Why isn't Mbin more popular?

I would've continue using Kbin (kbin.social) but I took a break from fediverse then after I'm back that instance is gone.

At the same timing, PieFed starts to becoming more famous so I started using it.

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.).

This. To put it simply, people respond better to what's familiar and to what has a clear goal. F.e. if you're about to open a restaurant, don't sell power tools in it. If you want to sell powertools, create a separate store

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.

Yep, reliability and popularity. There's still plenty of space for it. But I think piefed has kind of come in and sucked up all the extra oxygen in the room for the moment.

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".

Mastodon (and others a la twitter) is actor-centric, where focus is on people.
Lemmy (and others a la reddit) is topic-centric, where focus is on common interests.
These two are very different approaches that I can hardly see mixing well. I thought of "microblogs" of mbin as a "nice to have" but unnecessary functionality. Did it actually lift off?
- Mastodon also has hashtags and guppe groups, which kind of blur the line
- kbin.social did lift off. Maybe even too much for this software at the time?
- Started to argue with myself: if the concepts of following people and topics did not mix well, how could fb reach a couple bilion users? I myself silently hope for Bonfire to succeed, even after seeing Friendica, Hubzilla and almost forgotten Diaspora. Maybe it just wasnt done rght in FOSS so far?
This isn't really accurate. Mbin does what Lemmy and Piefed do (Reddit replacement) plus what Mastodon does (twitter replacement). They're just in different tabs of the interface. You have the option of microblogging if you want, but threads are still pretty much exactly the same compared to Lemmy or Piefed.

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.

Lack of a cute animal mascot and catchy name

Answering the real questions!

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.

The mobile app for mbin is a browser
- Well theres your problem lmao
- Accessing mbin as a firefox PWA is a nice way to use it outside of your main browser on mobile.
- That's not correct, it does have an app (Interstellar).
  Not official, but neither are all the Lemmy apps.

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.

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 am definitely a fan of the non-flashy UI, it's clean
- I'm a Piefed enthusiast, but I miss Lemmy UI

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.

You do realise they only run one server? All the others will be free of their direct influence.
what’s the deal w lemmy devs? i’m fairly new to the fediverse.
- Head dev of Lemmy (he actually spends most of his time supporting russian and Chinese propaganda) claims that North Korea is a great place to live.
  He also supports the killing of Ukrainians and the extermination of Ukrainian culture and identity and is a huge fan of russian genocidal imperialism.
  It's all documented here:
  https://sh.itjust.works/c/meanwhileongrad
- one of the devs is a tankie.
- They're tankies.
- they committed the worst crime: having moderation practices on their server that upset liberals, that's the primary motivation for the python spinoff

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

First-mover advantage is powerful.

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

"Mbin" literally stands for "magazine bin" though. The use of "magazine" is a gun pun carried over from kbin. Kbin was named after the karabiner rifle, which, somewhat ironically, doesn't use magazines, but it's still a gun thing.
The true format-agnostic platform would be named something like "gbin" because ActivityPub calls communities/magazines "groups". That could be a throwback to Usenet, but it's a fairly generic term.
... although that being an anagram of "bing" might raise a few eyebrows at Microsoft legal.

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

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.

Why would I want two different things in one?

This is an interesting question, because, I thought of the same thing sometimes--that threadiverse (Lemmy, PieFed) and microblogs are two completely different things. Integrating two can lead to a weird experience sometimes
One is not big enough to hold two. That's why two was created.
https://youtube.com/shorts/PqYThbnx86w
You don't have to use it for both if you don't want to. ¯(ツ)/¯

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

it has a combined "timeline" view in the mobile app now, and though it isn't much better the website (for my instance, anyway) only requires one click.

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

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

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.

Does Voyager work with it?

That's gonna be a no. As far as I know Interstellar is the only app that works with it.