I’ve been researching for the past week Threadiverse projects (Lemmy at first, then PieFed and now Mbin) with the goal of testing out their interoperability with the rest of the Fediverse.

Apologies in advance if this is the third post you see from me - this one is my first in Mbin.

I wonder if you have any insights regarding the differences between the 3 - advantages/disadvantages and opinions on your favorite project?

I’m also interested to see if Mbin manages to federate mentions (unlike Lemmy and PieFed who falls short). So for the purposes of this test, I’m mentioning:

Thanks and happy to be here!

  • ciferecaNinjo
    2•4 months ago

    Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:

    • when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
    • when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.

    CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.

    When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues – places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.

    So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.

    • just another devEnglish
      2•4 months ago

      I see.

      As the other commenter also said: can’t you just block the LW instance on your account?

      • ciferecaNinjo
        0•4 months ago

        I think he is talking about admins blocking instances in the settings for the whole node. AFAIK, users on Lemmy and k/mBin have no such setting.

        • just another devEnglish
          3•4 months ago

          Lemmy allows it on a user level, since version 0.19

          But since I see you’re on mbin, that don’t do you much good, I’m afraid.

          • ciferecaNinjo
            1•4 months ago

            Ah, I see! Found it. Indeed that was not there last time I checked.

            I’m on both Lemmy and mbin. I have several Lemmy accounts.

            Now I need to understand the consequences of blocking lemmy.world. Is it just the same as blocking every lemmy.world community, or does it go further than that? E.g. If I post a thread and a LW user replies, I would not want to block their reply from appearing in my notifications. I just don’t want LW threads coming up in searches or appearing on timelines.