I’ll go first…
My favorite Fediverse platforms as of 2024
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Mastodon - my main social feed platform that first introduced me to the Fediverse in general.
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Lemmy - my second main social feed platform that originally substituted Reddit from years ago.
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Matrix protocol - communication platform I use to connect with users on the Lemmy instance I’m on
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Peertube - would love to get an account going and use it more often but still don’t know how but there’s FediVideo.
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Bookwyrm - Goodreads alternative that I signed up for that could use more work for a genuine reading tracker.
BONUS: my least favorite Fediverse platform lately
WordPress - because I used to run art blogs on there before I heard word about drama about the CEO of the corporation so I basically had to put out my last existing art blog…RIP.
There is Matrix but no XMPP :(
Hubzilla. Closely followed by the intentionally nameless fork of a fork… of Hubzilla that’s colloquially being referred to as (streams).
Perks of both (excerpt):
- not based on ActivityPub, it’s actually optional; you can turn/keep it off if you want to
- nomadic identity; my channels are resilient against instance shutdown because they aren’t restricted to one instance
- multiple channels = IDs on one and the same account/login; no need to register additional user accounts for this, and you can easily switch back and forth between channels
- OpenWebAuth magic single sign-on, both client-side and server-side support
- very extensive permission settings that let me control what I see, what I don’t see and what others can see and do
- per-contact permission settings
- per-channel blacklist/whitelist filter plus per-contact blacklist/whitelist filters plus keyword-triggered, automatically generated, reader-side content warnings, supporting regex and (except the latter) a special filter syntax for extra features
- what’s “lists” on Mastodon is actually useful because you can use it both to filter your stream and to limit whom you send a post to, not to mention much easier to maintain
- a concept of conversations, you can follow entire discussions, and you generally receive all replies to a post (something that at least Mastodon doesn’t have, by the way)
- not only native support for discussion groups/forums, but they can and do host their own moderated discussion groups/forums (Mastodon has neither)
- no arbitrary character limits, characters only limited by the instance database (on (streams), that’s theoretically over 24,000,000 characters for one post)
- probably more text formatting options than your typical blogging platform and definitely more than any microblogging project in the Fediverse
- full-blown blog posts rendered gracefully
- non-standard BBcode tags for special features, often observer-aware
- embedded links; no need to plaster URLs into your posts in plain sight
- images can be embedded “in-line” within the post with text above them and text below them
- no limit on how many images a post can have
- unlimited poll options
- multiple-word hashtags
- post categories in addition to hashtags
- tag cloud plus category cloud/list
- quotes
- “quote-tweets”
- extensively customisable Web UI
- built-in file storage with a built-in file manager, per-file and per-directory permissions settings and WebDAV support that’s used for images and other media you embed in your posts (unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, you know where your uploaded images land, and you can delete them yourself if you need to)
- federated event calendar with support for Event-type objects
- built-in CalDAV calendar server (headless on (streams))
- built-in CardDAV address book server (headless)
- support for OAuth and OAuth2
- modular; can be extended with official or, if available, third-party “apps”, widgets and themes
Extra perks of Hubzilla:
- currently more reliable
- more active development
- easier to get new users on board because hubs are listed on various Fediverse sites, and more public hubs are available
- newer and more configurable version of the Redbasic theme
- switchable night mode
- multiple profiles per channel which can be assigned to certain connections
- you can configure new connections before you confirm them
- can also connect to diaspora*
- can also subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds
- event calendar also doubles as a basic frontend for the CalDAV server
- non-federating, long-form articles
- “cards” that work largely the same
- built-in wiki engine based on either BBcode or Markdown for as many wikis of your own as you want to, each with as many pages as you want
- support for webpages (the official Hubzilla website is on a Hubzilla channel itself)
Extra perks of (streams):
- more advanced
- better integration of ActivityPub into the two supported nomadic protocols
- contact suggestions also include ActivityPub contacts
- new default theme in addition to an older Redbasic version
- reworked, more powerful but easier-to-use permissions system
- easier to use once you’re on board
- supports BBcode, Markdown and HTML within the same post
- can set Mastodon’s sensitive flag for images
- built-in announcement/boost/repost/renote/repeat remover, no need to use filter syntax for that
- extra protection against both mention spam and hashtag spam
- alt-text can be added to images upon upload, no need to graft it into the image-embedding markup code
- verification of external identities (available on Mastodon as well, but not on Hubzilla)
- Lemmy
- Mastodon
- Pixelfed
- Various Misskey forks that are all about the same
- Peertube
Lemmy has eaten up just about all the time I used to spend on Mastodon. Pixelfed would be in the running for #1 if it hadn’t become so vaporware-y in the last few months.
Any recommendations for a peertube instance?
I personally use tankie.tube.
I use peertube.tv.
Stux (from mstdn.social) is the admin and he’s generally pretty great a running stuff. I haven’t used it a ton lately but no complaints!
Edit: Daaaamn. Just realized that registrations are disabled. Bummer. Sorry.
No problem at all, I’ve made it this long without it I can wait longer. Thank you for the suggestion!!!
kbin obviously!
Mbin now!
God willing ernst comes back
How’s he doing? I heard he had some health problems.
No idea. But I hope everything works out, i think it wss multiple shiti life events too.
Sometimes people get a bad roll in life.
Big fan of his work, got me to quit using Reddit!
As far as I can tell there’s been no communication from him for several months and not since he posted saying he’d turn kbin.social over to a new admin.
But the domain for kbin.social was recently renewed (I posted full details over at https://fedia.io/m/fediverse/t/1403334/Any-updates-on-kbin-social-recently ) which gives me hope that ernest is still around, just a bit more behind the scenes.
Of course, it could also be that the domain was simply auto-renewed (as described in https://www.godaddy.com/en-ca/help/turn-my-domain-auto-renew-on-or-off-41085 ). I think some registrars or services even offer prepayment options for auto-renewing, meaning that ernest might have set this all up before he disappeared, rather than slowly reappearing now…
Between Social, Run, and Artemis, I’m beginning to think kbin might be cursed. I’m on my fourth kbin instance, but have decided to revisit my lemmy account to enjoy some native ios app experiences again.
What’s your current kbin instance? Curious to see if it’s running mbin now or if it really is the original kbin on there still.
Also, anyone remember kbin.cafe ?
It think it runs latest mbin
Yeah i lost a few accounts switching.
No plugins from joomla ?
What’s that?
A PHP CMS for masochists.
Wow, that may be the most apt description I’ve heard for Joomla in a while. Well, my memory of what Joomla was like nearly twenty years ago.
TBH I haven’t used it in about 10 years but leaving it for wordpress was an improvement, and I’m no wordpress fan.
Everything PHP-related is for masochists
Ehh, it’s not so bad these days
It’s even worse nowadays, because we have good alternatives, unlike 20 years ago.
Not nice for Mbin
Lemmy, shortly followed by Piefed.
Will probably switch once Piefed gets mobile apps support and comments view
What’s so good about PieFed?
Much more advanced moderation tools: https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/
Actual instance blocking compared to the impartial “mute communities” instance blocking on Lemmy
Development seems fasters than Lemmy, they are almost at feature parity while being much younger
But wont you lose like 99% of the user base? Or is it cross compatible?
PieFed communicates with Lemmy. Same content, different platform. That’s one awesome thing about federation.
There is also mbin (fork of kbin), and Sublinks, which is API compatible with Lemmy so should be able to use Lemmy apps with it (from memory, this is what Beehaw are hoping to move to).
Hello from PieFed - yes it works.:-)
On the other hand, it has some weirdly opinionated features:
- Hiding downvoted comments (mob rule)
- Marking people with many downvotes as “low reputation”. I get it, getting many downvotes is a bad sign but I don’t think the software should try to make a ruling here, I think human moderators should look at the whole picture. It doesn’t make you a bad person that people disagree with you.
- Communities organized into “topics” - I’m not certain if these groupings are decided by the dev or the admin? Either way I find it a bit problematic.
- Marking certain communities as “low effort” and not counting “reputation” for those. I don’t feel like the software should be making this kind of value judgement.
If it helps:
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this is controlled by a user setting. I left the one that automatically “collapses” comments below a threshold at the default, but I disabled the one that “hides” comments by setting the threshold to -10000. So, far from taking away user power, it strictly enhances choices by providing new options, only at the user’s behest.
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it does have such a “reputation” feature, as too does life. Someone who constantly trolls others gets rather “known” for such. But crucially, it’s a label - it doesn’t hide anything, only enhances what is already there. And yeah it’s a bit of an experiment, perhaps it won’t work. Or perhaps it will be improved further? Based on the above and the responsiveness of the devs, I would expect complete control if features were ever added to actually do anything wrt this score.
Btw apps already have something similar, as too does PieFed, when adding a label for new accounts - bc people have asked for it, and it can be helpful to know when talking with someone that they are a new account (perhaps they are an alt, but it’s something, and again it’s just a label).
Yeah, I constantly get downvoted - and some of my posts are among the most heavily downvoted content existing in certain communities (but I also note that such things as Innuendo Studios The Alt Right Playbook got heavily downvoted by the same community as well so… I feel vindicated:-). So I mean it when I say that believe me I KNOW what you mean when expressing those concerns. Perhaps the experiment won’t work out, or perhaps it merely needs tuning - e.g. so that any one post or comment doesn’t weigh so heavily but rather only their aggregate (median rather than mean perhaps? or maybe only the binary choice of positive or negative total score, and even then perhaps not centered at zero but something more highly negative like -10?).
Also PieFed.social has defederated from hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml, so those sources of downvoting are entirely removed. It also preferentially weights scores more highly feedback from those with high reputation already - which state I achieved in roughly a week and with only two posts, one a cross-post of the other even. So it’s not like seniors are locking out the noobs.
Anyway yes there’s enormous potential for misuse there, but it’s also something that people have been clamoring for - so it’s something that they are being responsive enough to try it out?
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I’m not sure about the categories - but again the devs are very responsive so surely easy to change things? Also I’ve definitely joined communities that aren’t in those, and while there are large federation issues with any non-Lemmy.World instance right now (I see the same from many instances including my 2 alt accounts elsewhere - so it has little to nothing to do with PieFed; especially after the enormous surge in content surrounding the USA election), I believe that they show up in the main feed.
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I have never heard that before but I would support it - more “experimental” communities should be allowed, to try things out, a “safe space” if you will:-).
All of these are valid concerns - and seem like they are being worked on.
It doesn’t really help for me, but the beauty of the fediverse is that it doesn’t have to. You can like PieFed, I can prefer Lemmy and we can both still talk :)
💯
Absolutely 💯!
And truth be told, we don’t know what the future holds as well. As moderation tools improve on Lemmy.World, as communities evolve, and new concepts rise to the foreground e.g. PieFed, and also Sublinks, both on top of Mbin too.
A year ago I thought one way about e.g. communities located on Lemmy.ml, then time passed and I changed my mind. Then technology changed and I switched instances to follow.
What I am saying is: it is so fantastic to have choices! ☺️ THAT is the real win in this situation, IMHO, whether I end up liking PieFed’s approach or not. 🏆
Yea it’s cool. Although, regarding sublinks, it really looks like the project has stalled.
Honestly assigning a label to users that everyone can see based on other users’ opinions seems like a bad idea anyway you put it. Independent of it’s intention, it can stifle constructive arguments, encourage mass alt accounts, cause classism and mobbing. There is a Black Mirror episode with this exact premise where it impacts your real life reputation, people’s perceptions of you & what you’re allowed to do.
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I looked thru this blog hopeful that there would be protection against mod abuse. Instead you can get banned for downvoting? I don’t want to be looking over my back because some dipshit mod had a bad take. This is generating way too much analytical data on users. Communities don’t need empowered super mods treating users like numbers on a spreadsheet. Lemmy for sure has problems (ml) but this isn’t the answer.
It doesn’t need to be the answer. It just needs to be an answer for certain use cases. Both platforms can easily coexist. That’s the beauty of federation.
Lemmy admins can already see who downvotes what, I’m sure they already ban accounts who systematically downvote their communities content
It’s a tool. If some admins power trip, well report them on !yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Mods can also see votes in communities they moderate, lemmy-ui just doesn’t show the option (and no other client, to my knowledge, has the feature).
Piefed just needs an api, then we can add supoort as app developers.
- Mbin
- Misskey forks (I use CherryPick, but Sharkey is good too)
- PeerTube
- PieFed
- Mastodon
Lemmy. I love to read the posts and play the media.
Def Lemmy and Matrix
Lemmy and peertube and matrix (if it counts)
Mastdon is alr igI really wanted to like bookwyrm and use it but it’s just so bare bones. Instead, I switched from goodreads to StoryGraph like two years ago. I really like some of its features like content warnings, moods, very detailed stats of my reading habits, etc.
A Roblox alternative in the fediverse.
Because I want to get off Roblox.
Brickplanet exists, but its not a fediverse project.
Closed source and aimed for kids, sorry
Already read its ToS
It will face the same fate as Roblox
Is roblox not for kids?
Seems a little old. It should have BlueSky and FChannel
Bluesky uses ATprotocol not ActivityPub, therefore it’s not considered part of the fediverse.
also VC funded corpo trash?
Email
Peertube, Bookwyrm, Lemmy, Mastodon in that order. Theres a ton out there I haven’t tried.