I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it’s good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren’t enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.
At risk of answering a question with a question… Is there a drawback to using mbin? Are there certain ways that it makes interacting with Lemmy awkward or difficult, or is it essentially just another interface? There are lots of frontends for the threadiverse - Lemmy UI is just one.
I know that mbin has additional features on the backend, but is there something you are missing out on?
For me it’s the UI thing. It may be the borderless timeline or the colorful info line - I struggle to focus on the title when browsing with lemmy.
Just to be clear, mbin is not just another frontend but a completely different software (including the backend side of it). Like Lemmy it uses activitypub to communicate with Lemmy but also with Mastodon.
https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin There’s a few different instance lists at the bottom if you want to browse around and check the settings and stuff.
Yes, an important point, as I mentioned! However, the question was if there is a reason to use mbin if you are primarily interacting with Lemmy.
My question was if there is any drawback to it. From what I’ve seen (at a purely superficial level) mbin is perfectly capable of taking full advantage of what Lemmy has to offer.
It’s mostly fully compatible to Lemmy. The only minor thing I noticed is that Lemmy edits are not getting federated properly (maybe that’s fixed by now, I just noticed it in some threads in the past).
Federation issues of course can occur, but that can also happen with Lemmy, or activitypub in general. I’ve been pretty happy with it as I prefer the UI just way more.
This is less a reason to use Lemmy or MBin over the other specifically: One of the great features of the fediverse is that the content is not siloed off behind one interface. Usage and development can happen on both and any number of other interfaces and all of them will have access to the same content (barring federation issues, but that should become less of an issue as ActivityPub and various interfaces mature).
As for there being enough people to populate interface specific communities/magazines/whatever, you can’t take a snapshot of today and project that into the future statically. The fediverse population is still relatively low compared to commercial social networking sites, but there is enough of a core userbase for new people to accrete onto over the course of time. There is a potential future where the user base flips, or doesn’t but both Lemmy and MBin have large userbases, or another interface that doesn’t even exist yet takes off and becomes larger than both. But it doesn’t really matter because all that’s happening in those cases is people are being offered different ways of accessing the same content that better match their preference.
Bringing it back to the original point, that the content is not siloed means development on various interfaces can happen concurrently to make things not necessarily better than each other, but more suited to different tastes. You aren’t locked into whatever Reddit, or Twitter, or whatever decides the interface should look like.
I was a frequent Kbin.social user and I miss it. But also, you have to move on when the end is reached for the foreseeable future. One of the strengths of the Fediverse, is that you can make an account on something like MBin and still interact with Lemmy instances as if you were registered on Lemmy. Anything that makes me use one account and supports cross-platform is a major plus in my book.
Oh and uh maybe some of those running Lemmy, i.e mods, are kind of scummy so I don’t want to be at their mercy if I was just registered to Lemmy.
Better UI & UX. As long as federation works it does not matter whether they are Lemmy communities or mbin magazines. So, why use Lemmy when you can make use of the same communities on mbin?
I’m struggling to see how the UI is better in mbin. Maybe I just use the site differently, I also don’t care about mastodon/ following users.
vs. 
Pretty clear cut for me personally. I don’t really use the micro blogging feature either.
So mbin compact view looks better on desktop browser, but Lemmy looks better on mobile browser.
Here is Lemmy auto expand content on mobile and desktop:
I personally don’t use mobile sites, but the only plus for Lemmy seems to be the thumbnail size. Aside from that they seem both kinda meh. There’s plenty of apps for Lemmy though. Mbin only has Interstellar right now, but the Eternity devs said they at least plan to add mbin support in the future, which is what I used on Reddit back then too (Infinity).
At least earlier there have been quite a few problems with federation not working between KBin and Lemmy, posts and comments not syncing. It does seem better now but at the same time it’s hard to know if you’re missing a few comments or threads or whatnot.
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A lot of the major federation issues in kbin were already fixed on mbin. Also, there were at least two major federation issues caused by Lemmy updates, which had nothing to do with kbin nor mbin and affected Lemmy instances accordingly as well. Of course, new issues can arise, but that also goes for Lemmy, or even just ActivityPub in general. But overall federation seems to be working fairly well right now.
the interface to all the exact same content, as you point out, is better.
why would i use an incredibly shitty interface that almost requires the use of an app, when i can access 100% of lemmy from mbin?
this whole ‘lemmy-centric’ view you have of the fediverse is archaic. you need to think bigger.
the whole point of the fediverse is access to all the content from your interface of choice… and youre asking ‘why choose the better interface?’
Everything you listed is opinions and he is asking for actual reasons to use it.
To op:
There is no benefit to either. Test out a few frontends and choose the one you like the most. The differences are minimal.
The approach could be to use the lemmy server software and a custom UI, not a whole new server-side project like kbin/mbin.
Examples:
What is Next? I hadn’t heard of it before.
I don’t know. These are the frontends that my home instance offers. What I was trying to say with my post is that there are already a few different UIs available and it should be straightforward to fork one and adapt as you like.
Thanks, I found it here.
I love the front-ends as well but it feels like every Lemmy update breaks something there. Alexandrite still hasn’t updated to 0.19.5 (since most instances are still on 0.19.3 due to image caching issues), and upvotes/downvotes still don’t show up in my instance.
Some if them are hosted directly on instances like a.lemmy.world or photon.lemmy.world. Others are hosted separately, but allow you to login from most any server, like tesseract.dubvee.org,
Photon is available for any instance at https://phtn.app.
Alexandrite is available for any instance at https://alexandrite.app.
I don’t like when instances will host photon for anything other than the default interface, as then it’s just a more limited, outdated version of photon and another point of failure.
Thanks, I hadn’t considered that!
this whole ‘lemmy-centric’ view you have of the fediverse is archaic.
More like narrow, but we see that all over. Mastodon users think microblogging is the end-all, be-all of the fediverse, even ignoring the loads of other, similar server software in that sector. Lemmy users talk about the fediverse as if it’s only community-based forums.
In the meantime I guess, say, Peertube users are over in the other end of the room scratching their heads.
Lemmy-centric, I don’t know… I’ve been using Kbin and Mbin all along. I’m even posting this from fedia.io. But yes, I admit to feeling that the more users a service has, the more attractive it should be. And I was also thinking from a sync POV, as there has been problems before between the services (which doesn’t seem to happen now as much luckily).
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Looks Lemmy is the way to go. I really like how well it works.
More options is better
If those options are functional, otherwise focus on making some of them functional.
There is definitely a LOT of half ass activity pub projects floating around. Everyone wants to start a new thing, but few people want to mature and maintain something someone else started.
We need more people doing the latter. We don’t need another half-finished client. We have those in spades.
What ultimately caused kbin to shut down?
The dev had medical issues, and went offline for months. Lack of maintenance caused the site to break.
Single developer prioritised his life over supporting an increasingly complex project, I think
He had some health issues iirc, and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for. I don’t blame him for stopping development.
It seems like his health condition got bad enough that he quite literally prioritised his life.
I hope he’s well.
What I saw over there was a large portion of his community pleading with him to delegate administrative tasks to the community, as it became increasingly clear the website was becoming too much for a single guy to manage (he was the only moderator of like 30+ communities that were full to bursting with spam, as well as the sole site admin). He never approved the many applications to help moderate, and said he was extremely slow to trust others, so never appointed a second admin, and instead just continued to silently work on the codebase as the site became unusable from spam.
I think his extreme distrust and desire to do everything himself combined with his medical issues led to extreme burnout, and ultimately its downfall.
I mean… Maybe some exceptions, but I don’t feel like the community was being too pushy.
Stuff happens in life, people get that, but I don’t feel like it’s too much to ask for an update about what’s going on more than once every other month and while we appreciate him trying to handle everything, when he can’t, there needs to be some effort at creating a backup plan. And… then finally when people stepped up to offer to help him, he didn’t appreciate them, ignored their efforts and pushed them out (which is why we have mbin).
and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for
He doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he can decide to run his open source project just as he pleases, but it could have gone so much better. People are mostly just disappointed, I feel like.
I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.
The first half of what you said is the important bit, to me. He owed no one anything, and I just remember seeing some comments from people that couldn’t comprehend that. Entitlement is strong on the internet imho.
It’s much easier to follow people from e.g. mastodon from here than I remember it being on lemmy.
I don’t think you can really follow individual Mastodon (or even mbin / lemmy) accounts yet. At least not in a way where their posts will appear in your feed.
They appear in the “microblog” tab. To see them it’s necessary to get in the habit of clicking on that occasionally. Seems worth it. The rest of the fediverse is maybe two orders of magnitude larger than lemmy, there’s lots of stuff to be seen out there.
That just shows all posts though, or all posts posted to a certain community or whatever. I don’t think there’s a place where I specifically just see the posts of accounts or even whole networks that I follow, like the subscribed feed for threads.
Oh right, I forgot there’s a setting you may need in order to show only ‘subscribed’ stuff by default.
It’s sort of confusing. I usually just navigate directly to
/sub/newestas my starting point and then the microblog link at the top goes to/sub/microblog/newest.Wait, since when is this a thing? I’m pretty sure I’ve tried that some months ago already.
Apropos of nothing, I’d like to see a mod done to the fediverse… Each user keeps their own info pod, and fedi sites can use that to populate profiles.
Migration is the largest hurdle in the fedi for users, instances change/shut down/federate with Meta without warning, etc.
Would be great to have one’s info on one’s own drives, go to other mastodon site that didn’t e.g. manipulate its users into being on Meta and just plug in.
Images could also be stored this way, so copyright and provenance is straightforward. When user moves, so does all that.
Then a lemmy, (x)bin, piefed instance becomes just a place to park and not a captive zoo.
I think that the fediverse should offer a compelling improvement over commercial SM,: For me self-custody and easy migration are the things.
When I started, I picked Beehaw on lemmy. I hated the autorefresh and some other settings (around language IIRC, but it’s been a while) not saving and/or not working. I went to kbin as a result. I know lemmy no longer autorefreshes in newer versions, but I just got used to the layout and feel of mbin.
Simply by choosing the a lesser used fedi software you’re helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software’s whims. So that’s a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ““threadiverse”” that’s Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that’s Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you’re, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.
Your own local communities being “dead” mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn’t that much you can do there.
In my experience, it’s always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it’s true in the ““threadiverse”” (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).
So really, don’t worry about the size of your own instance’s communities. As long as you trust your instance’s staff to keep you safe there’s no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where “discoverability” is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.
This is exactly why I chose Mbin: to help diversify Threadiverse software.
Great arguments, thank you!
I’ve registered on a bunch of Lemmy instances, but I stuck with lemmy.ml because for the most part it seemed to have the least amount of downtime IME. Though I think they’re all pretty stable these days anyway.
What you said is very true though, it helps to try out and especially actively use alternatives, since that’s how you end up with software like Chrome (not really but kind of, you get the idea).
so i startet on kbin.social and lemmy.world, but kbin became shitty and overrun with bots. than i switched to kbin.run and now it seems to be down. No idea what actually happened there. Don’t think i will start a new kbin/mbin account for now. i think i will just stay on lemmy.world for now and not have an alternative instance as backup
TIL Kbin died.
I prefer being on instances with fewer users anyway - it feels a bit more personal. So more users on the larger Lemmy instances is not really an argument in my book.
I like the user experience on Lemmy and Mbin more. Another thing I like about Mbin is being able to boost posts and interact with the greater Fediverse more.
I like the performance of PieFed. It also works without JavaScript, which is nice some times.
What I like about this place is that we can all be on different platforms if we want to - there’s no such thing as there not being enough people around to support all the platforms, as they’re not competing for users. I’m happy whatever platform the people I interact with use - the important thing is that I can interact with them. :)
Thank you for mentioning Pie Fed, I neverd heard of it until now, but looks great. Clean code, intro video for developers, db structure exolained. Really friendly for new contributors, quite refreshing.
I really like the user experience as well, and @rimu@piefed.social is great at including the community in its development and keeping an open dialogue. It’s a great project.
