What is Mbin used for?

Mbin is a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform for the fediverse, forked from kbin and run by a community of maintainers. It is a good fit for hosting a Reddit-style community on the fediverse, running a federated instance for a niche interest and moving from kbin to a community-driven fork.

Yes. Mbin is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at MbinOrg/mbin and is written mainly in PHP.

Yes. Mbin is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Mbin?

Yes. Mbin can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Mbin an alternative to?

Mbin is an open-source alternative to Reddit. Other open-source alternatives to Reddit include Lemmy, Discourse and NodeBB.

Is Mbin actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Mbin was on 1 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.10.1, published on 4 August 2026. The project has 430 stars on GitHub.

Mbin: open-source alternative to Reddit

About Mbin

Mbin is a decentralized content aggregator, voting, discussion and microblogging platform that runs on the fediverse. It speaks ActivityPub, so it can exchange content with services such as Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Pleroma and PeerTube. It is a community-focused fork and continuation of kbin.

Compared with its origin, the project lists interface improvements, general enhancements, bug fixes, support for all ActivityPub actor types including service accounts for bots, up-to-date PHP packages with security fixes, and support for the application/json Accept header on ActivityPub endpoints. Hosted documentation is published at docs.joinmbin.org.

Mbin is written in PHP using the Symfony framework and is licensed under AGPL-3.0. For people running a server, there are guides for bare-metal or VM installs as well as Docker, and the repository enables security advisories, Dependabot and code scanning. Governance is shared: maintainers merge pull requests after consensus on Matrix, following the Collective Code Construction Contract, with translations managed through Weblate. Public instance lists are available for users who just want to join.

Key features

Federation over ActivityPub with Mastodon and Lemmy
Link aggregation with voting and discussion
Microblogging alongside threaded communities
Support for service accounts and bots
Bare-metal, VM and Docker installation guides
Translations managed through Weblate

Good fit for

→Hosting a Reddit-style community on the fediverse
→Running a federated instance for a niche interest
→Moving from kbin to a community-driven fork

Built with: PHP
Tags: fediverse; activitypub; link-aggregator; microblogging; federated; symfony; php; kbin; self-hosted

Mbin: questions and answers

What is Mbin used for?: Mbin is a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform for the fediverse, forked from kbin and run by a community of maintainers. It is a good fit for hosting a Reddit-style community on the fediverse, running a federated instance for a niche interest and moving from kbin to a community-driven fork.
Is Mbin open source?: Yes. Mbin is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at MbinOrg/mbin and is written mainly in PHP.
Is Mbin free?: Yes. Mbin is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Mbin?: Yes. Mbin can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Mbin an alternative to?: Mbin is an open-source alternative to Reddit. Other open-source alternatives to Reddit include Lemmy, Discourse and NodeBB.
Is Mbin actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Mbin was on 1 October 2026, and the latest release is v1.10.1, published on 4 August 2026. The project has 430 stars on GitHub.