Fediverse

The Web UI is not easy to use.

The Android app (interstellar) is not easy to use.

I actually prefer to use Lemmy (now Piefed) and Mastodon on two separate accounts rather one on mbin.

If the WebUI and the apps improve a lot I reconsider another try.

I didn't like Lemmy at first, possibly because it had this weird auto-refresh thing and other issues. I found mbin instead and have been with it since. I may check out Piefed at some point. My instance recently has been struggling with donations and I can't really help right now.

I don't use an app for mbin, just browser. The one thing I will say is that images are broken on mobile (Android) as there is no X to close the image, annoyingly.

Lemmy and Piefed are much more 1:1 reddit replacements. Mbin is it's own thing, which is very high quality, but has less out of the box appeal to someone looking for "fediverse reddit".

I joined the fediverse when Reddit made their API changes.

For me, personally, I found Kbin/Mbin to be a sort of hybrid between Twitter and Reddit, and I wasn't a fan of the layout. Lemmy felt a lot more like the Reddit-like experience I was looking for.

However, PieFed then came along and it feels like Reddit, but has features that cater to the Fediverse much better than Lemmy does (such as being able to combine communities into feeds, crosspost handling,), as well as other features that are great (polls, spoiler blur for image posts, etc.).

I thought Kbin had the most potential, but even after it was reborn as Mbin it does feel like it's been largely forgotten. Interstellar's alright, but I'm not super in love with it and it doesn't look like anything else plans to support it.

Piefed has gotten all the attention now, and I keep eyeing it wondering if the grass is greener.

I'm never touching Lemmy thanks to its devs though.

I want a basic app that has no frills, is snappy, and does its job well. Lemmy fits that, and is no more or less than I need. I have a separate masto account.

I started with kbin, but as that project declined the lemmy apps were starting to mature, after I found voyager I was all in on lemmy. I still haven't found a great mobile app for mbin.

I don't care for Mastodon - I want to discuss topics of interest not solely to follow individuals (while hashtags are inconsistent).

And for the strictly Threadiverse side of things, Mbin has a less compact layout than Lemmy's far more polished look and feel. Other things also did not integrate as well - e.g. the difference between Upvotes vs. Boosts (I understood it - I came over from Reddit to Kbin.social - but still it is jarring).

Mbin isn't "bad", it's just that I preferred Lemmy, although now I've left that too and migrated to PieFed that is even better!:-P Like, why when most images seem to be vertically laid out or somewhere squarish, does Mbin "force" such a horizontal layout? That plus how it leaves an enormous amount of room for a long title (which news articles tend to have but the more social media esque posts trend towards shorter ones) lead to a LOT of wasted screen real estate - overall it just seems like it was designed more for Mastodon and the Threadiverse side was almost an afterthought, or at least not as polished on that side (as Lemmy and PieFed are). And then like, you can see every account that upvotes something, but you are prevented from seeing anyone who downvoted ("reduces") it? It is not a pleasure to see all those inconsistencies in behavior.

Overall it comes across as less "welcoming" to the Threadiverse side, or at least it feels that way to me. Although I do like the placement of the account names side by side with both the up and downvotes on Mbin rather than the Lemmy style - bc all of that is real information, like if some content received 12 upvotes and 10 downvotes, that's a much more engaging set of stats than just "2" (net vote count); and I like seeing it all on one line whereas in Lemmy it is sometimes on the right side, other times on the left, and I hate how it swaps around back and forth depending on the length of other items. Then again, Lemmy's search feature is just absolutely fantastic, and neither Mbin nor PieFed even begin to compare with it IMHO (at the time).

Nowadays the competition isn't Mbin vs. Lemmy, which is rapidly falling behind in features offered, but Mbin vs. PieFed. Go to a PieFed instance like PieFed.social and the layout of the latter just blows me away! 😍 The icons are actually large enough to read without needing enlargement most of the time, the scrolling is so long, the titles accommodate both short vs. long, everything is just so exceedingly well-done, and the features behind it all are jaw-dropping for someone who is like more used to Reddit and hasn't heard of them - people are more used to "features" like increasing Reddit profit margins, not existing solely to serve the user base.

If I needed to use use both Mastodon and Lemmy/PieFed with a single account, I would absolutely not hesitate to create an Mbin account, as I once did with Kbin. However, I do not, so I use PieFed that is more tuned specifically towards the Threadiverse content.

Lack of a cute animal mascot and catchy name

Probably just the timing. Mbin was forked from Kbin after the majority of newcomers from Reddit settled on Lemmy over Kbin. Because Kbin was pretty much the one-man show with an unreliable flagship instance during the initial big wave of users coming over.

Why would I want two different things in one?

People got caught up with lemmy, as it was the most advertised one when the reddit exodus started. Mbin came a bit later after Kbin was doomed. Most won't bother changing and new users usually go for the more popular options.

I agree though, Mbin is the cleanest

I'm on mbin, after kbin. It's clunky but passable. I wish they'd get rid of some of the aternative jargon (thread vs post vs magazine) among other changes

First-mover advantage is powerful.

If Mbin is meant to be a "Lemmy and Mastodon client" alone, then it is a quirky Lemmy "app" and less responsive Mastodon "app".

But it shines only when it scales. This, however needs more users taking use of eg. magazines' custom CSS (and these don't even federate!), keeping track on most popular Mastodon & co hashtags, adding these tags to Mbin magazines, following outside accounts to federate them to instance, etc...

All the Great Exodus fledditors, people craving for non-tankie Threadiverse service, and also curious fedinauts from outside made this happen on kbin.social, and this is what I loved in it the most.

Mbin happened when kbin.social was already crumbling, but many of its users (me included) still hoped for it. When kbin.social definitely collapsed, the previous kbinauts were already aware of not-tankie Lemmy instances, like sh.itjust.works (hosting MeanwhileOnGrad), sopuli.xyz, or generic lemmy.world.

Maybe the more aggresive Mbin marketing (have you seen the sidebar of this community - it still mentions "KBin"...) would help Mbin - but only at cost of making drama with existing kbinauts. With Lemmy's toxicity problem being talked much recently (and instances being closed because of it) I am glad, that things did not go that way.

I recently moved to Mbin and I'm thoroughly impressed, I have basically stopped using Lemmy.

Interstellar is very bad, that's not a selling point.

Personally I don't like its interface and it requires two clicks to switch between threads and microblogging.

I thought Kbin (I used kbin first) was okay but really overturned with too much going on and no real reason to use it.

Does Voyager work with it?

I changed to Lemmy because I read about Lemmy first. After becoming interested I investigated, found much more articles suggesting Lemmy and those who suggested both gave preference to Lemmy.