I’m working on a Lemmy/PieFed client called Blorp that allows you to login to multiple accounts at once. You can login to your Lemmy account and PieFed account, and quickly switch between the two. However I don’t yet support PieFed specific features that Lemmy doesn’t have (e.g. topics).
PieFed has only recently had a stable v1 release, but based on my interactions with there devs, I’m very optimistic about their future.
Blorp is great. Nice work.
I don't understand. Blorp looks like another thing you host as a website to access & participate in the fediverse, just like lemmy, piefed and kbin. But you call it a "client". What are the differences? The project readme doesn't help explain this to me.
afaict Blorp is a Lemmy client. You know how on your phone, you can get to Lemmy through a web browser, but also through an app like Voyager or Jerboa? Well those apps, and the front-end of the website, are all called clients. And it's also possible to have alternative web URLs that access the same server.
So there's ttrpg.network, which is the name of the instance and also where the default lemmy-ui is hosted. But there's also old.ttrpg.network, which accesses the same instance backend, but has an alternative client designed to look like old reddit, called Mlmym.
To me, Blorp looks like another alternative front end to Lemmy.
Only thing I'll add is Blorp is a Lemmy and PieFed client. No mbin support currently.
Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin/kbin all provide APIs that let you pull data (communities, posts, users) from their backend. A client knows how to connect to the API, pull the data, and present it to the user. Lemmy, PieFed, and mbin all have a default client they ship with, but the Lemmy client only speaks Lemmy, the PieFed client only speaks piefed, etc.
Blorp, among other multi platform clients, speaks Lemmy and PieFed. Blorp can be self hosted, but it’s not a backend like Lemmy, PieFed, etc. Blorp reads/writes data via these APIs, but it doesn’t store any data on a server. The connected API is responsible for data storage.
Idk if I explained that well. Does that make any sense?
Another way to think about it is email. Gmail is both a email server and a client. Blorp is like using a 3rd party email client that connects to Gmail AND Yahoo.
I made an account on quokk.au, though I haven't used it much. If I were joining the threadiverse today, I'd probably look for Piefed rather than Lemmy.
Huh, it looks like the groups (of communities) are instance-specific. https://piefed.social/ has lots, https://piefed.au/ doesn't. Then there are "feeds" which... look like the same thing as groups? Of which piefed.au has Australian-specific ones (including a lot of auzzie.zone communities). I'll have to find out if any of these are portable across instances or not, or if I'm stuck using multiple sites to access the fediverse >:|
EDIT: Yess, feeds are a version that work across communities. Yay. BRB, gotta try this out. Although this does raise the question of "why bother with groups when feeds are the same but better?"
I haven't tried any Piefeds or mbins. My impression is similar to yours: interpreted language and "no fancy design patterns" gives me the idea it's probably great for quickly prototyping new features like categories and moderation tools, possibly at the cost of performance. If you're looking at hosting, maybe reach out to a few piefed admins, ask what they think about it and if/when they tried Lemmy for a comparison.
The great thing about the Fediverse is afaik you can test other instances and even other softwares while still getting access to the same communities and posts.
Discussion about the aussie.zone instance itself