Pamasich

Oh, that's what I meant. And Mbin calls it following too. I just said "subscribing" because it's the same action behind the scenes, just different terms to refer to it, and I was using "communities" first in the same sentence.

subscribe to not just communities but also users

There's Interstellar which is made by the admin of my instance. I don't know if the Mbin devs have plans for their own official app.

Not sure what the point of public upvotes is,

Well, you can see who upvoted something. kbin also allowed seeing downvotes, but that got removed because of worries about harassment.

By looking at who upvoted a specific post you liked, you can find like-minded people to follow. I also find it cool to see the different instances and platforms the upvotes come from.

Boosting is a bit complicated. It's supposed to be retweeting basically, and does work that way under the hood. Posts boosted from Mbin do appear that way from Mastodon. However, I don't think Mbin itself currently treats boosts as more than just an even more public upvote (with regular upvotes you can see who upvoted a post, not what posts a user upvoted; boosts are publically listed on profiles).

I'm an Mbin user.

Mbin is a fork of kbin. Kbin's dev didn't really trust people much, so he wanted to have sole control over what code gets added to kbin. Which led to issues when he wasn't available and development just came to a halt for months because no one could accept changes anymore. The other devs wanted more control so they could actually get shit done, so they decided to fork the project instead.

How different is it from Lemmy? I hear they have better integration with Mastodon.

I think the biggest difference is really the fact that you can subscribe to not just communities but also users. This is where the superior Mastodon compatibility comes into play by allowing us to see posts that don't mention communities. Lemmy only sees Mastodon posts if they mention a community explicitly or an Mbin user has interacted with it.

There's also other stuff like public upvotes, boosting, tags, reputation (karma), and custom community CSS. I don't really know Lemmy well enough to give a full list of where they differ.

Only for untrusted instances iirc.

I just tried to check this by looking at one of rimu's (piefed's dev) posts and indeed I can see upvotes by piefed.social users from kbin.earth. They're real usernames too, not just randomly generated ones like I've seen proposed in one discussion on private voting.

what the primary difference is between Mastadon and Bluesky?

Mastodon is in the fediverse (like Lemmy, which you're using), while Bluesky is not.

It's also way older than Bluesky (2016 vs 2023). So recency bias might have played a role.

It seems like bluesky is gaining much more traction than mastadon ever did, based solely on how I literally hear nothing about it ever. If I am wrong on mastadon not being widely adopted, do tell, I am genuinely asking.

You're not wrong at all there. Mastodon currently only has 886k monthly active users, while Bluesky is in the millions despite its much shorter lifetime.

The fediverse is just unpopular in general. Mastodon is the most popular fediverse platform though, Lemmy has only 48k monthly active users.

Yeah, I did check fedia.io with the intention of mentioning their score there too, but imo the difference between 25584 and 25332 is too miniscule for that.

25332

Lemmy doesn't, but other platforms like Mbin might show your total karma among posts federated with that instance.

The instance I'm on tells me your karma is 462.

Same was the case on /kbin, and while Mbin got rid of the downvotes, it still has public upvotes.