FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

The title is pretty clear. It happens only on run-in-place installs, either in minetest or freeminer, and for stable and dev versions. I have a blank list of mods or public servers, no error in the log.
I can however connect to servers if I enter their IP manually.
And this bug doesn't happen on my system-wide install: it shows every public servers and every mod from the mod repository.
I have ubuntu 13.10.

Interesting, I had the same problem on my testing system, where Ubuntu 12.04 LTS runs on...
Seems to be a linux-only problem because I don't have this problem in pre-compiled versions.