There's so many ways to interact with the Fediverse. The most popular, by far, seems to be Mastodon, but Lemmy, Misskey, and Pixelfed are also relatively popular. Kbin used to be popular, but it has apparently been abandoned, and is mostly dead at this point.

I recently learned that Mbin is a thing, checked it out, and it looked really cool! Has anyone used it? How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.

What Fediverse services do you actually, regularly use?

For me, it's mostly Lemmy, though I do hop on Mastodon every now and then.

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[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 16 points 2 days ago (14 children)

I'm an Mbin user.

Mbin is a fork of kbin. Kbin's dev didn't really trust people much, so he wanted to have sole control over what code gets added to kbin. Which led to issues when he wasn't available and development just came to a halt for months because no one could accept changes anymore. The other devs wanted more control so they could actually get shit done, so they decided to fork the project instead.

How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.

I think the biggest difference is really the fact that you can subscribe to not just communities but also users. This is where the superior Mastodon compatibility comes into play by allowing us to see posts that don't mention communities. Lemmy only sees Mastodon posts if they mention a community explicitly or an Mbin user has interacted with it.

There's also other stuff like public upvotes, boosting, tags, reputation (karma), and custom community CSS. I don't really know Lemmy well enough to give a full list of where they differ.

[–] macfranc@poliversity.it 2 points 2 days ago

@Pamasich @gon

Kbin's dev didn't really trust people much, so he wanted to have sole control over what code gets added to kbin

The developer of Kbin is an absolute genius and Kbin was one of the most beautiful and original things ever done in the Fediverse, with a hybridization between microblogging and threadiverse like never seen before. It's a real shame that he ended support for Kbin, but I think he got burned out...

I think the biggest difference is really the fact that you can subscribe to not just communities but also users

This is an added value, but it was also a critical aspect. The fact of having allowed to follow users and not only communities (magazines) has determined a significant slowdown of the server.

Furthermore, this great added value of joining microblogging to threadiverse, does not make the interface very easy to read. This was taken sic et simpliciter from Mbin, without further developments. Perhaps, if the original developer had remained active, he could have taken the responsibility of making some sensible changes to the Knin interface...

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