmy. I'd like to use Mbin, but there is no real useful android app for it yet (yes I know Interstellar exists, but it isn't very featureful yet).

[-] MITM0@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

I wish there were more Mbin apps

[-] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

tl;dr:

Lemmy for apps (shit moderation tools)
Piefed for fast development rate, responsive dev and great features (no apps at all)
Mbin for keeping your forum and microblog account in one place (really awkward to use)

Piefed is almost perfect, if it actually had apps then it'd probably blow all of these out the water (in my opinion, of course)

Can't go wrong with any.

[-] xnx@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago

Thunder is being forked for piefed. Once this happens I’ll move to piefed full time. In the mean time we should think of a better band and logo for piefed which the creator said he’s open to changing

[-] aasatru@kbin.earth 1 points 2 months ago

I wouldn't say mbin is awkward to use, but microblogging is included as a bit of a second thought. It's still nice to be able to communicate with the fediverse at large.

PieFed feels faster than the others to me. It has good support for various content (like peertube channels), allows for content filtering with keywords, has combined communities, and a lot of other clever stuff.

[-] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 0 points 2 months ago

You can't use Lemmy apps with piefed? I thought the API was the same?

[-] fxomt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 months ago

No, that's sublinks which isn't finished yet.

[-] classic@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Is piefed any of three listed on their site? Is it like mbin where fedia.io is one execution of it? Or is everyone here speaking of piefed.social, specifically?

[-] Fitik@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago

Yee, there are multiple Piefed instances, for example there's also https://feddit.online/ that I know about

[-] gi1242@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

I use Lemmy because there's a good ad free app (jerboa)

[-] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah jeroboa is awesome! They did great work.

[-] jagged_circle@feddit.nl 1 points 2 months ago

Good? Hah

(Written in jerboa, constantly fighting with the keyboard bugs the devs refuse to fix)

[-] Auster@thebrainbin.org 0 points 2 months ago

Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:

Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it's version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title's attached link instead
However, Mbin doesn't seem to be able to fetch the post's body through RSS
On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
On Mbin, afaik, you can't block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don't host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
For microblogging, RSS doesn't work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn't
Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn't

[-] Auster@thebrainbin.org 0 points 2 months ago

On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because "it just works", I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy's functions.