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TIL about this Fediverse software database (fedidb.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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Today I discovered the Fediverse Software Database, and it’s a bit disheartening to see how many platforms have so few users. What are some ways we could help promote these smaller or newer Fediverse projects and give them more visibility?

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[–] 6 points 1 year ago (8 children)

One cannot go past hundreds, maybe few thousands MAU without a significant hype and mainstream attention.

Mastodon was the decentralised social network and main ex-Twitter alternative at the time. Misskey attracted Japanese artists from a specific theme , exiled by Twitter. Pixelfed benefitted with Instagram's moderation drama and then with a Streisand effect. Its autor helped it with some marketing but this only helped with the migration wave, not caused it. Lemmy and /kbin grew on Reddit API debacle. PeerTube is one of self-hosting video solutions and a P2P video platform and a federated one. NodeBB and WordPress carried over their legacy user bases.

No other platform has more than several thousands MAU

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (7 children)

    Speaking of Kbin, how is it rn? My first account was made on there after all

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Kbin the software has died - technically there is still one small instance in Poland that uses it, but all others have ceased, and the software is no longer being maintained under that name - yet the project lives on in its fork Mbin.

    Instances that include the kbin word - e.g. kbin.earth - only retain that now as a legacy.

    Sadly I don't think anyone has heard from Ernst, the original developer and admin of kbin.social.

    App support finally came to Mbin though, see "Interstellar".

    A spiritual successor to Kbin's design philosophy that is very much worth checking out is "PieFed", which I am writing to you now using it :-). Most apps that work with Lemmy also now work with it (except Thunder support still coming "soon~(TM)~" but available only in the beta version for now, not the Play Store one). PieFed is written in Python rather than the obscure Rust language so its pace of development has been extremely rapid in comparison to Lemmy and it now has a feature set well beyond that of either Lemmy or Mbin. If you want to access both the Threadiverse/Lemmy/Mbin communities/magazines as well as Fediverse/Mastodon-style content, Mbin is still your best bet as it was designed for exactly that, but for Threadiverse stuff it offers numerous advantages. Anyway it is so nice to have choices to pick from!:-)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Is Rust really so obscure? I'm not a programmer, but I seem to hear about Rust frequently in any remotely halfway-techy space.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Not the person you are replying to, but I wouldn't call it obscure, no. It's getting used more and more in recent years and there are pushes to even use it for parts of the Linux kernel. However, it is a language that you wouldn't be familiar with unless you are most likely a professional software engineer (or a very dedicated hobbyist).

    One of the benefits of python is its relative ease of learning and readability make the codebase easier to understand and make contributions. I don't work in software, but I have made numerous contributions to Piefed for features that I have wanted in lemmy, but I haven't ever been able to wrap my head around rust.

    Nothing against lemmy though. Their codebase is a couple years more mature, and since they develop api-first, it is more feature complete from a mobile app's perspective. Piefed is developed web ui-first by comparison.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    I hear about Python probably at least as much as I hear about Rust, to be fair. I looked at some Python code years ago and seem to remember the code looking more like a shell script than like other programming languages I had seen, so the ease and readability aspects make sense. If ever I do start programming, I won't start by learning Rust. Baby steps.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah "obscure" was definitely the wrong word there - maybe "niche"?

    Thank you so much for your contributions btw! In this era of disinformation, making the Threadiverse more usable can be an enormous boon:-).

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Piefed seems interesting! Might register an account there :) Hurrah for the wonders of open source! I'm a bit worried about Ernest though. Didn't he have a bunch of health issues?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    He did, as well as mental health. So perhaps it is good that he pulled back a bit rather than overwhelm himself further. He did come back from his hospital trip, but then left the instance completely unmonitored which caused the entire Threadiverse to become flooded with spam messages like advertisements, to the point where some instances chose to defederate from it. You can't just leave something like open on the internet these days!

    Anyway PieFed is fantastic, you will probably fall in love with it instantly, like so many others of us:-).

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