Ah, my bad. Thanks for letting me know! Edited my other comment to reflect that.

From what I understand, Piefed instances will have better support for Mastodon posts, and I believe it supports subscribing to Peertube channels already (something that Lemmy still doesn’t support…) Edit: It does support Peertube!

This article is confirming the extreme merit of Citizen Controlled Media, which has only become more and more important as an essential form of prefiguration as time goes on, since these alternative citizen controlled sources become virtually the only way to communicate truth to others that is otherwise censored in state or corporate controlled media.

Related to Movim; it just received Discord-like spaces a couple days ago! So it’s now a pretty effective decentralized Discord that can do group audio/video calls, screen share, and even has blogging built in.

Highly recommend anyone thinking about ditching Discord to give it a shot. It doesn’t even require an email to use, just a username and password :)

Whether or not XMPP is a Signal or a Discord replacement is dependant on the client.

For a Discord replacement, there is the Movim XMPP client, which has group audio/video calls, screensharing (w/audio using chromium based browser), support for gifs and videos within the chat, and very soon Discord-like servers with rooms, after which the dev plans to work on drop-in voice chat rooms.

Especially with the Movim client :)

Lemmyverse.net is a very useful site to find communities that may not have federated to your instance yet (at least 1 user on your instance must be subscribed to it for it to begin federating). Especially useful for smaller instances.

I tried a lot, I think it has the most feature parity.

Have you tried Movim? It has most of the essential features, like group video calls, screen sharing, and a better E2EE method than matrix (IMO, anyway). It’s also much easier to set up and host since it uses XMPP.

XMPP and Deltachat are federated (though not with each other). A person can self-host a server that can communicate with any other XMPP or Deltachat instance.

That’s not a terribly good user experience if a user doesn’t want to interact with or see any comments from users of a particular instance, as then it would require the user to manually block hundreds of users over a long span of time.

User level community and instance blocks will stop you from seeing posts from those places, but it does not block their users or their comments, so you’d still be able to see them around in non-blocked communities.

The Dbzer0 folk also run a piefed instance, Anarchist.nexus, if you’d prefer to be using piefed with everything else the same.

Piefed has some neat features unique to it, such as:

• a very nice gallery view for image heavy communities.
• the ability to combine comments from multiple communities under one post, if the same link was posted to all of them. You can see an example of that here (notice how the comments have dividers for each community).
• the ability to create and subscribe to a pre-made list of communities, sorta like a multi-reddit.

Welcome to the Fediverse! Glad to have you with us ^^

Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.

An average user doesn’t really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.

As an example; I’m not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they’re trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it’s not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP’s, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.

With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that’s all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they’ll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it’s complicated.

Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it’s own codebase starting from scratch.

Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.

The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.

A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.

Just like with email, where you can’t log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can’t log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.

But if you’re familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it’s hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.

Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it’s own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you’d have to go to lemmy.world directly if that’s where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.

All of these servers are ‘federated’ with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.

Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you’re familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).

As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.

• Lemmy is mainly developed by Dessalines and Nutomic on Github.
• Piefed is mainly developed by Rimu (and others) on Codeberg
• Mbin is developed on Github

But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.

There are still active cinema and TV show communities, the ones from lemm.ee mostly moved over to piefed.social.

• !movies@piefed.social
• !television@piefed.social
• !fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social
• !trailers@lemmy.blahaj.zone

By default, a piefed/Lemmy instance only knows of the existence of its own local communities. To see any off-instance communities in the search, they first have to initiate federation by a local user manually searching that community and/or subscribing to it.

Once the off-instance community has been federated by a single user, it will stay that way forever, and other users on your local instance will see it show up in the search as well.

There is an effort to automate that initial federation by Lemmy-federate, which creates a bot on participating instances to automatically subscribe to participating communities, but I’m not sure if piefed instances are compatible with it yet.

Older desktops can have a somewhat hefty idle power draw due to the overall system consumption contributing more than expected, such as the southbridge. According to this old review of the i7-2600k, the system idles at 74w, which at $0.12 per KWh, would cost you roughly $77 per year. Though you might want to confirm that with a Kill-a-watt meter if you can (libraries sometimes lend them out), since I’m pretty sure that total system power chart includes a discrete GPU, so the real number for a GPU-less system is probably around 40 or 50w at idle.

If that is accurate, you could potentially replace your i7-2600 with a used Dell Wyse 5070 thin client from ebay for about $40 (in the US), and that idles at 5w, which would only cost you $5 a year at the same rate.

Older thin clients and laptops tend to have much better idle power draws compared to desktops. For other people reading this, if you’re using a desktop for a low-power use case, it’s probably worth finding out what its idle power consumption is and doing the calculation to determine if it’d be worth replacing it with a more efficient used thin-client or office mini-pc.

Muntedcrocodile: “I believe in the right to spread hatred as long as it’s not calling for violence.”

Lemmy: “Um, okay. Let’s give that a try. We hate hateful right wing views, and call people with those views total assholes.”

muntedcrocodile: “Wait, not like that! You should tolerate us so there’s a diversity of views!”

Ironic.