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.
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.
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.
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.
Simply by choosing 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.
