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.
Idk if I explained that well. Does that make any sense?
Other 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.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
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.
moseschrute@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Only thing I’ll add is Blorp is a Lemmy and PieFed client. No mbin support currently.
I’m the developer behind Blorp.