This is not an attempt to convert Lemmy users, nor is it a slight on Lemmy. I’m sure there are plenty of reasons why Lemmy works better for some, and I love the fact that we not only have multiple choices, but multiple choices that allow us to interact with each other regardless! It’s amazing. Lemmy is great, no shade.
With that said…
Why YSK: I see a lot of users posting frequent questions about Lemmy that are currently answered by kbin.
For example:
- The ability to block a whole domain, or subscribe to one
- The ability to subscribe to individual users
- A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
- Mitigation for the “tracking pixel” issue
I find that almost every day, I see Lemmy users asking about features and I think, “well, kbin does that.” I think it would be worthwhile for more users to check into both platforms and decide which might be best for them.
What do you mean by the built in search tool to find communities all over Fedi? From what I can tell the search bar only searches communities that are already federated with kbin, so you’d still need to use something like lemmyverse.net/communities for small communities anyways.
And also if you want to have access to a community that hasn’t been federated already, I think you need to use a different search bar. On Lemmy you can use the same for both.
For me Lemmy is better. The web UI is simpler and easier to understand for me, and I have no use for the microblogging features. And more importantly there are Lemmy apps but no kbin ones. I’m glad there are options for everyone, and hopefully they both get the features that they’re missing but the other has!
Yeah the current challenge with searching is if no one has subscribed to a magazine or user on another instance, you have to search the exact name@domain to get it to show up. Ideally Kbin instances would implement a user bot that subscribes to all the users and communities it can scrape from all federated instances until this search limitation is fixed.
Petition to name subscriber bot “Tom”
I’ve been enjoying mlmym.org it mimics oldreddit. Still needs some flushing out, I would love to see it developed further.
Begin, the Fediverse Wars has.
You were supposed to bring balance to the Fediverse! Not leave it in darkness.
Spot on
What I’ve been curious about is the relative performance of kbin (PHP) vs. lemmy (Rust) server code. Rust is supposed to be many times more efficient performance-wise than PHP as far as I know, but has anyone compared this in practice? The presumed ease and speed of adding features to kbin because of PHP may come at a high performance cost (read: carbon emissions too). Does anyone have any further insight into this?
PHP is fine as long as you don’t try to do too much with it. For simple GET/POST requests I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s not much difference performance wise. If you start trying to do any complex processing or data aggregation in PHP (which should probably be done on the database side with queries anyway) then the performance will really fall off a cliff. Especially because PHP is (for web) single threaded. Threading is possible but it’ll cause far more headaches than it’s worth. Best to keep it simple and use a more appropriate tool if more complex processing is needed.
Thanks for the insights!
Probably something you’d notice more in the number of concurrent users each solution could handle per web server instance. Rust theoretically would let you serve more users with less resources.
Disclosure: I dislike PHP.
Right, essentially this is what I was thinking - more vs. less users per CPU core.
me on kbin not knowing lemmy didn’t have these things… damn lol
Same, every time I see those posts thinking, “Kbin does that.”
Ernest is kinda the best, gotta say. Everyone should buy him a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
Kbin was where I first signed up but they didn’t have an app (yet). I’m only on Lemmy because I can use it on my phone. I kinda like Kbin better.
I just use the kbin mobile web app and it’s fine for me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Unfortunately I have an old phone that doesn’t support web apps. Kinda sucks but I’m too cheap to buy a newer one. Haha!
It’s certainly nice to have an app, but I’ve been happy with staying on kbin by having it permanently sit in a Firefox tab on my phone. Functions just fine for my purposes like that.
If you want something that resembles an app, you can even make a shortcut in firefox and put it on your home screen so you can have a dedicated kbin button rather than setting aside a firefox tab. Works great.
Its a responsive designed website, why do you need an Application?
I tried Kbin, I just don’t like their UI as much, plus no good Android clients that I know of, and I find things like upvotes vs. boosts really strange and confusing, its just completely unnecessary imo.
I saw that, but isn’t it closed source? That’s a deal breaker for me.
https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp/t/121025
Not open source right now, but is intended to be open source in the future, likely after development is sufficiently advanced. I’m in that closed beta, and have seen how hariette works and responds to people, I’ve seen enough to have enough trust in her, especially when the only real thing that could be gotten from me is a complex one-use password.
Oh, then yeah, seems promising, when it comes out, I’ll definitely try it.
I hear that. There are some good-looking Android apps in the works, but nothing yet. Also, ftr, the upvotes vs posts thing is now synced up with Lemmy.
A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
I didn’t realise this was something only Kbin did. It is extremely handy.
I like Kbin a lot - there’s no OS app but the PWA does me alright. It was the UI that win me over but I couldn’t do without having a good search tool now I’ve got used to it I have to say
Yeah, the search is the main thing that drew me to kbin, but I do also strongly prefer the UI (even if it has a couple of quirks).
It’s good that there’s multiple ways for people to enjoy the fediverse. I’d also point out that there’s a heap of people actively looking into improving kbin (you can follow the PRs coming here)
I’m super keen to get in some of the usability ones, tweaks for mobile and other features to make the mobile experience more exciting.
Eventually I’d like to tackle the core search functionally so we can search for users, magazines, posts and other content with more filters and options. Right now it’s good enough, but having more granular control would be handy for finding just that right community or post
I think these are all features that are being worked on, along with better administration and moderation tools. The Lemmy devs are very busy 😀
I have accounts on both, and I like the look of kbin better, so I’ve tried to use it more. However, the functionality you mention has been undiscoverable to me: I have no idea how to get a list of non-local magazines, and I’ve looked around for that quite a bit. On lemmy, it’s as easy as clicking “All” when searching communities.
Is there any document that would help me find those features on kbin? Or, for that matter, a similar sort of documentation for lemmy?
In the magazine tab on Kbin, it functions similarly to Lemmy. You can search for a community/magazine there, local or federated. If something doesn’t show up because it’s not federated yet, you can use the @ tag with the @ domain name. You can also use it as a list of all communities currently federating with your kbin instance by not typing anything into the search bar, selecting “local and federated” in the dropdown, and clicking search.
As soon as Artemis opens their beta testing for the iOS app (or someone else develops one) I’m in. But I hate using web apps.
I’ve got no problem with web apps and I’m happy with how Kbin works as one… BUT I am looking forward to Artemis just to see what they do with it 🙂
Maybe it’s a grass is always greener thing but I’ve been having issues with kbin that apparently other instances don’t have. Furigana is supported on some Lemmy instances, I’ve had issues embedding links from Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/etc, I frequently interact with threads (preview content or upvote) and get redirected to an error page, goes on.
I did sign up with kbin for a reason though and I’m overall mostly satisfied. Having a good FAQ with how all the features of kbin work, what’s on the roadmap, etc would be my biggest change.
It’s obviously not a competition, but this kind of reminds me of back in the day when you had to choose between Betamax or VHS. One seemed superior (kBin)–but “everyone” was adopting VHS (Lemmy).
It “seemed” superior but it was super lagging in total recording time
Ehhh. kbin’s quite feature-incomplete in its own right, it’s just a different set of features that are incomplete. I don’t think there’s anything about kbin that’s actually superior to lemmy, just… different. Meanwhile, Betamax had inarguably better video, and inarguably worse capacity.
Which features are missing from Kbin that are on Lemmy?
I lurked on both for about a week before going with Kbin so don’t really have experience of using Lemmy apps etc
A mobile app (or even api), RSS feeds (AFAICT).
Not being able to collapse comments is why I ended up on Lemmy instead of of Kbin
Not having a quick step to go to your subscribed magazines.
I know you can via settings but honestly on a mobile it’s a mission.
No apps yet support kbin, no way to change post layouts.
All of that said, what works for you works and the beauty of the fediverse is the choice to be able to choose the source and still see everything.
what works for you works and the beauty of the fediverse is the choice to be able to choose the source and still see everything.
This is the main point for me really, everything else is just quibbling. Although collapsible comments on Kbin definitely need to happen!
Off the top of my head:
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API’s a big one. Mobile app development for kbin is deeply hampered because of that.
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The ability to quickly filter your timeline by Local/Global, which is a big deal for regional or themed instances.
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A (more) easily accessible subscribed community/magazine list (slower/smaller communities are kind of totally smothered in kbin).
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PeerTube federation.
Meanwhile, the domain block touted by the OP is buried and kind of a pain to get to, and the search claim is… overstated (kbin search still only reaches other sites that the given kbin instance is subscribed to).
kbin has a nicer UI, IMO, and it’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. Lemmy is also perfectly fine. Neither is excellent, and that’s ok. Neither has reached version 1.0, either, and both are being developed by small teams (for some flexible definition of “team”).
I personally think Lemmy will have better UI as time goes on. It’s already coming slowly altogether as time goes on.
Yeah, 0.18 came with subtle but really impact changes.
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The advantage VHS had was tape length. Betamax standard tapes were 60 minutes. VHS was twice that. Whole movies could fit on VHS. Also, VHS VCRs were far cheaper that Betamax players.
Kinda. If you could watch VHS on a Betamax player and vice versa. The betamax player may have more features or do things a little differently but you can see the same stop on both players.
Good point.
If by “everyone” you mean “porn,” then yeah, I guess. VHS won for the same reason that DVD won and now streaming won:
Porn access is cheaper because of it.
Incorrect. It’s a common misconception that porn was the leading factor that doomed Beta to lose the format wars. In reality, Sony’s strict licensing of the beta technology, short recording times and higher cost doomed the system. A large part of the betamax development history is trying to lower its superior quality just to have the runtimes a standard vhs tape would have.
Isn’t one of the primary benefits of the Fediverse and ActivityPub that you have the freedom to select the better alternative and still benefit from the activity on the “lesser” instances?
Kbin has been great. It’s always odd seeing all the complaints and not knowing why people wouldn’t just migrate over here. Waters warm.
Honestly, I think most people don’t know about kbin/know about it’s feature set. I made this post hoping it would help raise some awareness.
For my understanding, is it different content as well or just a different instance where I would still scroll through the same posts such as this one.
Kbin how does Lemmy taste
