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?

  • OpenStarsEnglish
    4•2 days ago

    Your points seem phrased unnecessarily adversarially. Flairs are a brand-new feature, but if it helps, polls were added a year ago and those federate - not to Lemmy of course that lacks them entirely despite repeated requests to add them for many years, but to other federated platforms that have them e.g. Mastodon.

    I’ve always disliked the spirit of “anonymous voting”, and am glad that they discontinued that.

    I do not see how what you are saying is all that different from Lemmy.

    It is easy to criticize from afar - it is hard to actually build something. But PieFed is managing!

    • @rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      2•2 days ago

      To be completely honest, my dislike of AP server software is not restricted to PieFed. I think all of them are an evolutionary dead end and I wish we stopped wasting our time trying to emulate closed social networks.

      • OpenStarsEnglish
        2•2 days ago

        Hrm, interesting. This seems a strongly minority opinion though: people enjoy talking, whether it be focused on non-anonymous user-centric short-form content like Mastodon or Friendica, or topic-focused threaded forums like Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed + nodebb + flarum.

        But if you mean only the implementation, you could very well be correct, knowing so much more than I about such. “Most people” simply want stuff delivered to them for free, not really thinking about how it gets done. I appreciate that you actually take the time to care:-).

        I will add that I for one have no desire to visit a non-closed social network, such as 4chan, bc the amount of spam and trash seems likely to be insurmountable. That said, we need not be limited by what Reddit would do, and that is actually one of the chief things that I appreciate about PieFed - that it is moving beyond what Reddit offered, and is desiring to continue much further along those lines, rather than convert into purely profit making.

          • @dbtng@eviltoast.orgEnglish
            1•19 hours ago

            Wow. I respect your opinion, which was obviously carefully considered, and I completely disagree with your perspective about instances being a dead end.

            As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys. If that somebody refuses to enforce order in their instance, they can be defederated. Thus, bad actors incur risk. There is power in this structure.

            This is all public. Somebody owns it. It goes back to real people, who can have real consequences if they do bad things.

            There’s a lot of people out there doing bad things. I don’t see a lot of that here.

            I’ve seen a lot of crappy ways to organize people on the internet.
            This one seems to work alright. For now.

            • @rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
              1•13 hours ago

              As instances are currently structured, they are tied to web domain, and actually owned by somebody somewhere. That somebody has a level of commitment having setup hosting and configured the server itself, and likely to want to not lose their toys

              In this system, the people that simply want to access the web MUST trust the server owner and the people that want to have full control over their identity MUST setup their own server.

              This is complex, fragile, expensive and a huge barrier of entry. Just this week the admins of the second largest lemmy instance are closing down their server and 5000 people are left with no choice but to move on from their identity and find a new home.

              Email doesn’t have that. The WWW doesn’t have that. Phone networks doesn’t have that. Bluesky doesn’t have that.