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ZeroOne @lemmy.world

Lemmy vs Mbin vs PieFed

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

53 comments
    • 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.

      • 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?

      • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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).

  • Mbin has better support for microblogs and Mastodon federation than Lemmy. I also prefer the default front-end of Mbin to Lemmy, but Lemmy has better alternative frontends and apps. I think it's great to support Mbin as well.

  • 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.

  • 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 an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down

        Would you maybe share your filter as a separate post? Seems handy :)

53 comments