First of all, how is called this category of programs, instance engine?
Second, why there are 3 different, basically inter-compatible projects out there, what are the benefits of each one over the others? and why does Lemmy prevail all of them.
*i will be using feddit as a umbrella term for all the reddit-like fediverse.
I don’t have much of a technical Background to know how this things work under the hood, but I’m quite curious of where all of this is heading.
I see a lot of awesome features locked away in these other projects that would be just nice if it was standard to have them, like piefed’s hashtag-like system that allows people to seek things by topic instead of going to a specific community hosted in a specific instance, it would instantly fix the fragmentation problem across feddit, lol.
How the future of feddit will be? will be all be using Lemmy or other specific project, or instances will use whatever project they like and they will be cross compatible enough that it won’t be much of a deal what project is running underneath?
Development wise, how do you see piefed develop into the future?
any chances of it just dying?
There is always a chance of open source projects dying off, but if there’s an active user base who enjoy the software it will usually not die easy.
Mbin is a good example of this. It started out as Kbin, which was a project dominated by one very active developer who made the whole thing on his own. Unfortunately he did not prioritize getting other people on board, and he then suffered what seems to have been pretty severe health problems. Last thing we heard from him was a picture from a hospital bed. I hope he’s alright.
Thankfully, as what he had made was open source, Kbin lives on in the form of Mbin. If you check my domain you’ll see I’m still on a site called “kbin.earth” rather than mbin - this is why.
PieFed’s developer is better at taking other developers onboard. If you check out !piefed_meta@piefed.social you’ll see monthly development updates. The head developer (Rimu) runs the show, but seven other people contributed last month alone.
If Rimu decides to quit, other people can and will take over as long as there’s an interest. PieFed has the added advantage here of being written in Python, which is a language many people know.
So it should be pretty robust, all in all.
As for the future, PieFed just now launched app support. I guess one thing to look out for is the emergence of alternative user interfaces.
Developments are happening fast and the developers are quite creative. It’s fun to follow. :)
Like with what happened to Kbin, I think it’s great that we have 3 ongoing projects doing roughly the same thing. So if one is them dies out, we can just swap to the others. As a user invested in the threadverse, I think this is a net positive.