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.
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?’
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.
Edit: sorry, it’s linked on the page you shared. Not sure how I missed this one!
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.
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like when instances will host photon for anything other than the default interface, as then it’s just a more limited, outdated version of photon and another point of failure.
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).
TIL Kbin died.
I run fedia.io. I also run Infosec.pub. Which is lemmy so I know a lot about both. Lemmy is much more robust, but I personally find the interface for Mbin much nicer and the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy. At least for now.
From a moderator perspective it seems essential to have a microblogging section, because otherwise people make entire posts for simple questions or personal achievements. That plagues Reddit, drags down the whole site.
I still think it’s missing something though, streaming video service support. Mbin’s idea of combining known socials works great in that respect. Text and image, but needs video support. P2P maybe, no storage needed.
P2P? How is that supposed to work? You cannot expect every user that uploads a video to even have remotely enough uptime for any arbitrary interested person to successfully watch their video
Only for streaming and I’m just brainstorming, I don’t actually know how it would work. I’m just thinking about what mbin needs to be truly next generation rather than just a Reddit replacement
Reddit didn’t replace anything directly, it innovated. And whatever comes after will have to innovate as well
On mbin you’ll still see them, just in a separate section. And that’s only my perspective too, communities you join might dislike my methods entirely.
Thanks for answering! Nothing against fedia, after all I’m posting from here, just asked out of curiosity… would’ve been fun if the local magazines were somewhat more active. Though I guess there lies the fediverse’s strength, of being able to post and read in this collection for example.
would’ve been fun if the local magazines were somewhat more active.
I originally chose Kbin/Mbin over Lemmy because of the added support for Mastodon-like posts, but it’s still suffers from wonky early adopter stuff. I still rather like Mbin’s interface more than Lemmy’s defaults, though Lemmy’s support for third party front ends is very cool. Whichever way you go, I’m happy that Mbin and Lemmy have access to all the same content. Mbin could grow more if some of a magazine’s custom CSS could federate to other instances, or if it supported bots like Lemmy.
Oh dang, I’m gonna have to look into PieFed, though. That looks good! I’d like to see how my community looks, but I think a registered piefed.social user has to do this community lookup for federation to begin.
There’s a reason for that. About a year ago, Reddit started to implode. I set up Infosec.pub and Fedia to give people an alternative. There was a huge influx of people here creating all sorts of magazines, the same that you would see on Reddit. Fedia ran kbin at the time and it had all manner of problems, and over time people sort of wandered away. Either because they were tired of the problems or because they went back to Reddit.
In any event, what we see in the local magazines is the remnants of that initial migration. I really need to go and clean them up.
Now that Fedia is on mbin, things are much better. We still have issues now and then, but generally things work well.
Thanks for this! I escaped Reddit to Kbin.social to Kbin.run, and now landed at Fedia.io. I need to reconstruct some of the communities I started on the previous two. And will soon. It’s just gotten a bit busy IRL.
Jerry … admin of many instances!
the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy
Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here … it’s been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).
Mbin is very community oriented in it’s development, collective decision-making and all that. Lemmy is more subject to the ideas of it’s creators, for better or for worse.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I picked up by the Beehaw drama is that the Lemmy devs do not seem to be too interested in improving moderation support. I don’t know if this is politics related but I wouldn’t be surprised.
Looks like Lemmy is the way to go. I really like how well it works.
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?
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.
