Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all entirely different and unique attempts at creating a self-hostable software package for a reddit-like website. In the same way that Reddit was trying to be like Digg, but with it’s own codebase starting from scratch.
Despite using different codebases, Lemmy, Piefed and Mbin are all compatible with each other, like if you could leave comments on reddit threads from your Digg account while on Digg.
The reason they can talk to each other is they were all built with one thing in common: at the core of them is something called the ActivityPub Protocol, which in simple terms means the way they send messages, make posts, etc, are all using one standard, so they can all understand each other, like speaking the same language. An upvote from lemmy is understood as an upvote by Piefed, same for comments, posts, etc.
A similar thing on the web that functions just like that is E-mail. No matter what email provider you use, you can send an email to any other email provider, and it all just works because at the core, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL mail, Proton Mail, etc, they all use the standardized E-mail Protocol.
Just like with email, where you can’t log into a Gmail account from the Yahoo Mail log-in page, you also can’t log into a lemmy account from a Piefed login page.
But if you’re familiar with how you can use an E-Mail client, like Thunderbird or Outlook Express to log into almost any email account regardless of where it’s hosted, so to with lemmy/piefed mobile apps, which only act as a front-end like Thunderbird.
Each lemmy/piefed instance is like it’s own email provider (instance just means server, a server is a computer that hosts the software and makes it available on the internet for us to find). So lemmy.world is like Gmail, but piefed.social is an entirely different provider, equivalent to Yahoo mail. You could access either from a mobile app, which acts as a client, but if you went to them with a web browser, you’d have to go to lemmy.world directly if that’s where your account was, similar to how you would have to for email.
All of these servers are ‘federated’ with each other, which basically means once they establish a connection, they will continually offer new data to each other automatically. So Lemmy.world will always send out to piefed.social any new posts, comments, or upvotes that occur on lemmy.world, as well as pass forward any posts, comments, or upvotes that any lemmy.world user makes on a community hosted on piefed.social.
Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin are open-source, which means they are developed collaboratively online for anyone to see or participate in (if you’re familiar with how Linux is developed, it is very similar to that).
As for who develops these softwares, you can see who has contributed to them on their respective development platforms.
- Lemmy is mainly developed by Dessalines and Nutomic on Github.
- Piefed is mainly developed by Rimu (and others) on Codeberg
- Mbin is developed on Github
But as for the instances themselves, they are owned by the individuals who run the physical servers that each instance runs on.
Glad you found it helpful! Though for people new to this, depending on their tech savvyness, less info might be more.
An average user doesn’t really need to know exactly how Lemmy/piefed work to actually use it effectively, and depending on how interested they are in learning how things work, the longer explanation I gave may be off-putting to some people, or make it seem too complex.
As an example; I’m not sure most people actually know how email works at all on a technical level, they just know that if they log into their Gmail and put the right address for the person they’re trying to reach, everything works. They may not even understand that the @whatever.com part means their email is being sent to a totally different server (if it’s not also Gmail) being hosted by different corporations somewhere else in the world, or how exactly an email is shuffled across all the different ISP’s, cabling, repeaters, etc. Explaining the details of all those things would make email seem horribly complex and off-putting to many. Without any of the that knowledge, as long as they know just the steps to accomplish what they want, all is well.
With Lemmy or Piefed, an equivalent could be just sending them a link to a known reliable general instance (Piefed.social would be a good choice) and telling them to create an account there and to use it just like they would reddit. For the most part, that’s all anyone really needs to know to have a pretty good experience. They may wonder why different users have different domain names at the end of their name, and if they ask you could explain further, but they’ll still be able to navigate around, comment, find communities and all the rest without knowing, which should lessen the feeling that it’s complicated.