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dev politics and dev opinions. Pick whichever you like it doesn't matter.

Kbin is dead Mbin is the successor, both have lemmy (reddit-like) and mastodon (twitter-like) capabilities. You can submit a "tweet" and a "post" from the same platform and browse both lemmy and mastodon content.

Lemmmy is the activitypub version of reddit. PieFed is Lemmy but with the ability to see all comments and cross-posts of the same link or post, all collapsed into a single post and single thread to scroll through.

Beehaw deserves its own mention because of how cut off it is from the rest of the fediverse, its its own little walled garden, protected from all the baddies out there in the world.

All the rest is just drama surrounding the devs of all the platforms, and either their questionable political views (lemmy) or their questionable platform moderation views (piefed). So the platforms keep splintering as well as the instances on each platform. Which is a good thing its part of the fun of the fediverse.

TLDR:

• Lemmy is reddit-like with controversial developers (political views).
• Piefed is Lemmy with cross-posts collapsed to one thread, and controversial developers (moderation defaults).
• Mbin is Lemmy (reddit-like) plus mastodon (twitter-like).
• Kbin is dead.

Unless the dev of kbin returns, it's best to just forget it and think of mbin instead.

Kbin is pure kbin, made by Ernest, who is lovely but sick. Can browse lemmy/kbin/mbin content. Interface is slick and prioritized, which means it can be a bit inefficient resource-wise.

Mbin is kbin but with forked updates and frontend changes. Lighter load, little differences.

Lemmy can browse kbin/mbin/lemmy content. Created by Davel and nutomic. I think you might know about the intricacies of its interface.

Piefed, im not sure about. Very different interface and sorting.

The dev of Lemmy is an asshole, full stop. He's also incredibly pro Russian and pro Chinese, but first and foremost, he's an intolerable asshole.

You'll get banned from his Lemmy instance if you dare to suggest that Russia or China issue propaganda.

And he is a large part of the reason why all the "tankie", i.e. pro-communist Lemmy instances, have cultures of such obnoxious anti-intellectualism.

All work with the activitypub protocol and are interoperable. There are others which are more like microblogging instead of post aggregation, like mastodon.

Lemmy is the most popular but the dev has some strongly held ideological views which... are unusual. I'd prefer not to support their work on that basis.

Piefed is IMO a direct alternative to Lemmy. I switched to piefed several months ago and there's nothing missing. On mobile I just use a browser to access my instance' web page. It's fine.

mbin and kbin aren't viable alternatives for most users.

i just want to point out that "threadiverse" made me flinch like an abused dog, that's associated with facebook and thus tainted by original sin.

The proper term is "fediverse" which just means "anything that uses the ActivityPub protocol", which yes means it includes things like mastodon, but that's because despite their differences you can in fact interact with lemmy stuff from mastodon, so it makes sense!

It’s different software, doing the same thing differently.

Just like all the different forks of Mastodon.

Not sure about kbin and mbin but the difference is lemmy is owned by left wing devs who focus on stability while piefed is owned by conservative liberals who focus on bleeding edge and rapidly implementing half baked features (if you like this than good for you I guess, also with lemmy the personal politics of the devs dont really extend much beyond their instance while piefed is more than happy to enforce politics through code).