cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57576884
There’s so many ways to interact with the Fediverse. The most popular, by far, seems to be Mastodon, but Lemmy, Misskey, and Pixelfed are also relatively popular. Kbin used to be popular, but it has apparently been abandoned, and is mostly dead at this point.
I recently learned that Mbin is a thing, checked it out, and it looked really cool! Has anyone used it? How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.
What Fediverse services do you actually, regularly use?
For me, it’s mostly Lemmy, though I do hop on Mastodon every now and then.
How’s Pixelfed’s federation work? I thought it was an image-based thing, like Instagram, so how does that interop with, say, Lemmy?
Is that like TikTok? Or like Reels, I guess, since it’s Pixelfed. A shame it doesn’t work for you… I’m big on TikTok, might just give it a try, though I’m not sure I can find the content I want on such a niche platform.
Over Lemmy? Why do you say so? I see what they list as differences from Lemmy and some of the features seem pretty nice, but I’m skeptical of this reputation business. Feels a little like Reddit karma, I don’t know.
Pixelfed federation works well. it shows up on anything activityhub related.
Works closer to mastodon with hashtags.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Pixelfed post… But I was thinking more so the other way around. Does anything AP-related show up on Pixelfed?
Yep works both ways.
If you want to try it out: Pixelfed to other services:
https://photos.chrisco.me/p/michaelc/803147727714451568
It shows up in:
Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114122668582152347
And here it is in pixelfed: https://photos.chrisco.me/i/web/post/803734298035587039
oh wait that may not work for you on my server, I made it auth protected woops!
It works but im on the phone…so im going to leave it for now. But yeah it works.
Ugh, the links aren’t working as intended I think…
The first Pixelfed link works, but the first Mastodon link just redirects me to the Pixelfed one.
The second Mastodon link works, but the corresponding Pixelfed link prompts a signup…
I believe you, though!
Yeah its totally my setup! I had some issues with openAI and amazon just slamming my servers so had to make it harder for them to get content.
Dang ://
PieFed is more advanced than Lemmy in several ways, while less so in others.
Like for one it offers fantastic onboarding to the Fediverse via a wizard asking users what topics they are interested in and then signs them up to communities.
And for another, at any time users can view Categories of Communities, such as all things Fediverse, News & Politics, or Gaming, and now users can even create our own customized Feeds - all of this is in addition to rather than instead of the traditional Subscribed and All feeds.
Users can also follow anything - a user, community, post, single comment, etc. - plus stop following comments that you’ve written but no longer wish to receive notifications for.
It’s REALLY cool! The major downsides revolve around it being newer and so a bit less polished, like there’s now a post preview feature but that is not yet available for comment replies.
The codebase is written in Python, so is possible for more people to help out with making changes than Lemmy, written in Rust. Some people wonder if it might not scale as well to larger number of users, but so far that is not a problem and the speed of updates seems well worth that trade-off.
I like the sound of this. Pardon the comparison, but it’s like multisubreddit. That’s one of the big things from reddit I miss. Making my own categorised feed.
It is a feature very often asked for on Lemmy, but with the codebase being in Rust, development work on it is very slow. With PieFed being in Python, it is far easier to add features such as that one to it.:-)
I see… You make a compelling argument, to be honest, and those are some nice features. I really like this custom Feed thing.
I’m definitely delving into Piefed in the coming days.
It is very much worth checking out, yes!
I use it as my daily driver. Some functions, like searching for posts, are abysmally bad - but thankfully that’s the only one in that category. For me who can hop over to a Lemmy alt when I need to, PieFed is a great main. Another downside is that often I receive a notification for something that I cannot see, for a variety of reasons including that I’ve blocked all users from an instance (but hey, on PieFed that’s actually possible in the first place!).
PieFed is definitely still in alpha, though ironically a better experience than Lemmy in many ways for all of that, even though a more frustrating one in other ways. An API is currently being tested using the Thunder app, which should help smooth the usability issues.
My advice: most definitely make a PieFed account - you have nothing to lose there - and also hold onto your older one. You’ll use it less and less often, you’ll see:-). There is a bit of a learning curve though, since PieFed offers so many new features and you’ll want to try out this and that to see what works best for you. e.g. for some lower-volume communities, I have notifications set up to receive every single new post, rather than have to wait to find that while scrolling Subscribed or All. It really helps! (But can be quite overwhelming for higher-volume communities - the better way now could be to create a custom topic Feed, which I haven’t tried yet but that’s awesome that I now can:-).
I love how excited you are about this!
I have a PieFed account. Set it up and browsed for a little, but haven’t found my way quite yet. I’ll try to figure it out this weekend.
I’ll probably post about my expedience on !gondaily@lemm.ee, one of these days.
Excited :D
Yeah the learning curve is real… but fortunately it’s bc there is so much more that can be done, not bc like it’s “difficult” or anything, just that you get to choose how you want things to be.:-)
Like anything, you get better with practice, so yeah, just start strolling through the posts and enjoy!
PieFed really is the best (most often only) answer that I’ve seen to SO VERY MANY questions for how to accomplish something on Lemmy (usually you cannot, unless some app provides that feature). Like how to see posts that have nothing whatsoever to do with politics: the topics (often if not always tend to) do that, like Arts & Crafts - and another cool trick is that if you ever do want it, News & Politics is always right there just waiting for you, so there’s no longer any need to “subscribe” to those (or maybe subscribe to some of the lower traffic, less contentious communities?), hence you can both have a Subscription feed free of politics (as an example, for someone who wanted that) and still have full access to politics whenever you wanted. It’s a whole new way of browsing the Threadiverse, i.e. even if accessing the same Lemmy communities, you approach it all differently - or, you can, if you want.
It’s so nice to have choices!:-)
:D That does sound nice…
It is nice. I use my older Lemmy account less and less often these days… I am glad that Lemmy exists for people - especially someone just using it as a back-end for whatever app of choice they use as an actual interface - but I am even more glad to have PieFed, which suits so many of my needs (tbf not all) perfectly or at least more so than Lemmy.:-D
What do you think is missing from PieFed?
Pixelfed/Mastodon/etc sort of work with Lemmy, in that they can see Lemmy posts. Lemmy can see posts from them if you tag them appropriately, which rarely happens. They only sort of federate properly. And yeah, Loops is like TikTok for the Fediverse.
I’m not saying PieFed is better than Lemmy, just saying that apart from Lemmy, your best option is probably PieFed atm.