https://thebrainbin.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/563178/Some-quasi-features-for-Mbin-through-Ublock-Origin-filters

(edit - weird, the link isn’t appearing directly on The/Brain/Bin…)

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.

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 theming, akin to Linux, I don’t think there’s much room for breakthroughs, or at least they’d be harder to achieve, being more a case of picking the “flavor” you want instead. Furthermore, I think this applies to UI as a whole in social medias, federated ones included.

Now, one thing that annoys me and I think that falls on branding is how most of the federated platforms don’t have proper names. As I follow communities and people primarily by RSS, I like things to be organized, and having to figure out how to fit “names” like kbin.social (RIP), lemm.ee, feddit.uk and the sort is a bit of a migraine. "<.<

No one cares about servers

I’d like to see the source for that.

And even if it is/was true, looking at what came before, you’d just be paving the path to become that which you were against.
If one is to depend on a single element, when it fails, it becomes the failure point for the whole ecosystem. Like with the instance I originally stuck to, Kbin.Social, where, if was the sole instance of the federated forums, when it died, the “fediverse” as a whole would have died overnight.
Also, a centralized platform is far easier to be taken over by either good or bad actors, and at least with fragmentation, when you notice degradation in one of the pieces of the fediverse, you can easily jump to a platform that hasn’t been compromised while not having to build the community and groups from scratch.
Sites with specific niches and scopes that still allow for integration, and the culture that ensues, are also an alien concept on a centralized site, and what takes over basically becomes the face of the site’s ecosystem as a whole. With the federation/defederation system, however, it’s much easier for a site to build its own ecosystem while letting in and out just enough of/to other instances to oxygenate it.
And lastly, like with email and Linux, while some may be rather passionate to defend it, I think that, despite that, it’s still a technology, or at least an idea, with great potential, even if slow but constant, as, once more, anyone can make instances in their own vision, or join a platform that better fits what they need while not making a walled garden to force users to stick to it.

While I think fragmentation can grow into being a problem, trying to standardize things too much can be problematic too, as the developers would be bloating the software for features that the community may use very little, as well as, by consequence of the bloating, the devs being either limited to a design that needs to take into account the quirks of all object formats, or to make some frankenstein monster design to include those different formats.

A more reliable path, I think, is what Kbin (RIP) and its successor Mbin do, to have a section for articles and one for notes. While it’s still more load on the developers and the servers, at least it shouldn’t be as much as having to make sense of multiple formats together, since the two sections don’t directly interfere with each other. This, on a final point, is, to my understanding, and with their respective proportions, what happens with the Linux family of operating systems, where it’s also pretty fragmented, but every once in a while a way to put two different environments together appear, like Wine and Xfce translating Windows and QT5 programs, or AppImage and Flatpak trying to be as universal as possible by depending on as little default dependencies from the host system as possible.