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.