Are Lemmy and Mbin the same instance?

The Fediverse is called that because it is “federated”, meaning different instances (and different platforms too!) can communicate with each other. A Mastodon user can see Lemmy posts and interact with them, for instance, and in your case, you can see Lemmy posts as an Mbin user. Everything is interconnected rather than being confined in their own little box!

“Instances” are what we refer to the hosted servers. For example, sopuli.xyz, lemmy.ca, feddit.org, and programming.dev are all Lemmy instances, hosted by different people and groups around the world. These can all talk to one another, so even a tiny instance where the only user is you and a few friends can see the posts of everybody else, and vice versa! Just something to keep in mind, as Lemmy, Mbin, etc. are not one instance, they are collections of many!

You seem to be confused what the word “instance” means in a fediverse context. The answer to your question, as asked, is “no, the question doesn’t even make sense”.

Lemmy and Mbin are two different backends that talk in the same language (“protocol”), ActivityPub, to each other. The entire idea of that common language is that you should be able to use either of them and also communicate with people using the other.

They’re different ways of communicating within the ActivityPub protocol

lemmy, mbin, and piefed share the same sorta space. mbin actually gets mastodon stuff but its seperate so you can’t combine the feeds. on mean on the site anyway maybe an app can mix em.

Mu.

Lemmy and mbin are different software. You are on lemmy.ca, which is a Lemmy instance. There are other websites that run Lemmy, notably lemmy.world, beehaw.org, and sopuli.xyz. They are different, independent websites, but they all run Lemmy, and thus are all Lemmy instances.

All these sites communicate with each other because Lemmy is based on ActivityPub, a protocol for letting social media accounts on different websites talk to each other. (A common analogy is that email lets people on different websites communicate because it’s all based on SMTP).

My account is on thebrainbin.org, a website that runs mbin. mbin is less popular than Lemmy, but there are still a few other websites that run it, including kbin.earth and fedia.io. Each of these sites is an mbin instance, and because mbin, like Lemmy, is built on ActivityPub, all those websites are able to talk to each other.

Now you might be thinking that, because Lemmy and mbin are both built on AcitivityPub, then logically accounts on Lemmy instances should be able to interact with accounts on mbin instances and vice versa. And if you think that, you are correct. The reason you see posts from Lemmy when using an mbin account and vice versa is that the various instances all use AcitivityPub to talk to each other, even though they’re on different websites.

But it doesn’t stop there! Mastodon is also built on ActivityPub, but aims to be like the website formerly known as Twitter, whereas Lemmy and mbin both try to be similar to Reddit. But because it’s all ActivityPub, accounts on Mastodon instances and interact with accounts on Lemmy and mbin instances and vice versa.

The same applies to other ActivityPub software, such as Sharkey (imitates Tumblr), Akkoma (also Tumblr), PeerTube (YouTube), and WriteFreely (blog).

Lemmy and Mbin are roughly the same thing - “Reddit”

Mastodon is “Twitter”

… and there are more, with Loops being “TikTok” and Pixelfed being “Instagram”.

They can all see the same content, but presented in ways that emphasize their unique aspects. That’s what people call “Fediverse” but it’s much simpler to just think of them as separate apps and ignore that technically true but confusing aspect.

Short answer:

All Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, and mastodon instances send posts to each other using a common language.

So you can potentially see everything in the fediverse from your instance.

Lemmy and Mbin are software. Together with Piefed and Kbin they make up what’s loosely called the threadiverse which is the slang name for different types of software that are similar in nature to Reddit.

Each of those can be installed on numerous servers and become instances. So your instance is Lemmy.ca and runs Lemmy. Mine is piefed.blahaj.zone and runs Piefed. Even though the software is slightly different they can talk to each other. So all Lemmy instances can talk with all Piefed (or Mbin or Kbin) instances.

Interstellar is a threadiverse mobile app. I could also use it to access my account even though my instance runs Piefed and yours Lemmy.

Mastodon is slightly different. It is also software but its nature is closer to microblogging like Twitter or Bluesky. There are also different types of software for this too and each instance of all of those can talk to each other.

It is also possible for threadiverse software instances to talk with microblogging software instances but its still a bit unwieldy and awkward due to differences in how they each present content.

Welcome!

We have some guides / infographics for new users, which you might find helpful. These two pages in particular:

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/get-started

https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/threadiverse/detailed-overview

An instance is the site where you make an account. If we extend the analogy to email, then gmail.com is one instance while hotmail.com is another instance. If you make an account on Gmail, you can’t use that login on Hotmail but you can still see content from people on Hotmail.

Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are all software. It’s hard to extend this analogy out, but imagine if Google released the code for Gmail freely so that anyone could easily set up an email website that had the same appearance and functionality as Gmail. That is what is happening here.

So in the same way, lemmy.ca, lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works and many other Fediverse instances are running the “Lemmy” software and that’s why they look and feel very similar. Where they differ comes down to the people running a particular instance, since they will have different rules for what you can do. You can find that information in the sidebar.

Now all of the Fediverse platforms use a common and agreed upon language to talk to each other. Because Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin software all use this language and follow a similar format, you can easily share content between all of them. That is what the second guide page talks about. They all have communities, posts, and comments, and work in a similar way.

Usually people make one account on a forum/threaded instance (Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin), and one account on a microblogging instance (Mastodon). This is because the format of microblogging (ex. Twitter) is pretty different from that of forums (ex. Reddit), although it is technically possible to cross post in between them.

There’s isn’t really such a place as “Lemmy.” Lemmy is like Email - you don’t have an email account, you have a gmail, outlook or protonmail account (in your case lemmy.ca account)