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 @[email protected]
- my Friendica account @[email protected]
- and my Lemmy account @[email protected] to see if anything happens
Thanks and happy to be here!
tl;dr:
I’ve been using Lemmy for years, back when there were only 2 or 3 nodes and federation capability did not exist. It’s a shit show. Extremely buggy web clients and no useful proper desktop clients. I must say it’s sensible that the version numbers are still 0.x. It’s also getting worse. 0.19.3 was more usable than 0.19.5 which introduced serious bugs that make it unusable in some variants of Chromium browser.
mBin has been plagued with serious bugs. But it’s also very young. It was not ready for prime-time when it got rolled out, but I think it (or kbin) was pushed out early because many Redditors were jumping ship and those refugees needed a place to go. IMO mbin will out-pace Lemmy and take the lead. Mbin is bad at searching. You can search for mags that are already federated but if a community does not appear in a search I’m not even sure if or how a user can create the federated relationship.
The running goat fuck with Lemmy is in recent years with the shitty javascript web client. There’s only so much blame you can fairly put on those devs though because they need to focus on a working server. The shitty JavaScript web client should just be considered a proof-of-concept experimental test sandbox. JavaScript is unfit for this kind of purpose. It’s really on the FOSS community to produce a decent proper client. And what has happened is there has been focus on a dozen or so different phone apps (wtf?) and no real effort on a desktop app.
Cloudflare filters lacking
Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums. So you get imersed/swamped in LemmyWorld’s walled garden and to get LemmyWorld out of sight there is a big manual effort of blocking hundreds of communities. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole.
There’s
ProtonPhoton, an actively maintained desktop ui alternative for Lemmy.Photon is a strange beast. How do you install it?
It seems to only come as a docker container. That’s weird. I don’t have docker installed but docker should really be a choice… not a sole means of installation. I see no deb file or tarball. It seems that it has taken a direction that makes it non-conducive to ever becoming part of the official Debian repos.
Then it seems as well that their official site “phtn.app” is a Cloudflare site – which is a terrible sign. It shows that the devs are out of touch with digital rights, decentralisation, and privacy. That doesn’t in itself mean the app is bad but the tool is looking quite sketchy so far. Several red flags here.
(edit) I found a tarball on the releases page.
I think you’ve got the entire thought of photon wrong. Photon is not an “app” that you “install”, it is essentially a website. The docker container includes a server runner, meant for instance owners to deploy photon on their own instance easily.
vger.app and alexandrite.app work the exact same way as photon for installation. You clone the app, build it, and run the server.
There is no team of “devs” who are out of touch with privacy, it’s just me. This is a web app to access Lemmy in a different UI, and it’d be pretty stupid to dedicate time to tracking people when I’ve got homework to do.
I could make a subdomain for phtn.app that does not proxy through cloudflare if you’d like.