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.

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 @_elena @elena@lemmy.world I have most experience with Lemmy which does what I need it to and what I expect from it, which is: being able to post long format texts with the occasional pictures. I maintain the community over at https://feddit.nl/c/nuclear

I think there were historically interoperability issues, and there used to be (my version of mbin is quite old), and maybe still are issues federating dislikes (which stems from the way they were seen in kbin, which straddles both thread based and mastadonesque sides of the fediverse). But overall there’s aren’t the larger federation issues there used to be.

Right now, the choice mainly comes down to the interface you prefer, and if you perhaps want a limited ability to work with mastadon type posts. Since you can follow mastadon users and see their posts within the mbin interface.

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

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.