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?

We call them threadiverse or forumverse.

They are very different.

Currently Lemmy lacks lot features compared to PieFed and Mbin.

• Mbin support mastodon, tag, change link to link’s title, customization…sorry i don’t know well Mbin but it is a good software
• Piefed support tag, flair, multicommunity, temporary filters, i read the article, block downvote from people who aren’t subcribed to community…
• Lemmy was there before PieFed. So it was my first software they have lot apps, lot UI.

Anyway, i recommend you testing them so you can get a better understanding on their pro and cons

Piefed also has this Mastodon-esque tendency to implement features that only work on their system and are not interoperable with the rest of the ActivityPub software. Which is the kind of thing that is only “nice” until they are a minority player, but could make them one of the most hated systems if they start getting significant users.

I don’t think this is accurate for either of the two projects to be honest.

PieFed made sure to make their API as close to Lemmy’s as possible, and they created feeds so that it would be as easy as possible for Lemmy to integrate in the future.

Vibes between the developers of the two platforms seems good enough.

No need to make up drama where there is none.

• The flair part does not federate.
• They send fake (non-existing) actor ids for votes to obfuscate the identity of the real user. It is “compliant”, but completely against the spirit of a public social network.
• Every proposal that I’ve seen from them had ActivityPub as an afterthought. Creating “Feed” as a type of Actor, using a special formatted type of message to share ip addresses of abusers for “spam mitigation” even before considering a simple usage of the Flag activity, etc.

I am not saying they have bad intentions. I am just saying that they prefer to develop things that work for them first and for the rest of the Fediverse second.

They send fake (non-existing) actor ids for votes to obfuscate the identity of the real user. It is “compliant”, but completely against the spirit of a public social network.

There have been discussions about how to implement this before. But it has to be done in a way that is agreed by other threadiverse software. Unless they actually provide profiles for these fake actors there will be problems since some software will look up the profile info to cache it, even for likes…

Personally I’m of the opinion of a standard header to mark a favourite message as a private one and use a random ID that the originating instance can use to validate the message as genuine. But, this needs to be adopted properly by all.

There have been discussions about how to implement this before. But it has to be done in a way that is agreed by other threadiverse software.

I think we should move away from “threadiverse software” and embrace a transparent social web.

If we want to be transparent, we need to stop creating these leaky abstractions. Votes are not private. A vote on Lemmy is just a Like, a downvote is just a dislike. Instead of pretending this information should be private, we should make it clear to the users that they should only react in anyway if they feel comfortable in sharing their opinion in public.

That depend, what your are trying to achieve.

Your point is valid. PieFed point of view is also valid. There are circumtance where voting is better private than transparency. As for myself, i would completly remove the voting system because it is useless.

Why are you voting ? Do you like the cat picture ? The article ? The title ? We will never know. So what’s the point of voting since we don’t know its reasons ?

Why it is at the top of my timeline ? And what about minorities ? Let’s imagine 10 deafs people 1000 hearing people. If ya 1000 hearing people downvote a post because you don’t want to see a post with sign language…

So what’s the point of voting since we don’t know its reasons ?

Don’t overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it’s a negative addition, you vote it down. That’s all that there is to it.