Lemmy vs Mbin vs PieFed
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I just opened fedia.io and screenshotted what it showed me. Same for mastodon.xyz. I wasn’t trying any kind of rigged setup. If there’s a simple change to the default theme choice which would make it less horrendous by default, or the layout is more logical on some screen sizes, then I think they should make the defaults better yes. Maybe I happened to hit on one badly-configured server or bad screen size, but I didn’t change anything on purpose, it just kind of feels like making it not-horrible visually is simply not a priority.
I would actually describe that as a problem for both Mbin and Lemmy. It really annoyed me when I was setting up this server that the default theme is kind of bad, the default sort is “Active”, and so on. It feels like there’s a pretty common mindset of “as long as it works for my account I don’t care what experience new users get.” I don’t think it’s deliberate, I think it’s just a natural outgrowth of working on the project because you want it to exist for you, not like trying to “grow the user base” necessarily or worry about what happens to novice users, like would be front of mind for a standard software company.
Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I'm not sure if there's a reason you can't default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don't think it's a big deal. Plus highlighting a "what is this app" tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there's that as well.
Which is not to say that you're wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.
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Honestly, choosing whether to default to dark or light is pretty arbitrary, and pointless once the user sets a preference on login anyway. I'm not sure if there's a reason you can't default to OS/browser preference on a logged out user, but also don't think it's a big deal. Plus highlighting a "what is this app" tile makes more sense on the logged-out default, so there's that as well.
Which is not to say that you're wrong on the larger point. FOSS devs having the attitude that the UI is a secondary concern or wildly misrepresenting the ability of users to deal with friction or bad looks is an ongoing frustration. I guess engineers are more likely to attempt FOSS projects than UX designers.
If it was a good light theme, I would agree with you, but the light theme it chose to show me was awful. It sounds like if someone logs in and chooses light theme, they get this.
(And again, Lemmy does the same: Of the pretty unappealing theme options, the default is one of the most unappealing ones. If I remember, it likes to color unimportant UI elements in GARISH bright green and orange colors which are borderline alarming compared with the muted colors of everything else. Why not just default to “darkly”, because that is one that looks okay? Who knows.)
I was even questioning myself, like “why am I complaining about the pushpin”, and then I looked again at my screenshot and the pushpin is the only solid dark contrasting thing anywhere in the whole article listing, which explains why I was looking at it first and wondering what the heck it “did” until I figured it out. It’s so bad.
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If it was a good light theme, I would agree with you, but the light theme it chose to show me was awful. It sounds like if someone logs in and chooses light theme, they get this.
(And again, Lemmy does the same: Of the pretty unappealing theme options, the default is one of the most unappealing ones. If I remember, it likes to color unimportant UI elements in GARISH bright green and orange colors which are borderline alarming compared with the muted colors of everything else. Why not just default to “darkly”, because that is one that looks okay? Who knows.)
I was even questioning myself, like “why am I complaining about the pushpin”, and then I looked again at my screenshot and the pushpin is the only solid dark contrasting thing anywhere in the whole article listing, which explains why I was looking at it first and wondering what the heck it “did” until I figured it out. It’s so bad.
You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.
I don't necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you're claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more "the light theme has made some debatable color choices".
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I can't emphasize enough how bad Lemmy's moderation tools are. It's not just that they're abysmally anemic (including that you can't perform moderator actions on someone in your community without a comment of theirs to click the context menu on? what??). It's not just that reports don't synchronize correctly across instances (i.e. if you want to moderate a community on another instance, you're at a severe disadvantage). It's that they're wildly fragmented, presented just all over the place like some kind of scavenger hunt.
- As I said previously, the context menu of a comment is the only way you can ban and unban users (except that you actually can ban them if you use the API directly).
- Moderation has zero hierarchy, so 1) any moderator if they want to can perform a Night of the Long Knives and become the sole moderator (fine for now when admins can quickly intervene, but impossibly stupid if Lemmy ever became bigger), and 2) every moderator has access to all of the tools (including appointing other admins).
- You can't view a list of banned users and unban them from there; this gets back into point 1 where you need to dig up the last comment on your community (not easily if you removed it) to unban them.
- On Voyager (third-party mobile app), I have more tools than I do on desktop, which indicates to me that the tools are there in the API but just aren't exposed on desktop for some god-forsaken reason.
- I literally can't even view a per-community modlog on desktop. I have to go out and find the Lemmy.World modlog (usually from a search engine) and then filter by action and pray that it was recent enough that I can find it in the rest of the heap.
- Oh, but don't worry. There's a third-party tool for viewing the modlog, which is just ??? What the fuck?? How is this in some random tool you have to go searching for instead of in Lemmy proper? And even then, this tool has its flaws.
You're on LW, newer versions of Lemmy are better in that regard.
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ is a better frontend for moderation. Allows you to see votes as a mod, and ban users who never commented or posted.
I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop.
There's an orange "modlog" button in the sidebar of every community that shows the community modlog?
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You made me go check, and the signed-out site on an incognito tab does autoselect my browser-default dark theme. It looks much better than the light, incidentally, and the highlight to the Fedi tutorial link makes more sense in this context and is clearly restricted to signed-out users as a call to action/promo thing.
I don't necessarily think the light theme is as awful as you're claiming, and at a glance it definitely seems to be derived from Dark and not the othe way around. The more I look into it the less this seems like a universal problem with the UX in Mbin derivatives and more "the light theme has made some debatable color choices".
If you press the cog in the top right corner you can choose between six different themes, as well as moving the sidebar around, text size, and a bunch of other tweaks.
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Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their "Killer Features"
Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:
- Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
- But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
- On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it's version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title's attached link instead
- However, Mbin doesn't seem to be able to fetch the post's body through RSS
- On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
- On Mbin, afaik, you can't block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
- On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don't host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
- For microblogging, RSS doesn't work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
- On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn't
- Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
- Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn't
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Not familiar enough with PieFed to give an opinion, but among Lemmy and Mbin, of things I can observe:
- Lemmy has far more visual candies / visual noise than Mbin, whose UI rather barebones
- But as Mbin has a more basic UI, it tends to break less and be more compatible with user scripts and filters
- On RSS, from my experience, Mbin links to posts properly through RSS, while, maybe it's version-dependent, Lemmy sites seem to have a bit of trouble with linking posts with links attached to their titles, usually opening the title's attached link instead
- However, Mbin doesn't seem to be able to fetch the post's body through RSS
- On newer versions of the Lemmy engine, you can block instances and hide posts, but not block domains linked in posts
- On Mbin, afaik, you can't block instances nor hide posts (both requiring browser modifications from my tests), but you can block domains
- On Lemmy, also maybe version-dependent, but it seems that instances don't host RSS for federated communities, while Mbin does (good for redundancy, I think)
- For microblogging, RSS doesn't work on Mbin (might in the future?) despite other microblogging alternatives having them, and integration of microblogging to Lemmy only happens indirectly
- On Lemmy, some communities seem to have an extra step to subscribing where you need approval after applying, while Mbin doesn't
- Specific to Mbin, but the error 404 issue from Kbin when blocking or subscribing to an user or community seems to be extremely rare with its successor
- Lemmy allows visualizing how formatting will look like before posting, while Mbin doesn't
On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because "it just works", I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy's functions.
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- Lemmy pros: Fast, mature, everyone knows it
- Lemmy cons: Shouty communists, atrocious mod tools
- Mbin pros: Follow Mastodon people
- Mbin cons: (1) Ugly (2) What the fuck is “Magazines”
- Piefed pros: Python, some semblance of responsiveness to what features people actually want in it
- Piefed cons: What the fuck is a Piefed
(all is satire, I love you guys)
What the fuck is “Magazines”
This but unironically. I could never get over it with Kbin and still can't with Mbin. It's a bad name for a community/sub and I'll die on that hill. You can never get me to call a meme shitpost an "article" in a "magazine".
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Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their "Killer Features"
One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Mbin supports custom magazine/community CSS like Old Reddit did. Don't think it's federated currently though, so it's local only. There's also the ability to follow users and boost (retweet) content, which Lemmy lacks.
Judging by recent posts by Piefed's creator, they seem to be planning to add end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content.
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Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their "Killer Features"
I use Lemmy because there's a good ad free app (jerboa)
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On a more personal take, I prefer Mbin because "it just works", I use far more RSS than the sites directly, and when I use them directly, I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down (very responsive =D ) and block sites I recognize as manipulative (rather common sadly). That also makes so I end up not missing much on Lemmy's functions.
I use an UBlock Origin filter to hide posts I either vote up or down
Would you maybe share your filter as a separate post? Seems handy
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If you press the cog in the top right corner you can choose between six different themes, as well as moving the sidebar around, text size, and a bunch of other tweaks.
Yeah, but that's bad, though.
Hypercustomization is way more of a hassle than a positive in most applications. I will take a couple of binary settings, I won't design the UI for you.
My contention here is that the default UI for the *Bin is actually good.
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Basically, It would be nice to point out what those platforms are & what are their "Killer Features"
If I am being honest, Mbin/Kbin's concept is much better than Lemmy. I like how you can microblog and just use it like a normal forum, which means you can interact with even more people since microblogs (from Mastodon, for example) don't really federate with Lemmy.
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One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Mbin supports custom magazine/community CSS like Old Reddit did. Don't think it's federated currently though, so it's local only. There's also the ability to follow users and boost (retweet) content, which Lemmy lacks.
Judging by recent posts by Piefed's creator, they seem to be planning to add end-to-end encryption and ephemeral content.
How does the boosting work? Because I was never a major Twitter user, and on Tumblr, the "retweet". Option makes things a bit of a disjointed mess because (at least with new Tumblr and the app) it treats each share as a separate post and they aren't linked properly together. So, say someone responds to a comment you made on the reshare ten reshare ago. You may or may not even be able to access it. You may not even be able to find it.
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You're on LW, newer versions of Lemmy are better in that regard.
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ is a better frontend for moderation. Allows you to see votes as a mod, and ban users who never commented or posted.
I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop.
There's an orange "modlog" button in the sidebar of every community that shows the community modlog?
The Tesseract front end is just completely superior for moderation imo. It took me a little bit of getting used to, but it is clean
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How does the boosting work? Because I was never a major Twitter user, and on Tumblr, the "retweet". Option makes things a bit of a disjointed mess because (at least with new Tumblr and the app) it treats each share as a separate post and they aren't linked properly together. So, say someone responds to a comment you made on the reshare ten reshare ago. You may or may not even be able to access it. You may not even be able to find it.
Boosting re-sends the original message, with the original message id attached, and both Lemmy and mbin filter filter out duplicates. On Lemmy, upvoting a post boosts it, and on mbin the functions are separate. Boosting works to get the community/magazine group actor to re-send the post to subscribed remote sites, so if the site you're using subscribed to a community after the original post was made, it could now receive it thanks to the boost.
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Yeah, but that's bad, though.
Hypercustomization is way more of a hassle than a positive in most applications. I will take a couple of binary settings, I won't design the UI for you.
My contention here is that the default UI for the *Bin is actually good.
I personally like being able to easily change the colour theme, but it's of course entirely optional. Each to their own.
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You're on LW, newer versions of Lemmy are better in that regard.
https://tesseract.dubvee.org/ is a better frontend for moderation. Allows you to see votes as a mod, and ban users who never commented or posted.
I literally can’t even view a per-community modlog on desktop.
There's an orange "modlog" button in the sidebar of every community that shows the community modlog?
Whoops! I didn't even notice the Modlog because (at least for me) it's tucked away at the very bottom of the sidebar and nestled between the list of mods and some statistics I don't really care too much about.
Genuinely my bad, though; I should've looked harder. Appreciate it now that I can finally see it! -
If I am being honest, Mbin/Kbin's concept is much better than Lemmy. I like how you can microblog and just use it like a normal forum, which means you can interact with even more people since microblogs (from Mastodon, for example) don't really federate with Lemmy.
I wish there were more Mbin apps
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Boosting re-sends the original message, with the original message id attached, and both Lemmy and mbin filter filter out duplicates. On Lemmy, upvoting a post boosts it, and on mbin the functions are separate. Boosting works to get the community/magazine group actor to re-send the post to subscribed remote sites, so if the site you're using subscribed to a community after the original post was made, it could now receive it thanks to the boost.
So it doesn't work like it does on Tumblr then. Thank you!
