They're different but compatible pieces of software.
A major difference is that Lemmy doesn't allow following individual (microblogging) accounts, only communities. The other three allow following both AFAIK.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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Aight thanks! This is definitely how I think of them. I don't code at all or run a community, so most of the differences I am aware of weren't relevant to me.
I don't believe any have the ability to follow individual microblogging accounts unless I've overlooked it. I have a PieFed and a mbin account. Following individual accounts for microblogging sounds like mastadon.
Maybe I don't understand what microblogging is though, that's like Twitter/Threads right? If so then Mastadon
You can follow microblogs on mbin, also following flipboard too.
Edit:
The screenshot.
Oh cool, I found it! Guess I've been spending more time on Lemmy and PieFed but not enough on mbin
I managed to do this once on mbin - but I have no clue how. This is a commonly requested feature.
I found it, but I had to know an exact name. Like I couldn't search aljazeera and select from a list I had to search Aljazeera@flipboard.com completely. But that means when you see a source you should be able to click their name and then there is a follow feature
Is it worth the effort to switch over from Lemmy?
Unless there's a particular feature you're after, like following microblogs, or better mod controls.... Meh, it's all about the same for the end user.
I shifted to PieFed because I like the direction they're heading, the flexibility/volume of potential contributors Python provides, and to just generally show support for more options in the fediverse.
PieFed features come more quickly but the apps/front ends are slower to adopt them so it's not all sunshine and rainbows but the basic functions generally work the same no matter where you are.
On Mbin the vote buttons for replies are on the right, which is the primary reason I picked it.
The rest is just momentum.
I'm on Summit for Lemmy and my vote buttons are on the right.
Just a BTW, I have no argument to make.
Depends - what don't you like about your current instance? The ui will be different on each but that isn't good or bad so much as what you like. (No project has a real ui designer)
Nothing wrong with my instance, just wondering if I'm missing out on anything by not going with the latest and greatest.
lemmy is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to reddit, coded by a tankie
kbin is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to ~~reddit~~ digg, coded by a gun nut and abandoned. mbin is a continuation
piefed is a piece of opinionated foss software that attempts to be an alternative to reddit, coded by a control freak with (formerly) hard-coded questionable moderation
there's a couple of others like misskey/sharkey. all of them are broken and wonderful. piefed seems to be more feature-rich. by way of miracle, somehow these are interoperable with each other and in more broken way, with mastodon. i heard there lie horrors within lemmy codebase, and updating it is major pain. these all attempt to do slightly different things and so features provided by each are different (kbi/mbin has separate upvote and boost, and who up/downvoted/boosted is always visible to public, all of that is always technically public, but hidden in lemmy)
Piefed is also written in python. No clue why you would do that when you know that you’re going to be dealing with a massive amount of network traffic, more so than most server infra. Lemmy already struggles with certain amount of traffic and that’s written in rust.
Takes a special kind of person to write federated software and they all seemingly make really really strange decisions when doing so.
The idea behind Python is to get the community to contribute. More people know Python than Assembly or Fortran. At some point, running a FOSS project like Piefed becomes a numbers game. Having more developers is useful in the beginning.
If Piefed grows significantly, it might make sense to rewrite the whole thing in a different language, but right now, contributions matter more than efficiency.
Or you follow the python ethos and when it matters, you profile the code, and rewrite only the modules that need it in a lower level language.
That would make more sense. Best of the both worlds.
So you set up a nice strawman with assembly and fortran there (which would never be used for a web server) instead of suggesting a realistic option like C# or the JVM, both of which have much larger communities of people that actually know what they’re doing.
You’d get just as many contributions in Java or Kotlin and the quality would be higher as well.
The decisions at the start of the project have the most influence on the project, more so than anything ever will later down the line.
Fair enough. Should have gone with C#. Would make a lot more sense. For some reason, my mind was wandering in all the wrong directions when writing that.
they all seemingly make really really strange decisions when doing so.
Spoiler alert, it happens too in proprietary software, physical engineering, and as soon as there is a corporate structure and a quality department it's even worse because you need to explain why you want to spend more money, and document the impact which means do a shit load of paperwork for every change
in general I feel the same way about python, but the federation traffic is done with redis queues as a background task and my servers can easily run around 2.5-3k messages per second before spinning up another pod. The rest of the load is, of course, when using the UI, but with most of the load being federation, it's not that big of a deal when you have a separate container/pod with reasonable resource limits.
Has the hard-coded censorship been removed from PieFed? I thought that was a really weird and concerning choice to include.
Say what you want about Lemmy devs (and I could say a lot) but they don't seem to have made any major efforts to enforce their views within the platform itself. Just on their servers.
last time i've checked yes it's gone as default, but it's still an option. lemmy devs openly stated that anyone can do whatever they want on their own instances and they can't influence it (except that for the longest time they've controlled the largest instance, not anymore of course)
They all do basically the same thing and can be connected through ActivityPub. However, they all have a totally different code base as they are separate projects, other than that Mbin is a fork of Kbin. As far as how it is being an admin or mod on any, I can’t speak from experience.
Communities are largely similar, but the underlying hardware and tweaks are slightly different.
Mbin supports microblogging and following users. I'm following quite a few Mastodon users. Also, upvotes are publically visible.
Piefed has multi-communities, though I forgot their name.
Try getting managed-hosting for them, & you'll see that only some can be hired.
Managed-hosting means that the hirer isn't having to do all the sysadmin stuff for their instance, like security-updates, they're able to concentrate on the community, instead.
Horribly-pricey, for the amount of service one can get, from what I've seen, but .. drastically cheaper than having one's community obliterated by a missed security-update, & then becoming irrelevant.
I wish there was massively more competition in the managed-hosting space, for fediverse servers.
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