this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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Lemmy vs. PieFed vs. Mbin (fedia.io)
submitted 2 months ago by elena@fedia.io to c/fediverse@lemmy.ml
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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 @_elena@mastodon.social
  • my Friendica account @elena@opensocial.space
  • and my Lemmy account @elena@lemmy.world to see if anything happens

Thanks and happy to be here!

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[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I started on /kbin (MBin's predecessor) because I liked the UI and the philosophy. But then I wanted to host it myself and it being written in PHP I really didn't want to host it myself, I've been burned by PHP software too many times in the past.

Therefor I switched to Lemmy which was a nightmare to setup in the beginning because there was no documentation on how to do it. I still got it working after some time and was fairly happy with it. It was reasonably fast, the UI is good enough and it had a lot of 3rd party apps working with it so I could choose some other frontend on the phone for example. But over the last year every update made it more and more heavy to run as a single user instance. And then the current update made it so I couldn't run it on my small VPS anymore because it would create such a load that all the other services I'm running on it (Mastodon, some Websites, PeerTube, Matrix, etc.) would go down because of it.

So I switched to PieFed. So far it has been amazing for me. It's written in Python so it's super easy for me to understand and to fix things which I don't like. It has a simple theme engine which made it very easy for me to adapt a theme to how I want to have it. But the biggest advantage is that it's so easy on the resources, I can run it as a single user instance and it does not affect any of my other services running on the same server.

So there you have it, if you don't have too many resources available on your server I would go with PieFed. The developer is very approachable and aligns with my values more than the Lemmy devs.

[–] elena@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@jeena@piefed.jeena.net

This is great to hear - thank you for your testimony. May I quote you on my blog, if I do a follow-up post about Fediverse content aggregators?

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Sure!

What's your blog URL? I'm always looking to subscribe to interesting blogs.

[–] elena@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago

@jeena@piefed.jeena.net it's on blog.elenarossini.com (specifically the newsletter / series The Future is Federated)

[–] elena@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Testing out comment federation, please don’t mind me 🙈

Pinging @_elena@mastodon.social @elena@friendica.opensocial.space and @elenarossini@pixelfed.social (because, why not) 🙈 as well as @elena@lemmy.world and @elena@piefed.social

[–] elena@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

one more Fediverse interoperability test, this time with my new Friendica instance (oh hey @elena@poliverso.org) and with my federated Wordpress blog (@ele@elenarossini.com)

[–] _elena@mastodon.social 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

@elena@fedia.io @elena@lemmy.world 👷🏻‍♀️ OP here, testing out if Mastodon replies federate 👷🏻‍♀️

[–] jerry@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If I can help with your tests in some way, let me know. I manage most types of fediverse software including Fedia.io, though I’ve not yet tried piefed. I think your question is prompting me to give it a try.

[–] elena@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thank you so much Jerry, I really appreciate! 🙏

I'm really enjoying Fedia.io and I'm delighted that my Mastodon (thread) mention showed up in my Mastodon notifications. It's the first time I managed to get it to work on the "Threadiverse" (the same experiment failed on Lemmy and PieFed).

Interestingly, the same thing didn't work for my Lemmy.world account or Friendica.

The lesson so far: Mbin threads on Fedia.io federate mentions on Mastodon but not Lemmy or Friendica. But I bet mentions in comments federate. So retrying this here: @elena@lemmy.world and @elena@friendica.opensocial.space

And apologies in advance if I'm using the wrong language to describe this, I'm a newbie 😅

[–] jerry@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I’m not surprised about friendica. I will ask the mbin developers to take a look. I will also take a look at lemmy - I know federation works with lemmy.world - I get enough reports about their users here to know that for sure :) I just don’t know how mentions are handled.

[–] _elena@mastodon.social 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

@jerry thank you again Jerry!

Communication between Friendica and Mbin (mentions) doesn’t work at all. And I’m finding some strange bugs when it comes to federation of Mbin comments that mention Lemmy.world accounts (some show up, others don’t).

But the communication between Mbin and Mastodon is EXCELLENT ✨🏆✨

Thank you for all your work on Fedia.io!

[–] Jerry_L@fedia.io 1 points 1 month ago

Hi Elena. I just tried duplicating your test. I posted a thread here and mentioned both my Mastodon and Friendica accounts. Like you, it took a while (15 minutes) for the mention to reach Mastodon, but unlike you, the mention did eventually reach my Friendica account as well (after 45 minutes).

Is it possible that your Friendica server is blocking MBIN?

[–] testing@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

federation issues plague mbin to a point that surpasses kbin, time and again ... federation between kbin and friendica had always been troublefree ...

[–] elena@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Interesting, le sigh. Unfortunately I could not make account mentions federate AT ALL from Mbin → Friendica. I'll try the other way around to see if anything happens (Friendica → Mbin)

[–] kenkenken@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Threadiverse? I didn't hear this name, I think it can be confused with Meta's threads.net. But I don't like Lemmy, and don't want the network to be named after it. For example we don't call Fediverse as Mastodonverse.

As for Mbin, UI looks good, a feature showing similar threads is useful. But it is quite new yet, many important options are missed in the preferences yet.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 months ago

The network is called Fediverse. I don't see the need for a separate term, there also isn't a "Tootiverse".

[–] meldrik@lemmy.wtf 2 points 2 months ago

Lemmyverse = a federation of Lemmy instances. Threadiverse = a federation of Lemmy, mbin instances etc. Fediverse = all the software that uses ActivityPub.

[–] _elena@mastodon.social 1 points 2 months ago

@kenkenken I totally agree with you, the term "Threadiverse" makes me cringe because of the Meta connection... but it's what people have been calling content aggregation projects on the Fediverse. I didn't come up with it 🤷‍♀️

Really liking #Mbin so far and happy about its interoperability

[–] Bezier@suppo.fi 1 points 2 months ago

I think the name has been there longer than threads(.)net. But yeah, at this point it's too easy to confuse if one doesn't know about it already.

[–] Joaoalberto9009@fedia.io 1 points 3 weeks ago

@elena@fedia.io I send you a message on mastodon!

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (3 children)

tl;dr:

  • Lemmy ← shit show for years
  • (mk)bin ← shit show but understandable given its age
  • piefed ← never heard of it

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.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Both Lemmy and Mbin lack the ability to filter out or block Cloudflare nodes. They both only give a way to block specific forums.

Lemmy lets you block whole instances, it was introduced in 0.19.0 (which was released just before Christmas, but many instances didn't update until 0.19.3 was released around the start of the year due to federation issues with 0.19.0).

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though. If your instance doesn't use cloudflare, then you won't access through cloudflare. I'd actually be really interested in understanding why this is something you're looking for, rather than just the ability to block an instance such as Lemmy.world.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't get why you want users to be able to apply cloudflare filters, though.

Suppose an instance has these users:

  • Victor who uses a VPN
  • Cindy whose ISP uses a CGNAT (she may or may not be aware of the consequences of that)
  • Terry who uses a Tor
  • Norm who uses the normal clearnet
  • Esther who is ethical (doesn’t matter what she uses)

And suppose the instance is a special interest instance focused on travel. The diverse group of the above people have one thing in common: they want to converge on the expat travel node and the admin wants to accommodate all of them. Norm, and many like him, are happy to subscribe to countless exclusive and centralised forums as they are pragmatic people with no thought about tech ethics. These subscriptions flood an otherwise free world node with exclusive content. Norm subscribes to [!travelpics@exclusivenode.com](/c/travelpics@exclusivenode.com). Then Victor, Terry and sometimes Cindy are all seeing broken pics in their view because they are excluded by Cloudflare Inc. Esther is annoyed from an ethical standpoint that this decentralised free world venue is being polluted by exclusive content from places like like Facebook Threads™ and LemmyWorld. Even though she can interact with it from her clearnet position, she morally objects to feeding content to oppressive services.

The blunt choice of the admin to federate or not with LemmyWorld means the admin cannot satisfy everyone. It’s too blunt of an instrument. Per-community blocks per user give precision but it’s a non-stop tedious manual workload to keep up with the flood of LW communities. It would be useful for a user to block all of LemmyWorld in one action. I don’t want to see LW-hosted threads and I don’t want LW forums cluttering search results.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 months ago

Ah right! OK first off, you can block all of Lemmy.world with one action now.

Secondly, Lemmy now supports image proxying (with a new feature in Pictrs 0.5, which I believe was also introduced in Lemmy 0.19). I'm not sure which instances have it enabled but in theory you can check the source of images for remote users who have posted images.

Lemmy is already a strain on hard drive storage so I don't think many people have enabled it (proxying will store the images on the Lemmy server for a set period of time).

Thanks for the explanation by the way, it makes sense.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

There's ~~Proton~~ Photon, an actively maintained desktop ui alternative for Lemmy.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Xylight@lemdro.id 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

Thanks for the insights. I was looking for a client not a server. So maybe this can’t help me. A server somewhat hints that it would be bandwidth heavy. I’m looking to escape the stock JS web client. At the same time, I am on a very limited uplink. To give an idea, I browse web with images disabled because they would suck my quota dry.

[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 months ago

I've never installed it myself, I've only used it on the instances that offer it, such as my home instance at slrpnk.net.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 months ago

It's actually called Photon.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I feel like there's too many things named Proton right now.

[–] Rozauhtuno@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 months ago

No love for neutrons ;-(

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 1 points 2 months ago

It's actually called Photon.

[–] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What's the usecase for cloudflare filtering / blocking LW?

I'm aware that the latter is a huge risk in what is supposed to be a decentralised solution, but I'm not sure why you'd need to filter hundreds of communities for that (rather than defed 1 server).

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

  • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
  • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

[–] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I see.

As the other commenter also said: can't you just block the LW instance on your account?

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

[–] admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lemmy allows it on a user level, since version 0.19

But since I see you're on mbin, that don't do you much good, I'm afraid.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.

[–] BrikoX@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Instance blocking only hides communities from that instance, but not users.

[–] ciferecaNinjo@fedia.io 1 points 2 months ago

good, thanks!

[–] weirdwriter@tweesecake.social 0 points 1 month ago

@elena@fedia.io @_elena @elena@lemmy.world I know this is an older post, but testing out replies and follows and such! I interact with these strictly through Mastodon and don't have accounts on these services so hi! Love the Future is Federated series!