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Apps are built by third parties. Maybe even the piefed developers are involved in their development. (feddit.online)

submitted 2 weeks ago by MastKalandar@feddit.online to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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But why should we be compelled to install apps ?

I mean, apps do make life convenient, but we ought to have a choice of not installing apps, right ??🤔🤔🤔

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 3 points 2 weeks ago

PieFed is a combination of back-end software that runs the stuff - posts, comments, votes, DMs, etc. - and a front-end providing access to that stuff (this is the actual buttons pressed, and what things are shown vs. not, plus how they are laid out).

When you use a 3rd party app, you still access the same back-end, but through a different front-end. e.g. the traditional basic PieFed front-end refuses to show you both upvotes and downvotes separately (since +51 & -50 is a VERY different situation than just "1" - the former shows contentious engagement whereas the latter shows lack of any engagement at all, which could affect e.g. voting results or other conclusions that you wanted to draw from the conversation, or even clue you in to network problems where people weren't seeing your content at all. There is a way to see those btw, but it's super jankey and barely works), but a 3rd party app can make a different design decision and so choose to show them... however it wants.

As such, you could either have a better or worse experience than with the basic web browser UI. Or more likely both at the same time: better in some ways and possibly also worse in some others. Though it is so good to have choices to pick from:-).

Hopefully someone who actually uses 3rd party apps can step in with some recommendations or like information on how to find what features are offered by what apps, though here I just wanted to clarify what you might expect from all of that.