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
- 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)
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.
What the fuck is “Magazines”
This but unironically. I could never get over it with Kbin and still can’t with Mbin. It’s a bad name for a community/sub and I’ll die on that hill. You can never get me to call a meme shitpost an “article” in a “magazine”.
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.
I mean Lemmy is pretty ugly and awkward too sometimes… actually I realized that I changed around my Lemmy theme so it wouldn’t look quite so bad to me. So maybe I’m making an unfair comparison of that versus stock Mbin. But check this out:
What’s the important stuff? Is it the high-contrast areas, like the “what is the fediverse” box or the always-vital “Add new link” button? Or the icons for the users, which are huge and in attention-grabbing high contrast for some reason? What does the pushpin do? Oh, that’s letting me know it’s a pinned comment. Can we just change the color for that, like every other platform? Is “People” really so vital that it needs it own big menu entry? Why is everything that’s in a bright contrasting color something that isn’t important, and the headlines are only a little shade different from the normal text? Why do we have giant boxes with speech bubbles in them, right in a super-prominent place, which sort of look like skeleton shapes because the page hasn’t finished dynamically loading yet, except that they’re actual final content elements? And why do they so skillfully separate the very unobtrusively colored vote counts from the things that they are counting votes for?
Compare that to this:
See how it does the same “what the heck is this place,” but it isn’t the most attention-grabbing thing on the screen every time you’re there, and put in a place where you will look if you’re first getting oriented (the first thing in left-to-right, top-to-bottom reading order), but not grabbing your attention every other time? See how “show me all the users” is way down at the bottom left in an unobtrusive list, because it’s not commonly used, whereas the main three types of feeds it can show you are the only things grabbing your attention up top, and then there’s a bar off to the side with a small handful of other actions separate from that you might want to do? And how, if you’re totally lost, the one button that’s most useful (create an account) is the most obviously high-contrasting thing?
Like I say, I am saying all this with love. Mbin has great features and Mastodon has a lot more eyes on it and people who want to chip in and make it attractive. I’m just saying that anything you use every day, you can get used to, and Mbin could look like the Mastodon interface and become to my eyes a lot less jarring. Put a little “feed settings” icon next to where “Explore” is now, that pops down a set of filters if you want one, get rid of a bunch of the stuff that gets thrown around on the screen that only very rarely is relevant, emphasize the stuff that needs attention and de-emphasize the stuff that doesn’t. That is my feeling.
Yeah, Lemmy’s UI has more gratuitous awkwardness in the actual design, maybe. Mbin does a lot more stuff, and generally has it pretty well-organized conceptually. Lemmy does a more minimal set of stuff and somehow still manages to make some of it confusing or hard to access. I think I was mostly just talking visually.
Hold on, that doesn’t seem like an apples to apples comparison. You’re doing light theme in one and dark in another. The light theme has a different balance (also, ow, my retinas).
The default Fedia dark theme I am using does not look like that at all. Sure, both the main column and the tool column on the right have the same emphasis, but you still get hierarchy from both the relative sizes and the positioning (if you’re a left-to-right reader, at least).
I just opened fedia.io and screenshotted what it showed me. Same for mastodon.xyz. I wasn’t trying any kind of rigged setup. If there’s a simple change to the default theme choice which would make it less horrendous by default, or the layout is more logical on some screen sizes, then I think they should make the defaults better yes. Maybe I happened to hit on one badly-configured server or bad screen size, but I didn’t change anything on purpose, it just kind of feels like making it not-horrible visually is simply not a priority.
I would actually describe that as a problem for both Mbin and Lemmy. It really annoyed me when I was setting up this server that the default theme is kind of bad, the default sort is “Active”, and so on. It feels like there’s a pretty common mindset of “as long as it works for my account I don’t care what experience new users get.” I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of working on the project because you want it to exist for you, not like trying to “grow the user base” necessarily or worry about what happens to novice users, like would be front of mind for a standard software company.
Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I’m not sure if there’s a reason you can’t default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don’t think it’s a big deal. Plus highlighting a “what is this app” tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there’s that as well.
Which is not to say that you’re wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.
If it was a good light theme, I would agree with you, but the light theme it chose to show me was awful. It sounds like if someone logs in and chooses light theme, they get this.
(And again, Lemmy does the same: Of the pretty unappealing theme options, the default is one of the most unappealing ones. If I remember, it likes to color unimportant UI elements in GARISH bright green and orange colors which are borderline alarming compared with the muted colors of everything else. Why not just default to “darkly”, because that is one that looks okay? Who knows.)
I was even questioning myself, like “why am I complaining about the pushpin”, and then I looked again at my screenshot and the pushpin is the only solid dark contrasting thing anywhere in the whole article listing, which explains why I was looking at it first and wondering what the heck it “did” until I figured it out. It’s so bad.
You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.
I don’t necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you’re claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more “the light theme has made some debatable color choices”.
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).
I wish there were more Mbin apps
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.
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.
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.
So it doesn’t work like it does on Tumblr then. Thank you!
Not here, no. It does on Mastodon and other microblogs, though.
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
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.
I use Lemmy because there’s a good ad free app (jerboa)
Yeah jeroboa is awesome! They did great work.
Good? Hah
(Written in jerboa, constantly fighting with the keyboard bugs the devs refuse to fix)
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?
Yee, there are multiple Piefed instances, for example there’s also https://feddit.online/ that I know about
Mbin has microblogg and thread support, so you can post and respond to both formats, piefed and mbin both have the goal of letting instance owners or ppl make topics that contain multiple communities to make it easier to sub to similar topics, like subbing to linux topic for linux, linuxmemes, etc. instead of subbing one by one and finding communities whos name may not fit what they are
Right now lemmy has better app support, eventually Id love to see just one client/app that supports threads, microblogging, etc. with feeds, you kinda have to build your feed brick by brick with friendica, streams, hubzilla, etc. but they connect them all, letting you browse and post to communities you’re subbed to, reply and see peoples microblogging stuff,no apps tho
Piefed/mbin both have better fediverse integration with other platforms. Lemmy has the numbers and is super fast + apps.
