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?
Lemmy, piefed, and mbin are all similar pieces of software that run on a server.
They are each capable of hosting a small social network website with a similar reddit-like format. They all also support the activitypub standard, which means that they can be linked together, so that when you go to one of those social media sites (lemmy.world for example) you can see any other site that they’re “federated” with, even if that social media site is powered by a different software that supports activitypub (I’m on lemmy.world but I can see communities and posts from piefed.social)
I generally call lemmy, mbin and piefed “fediverse platforms” because they’re each a platform that you can make a fediverse account on, but that usage is a bit imperfect, since each individual site could also be described as a platform, and is where your account is actually hosted. You could be more specific and call them “fediverse/federated link aggregators” if you wanted to specifically refer to the ones with a similar format to reddit.
These pieces of software are different because they’re built in different ways (different languages and underlying structure), have different priorities, and as software projects are run in different ways with different leadership, all of which is how you get differences in features and implementation. Lemmy is the oldest of these similar platforms, and as such is the most established. In the open source world it’s very easy and common to end up with a lot of fragmented similar projects. Its both a blessing and a curse.
There isn’t perfect language for all these things because in the grand scheme of things, it’s a rather new way for social media platforms to work, so the language around how to describe or refer to these things hasn’t really “settled”