Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.
Usability
I heard a lot about both Kbin and Lemmy over on Reddit, and at the time, Kbin seemed to be getting more positive mentions, at least where I was looking.
I tried out Kbin first, and it felt confusing and there were a lot of little annoyances. Then a few days later, I signed up on Lemmy, and I liked the experience a lot better. Then a bunch of 3rd party apps started coming out for Lemmy. There was just no reason for me to log on through Kbin anymore, especially since the small handful of communities that I liked on there could also be accessed from Lemmy.
I avoided Lemmy because tankies developers. But lemmy.world is run by different people, and the interface is honestly so much better than kbin… so I’m staying here now
Same. Signed up with both and Lemmy clicked, kbin didn’t. So here I am
Out of curiosity, I made an account on kbin and it feels more feature rich, albeit a bit sluggish. Might give it another try soon. It feels like it could be a fediverse alternative for Facebook more so rather than reddit.
I’m really put off by the “warning warning this content isn’t from this instance” attitude of Kbin. I’ve also had a heck of a time getting some content to federate. I’m having a much better experience on Lemmy, so I’ll put up with the UI quirks - I use the memmy app most of the time anyway.
FWIW I’ve had as many issues with federation between Lemmy instances as with Lemmy-to-kbin. So I’m my view the accurate warning is the main difference.
shrug I’m just speaking of my experience. I’ve been able to access the communities I’m interested in on multiple lemmy instances, but I’ve had zero luck on Kbin. Frankly, the “connect to remote community” UX for both lemmy and Kbin is complete crap, and is likely the #1 turnoff for new users. I’m very disappointed that neither have chosen to fix it.
@cerevant @Frostwolf Content from remote instances is sometimes going to act a little bit weird in the Fediverse.
Would you rather be warned about it, or notice it yourself? Kbin seems to be the most pedantic fediverse app, with its insistence that users be aware of the implications of the use.
That isn’t a feature, it is a bug. With the exception of during recent slowdowns, it almost never happens on Lemmy. If you want to post a warning, at least give the ability to dismiss it - I don’t need to have an oddly colored banner at the top of every community.
On closer look, I think Kbin feels more like an alternative to facebook or tumblr than to reddit, although it has its own “communities” as well. Though once federation matures, I guess it won’t matter too much.
I see little difference beyond the ability to microblog on Kbin. I think it was unnecessary to rename communities, and causes confusion. I still keep an eye on my kbin.social and fedia.io logins, but I just can’t access content I can find from multiple lemmy instances. I was also swayed away from Kbin by an admin who was running it but ultimately gave up on it and switched to lemmy because Kbin is unstable. (I’ll update this comment with a link if I can find it)
You’re right. The microblog on Kbin is very tempting. But it’s sluggish right now, at least for me. So I’ll probably still make lemmy my home base and keep an eye on kbin. I definitely see its potential as an alternative facebook or tumblr or even twitter if it can’t compete as a reddit alternative.
It’s still in the fediverse but like you, I’ll be keeping my eye on my kbin.social account, as well. :)
Is it sluggish on other kbin instances? I think a lot of the problems with federation right now is the sheer load of users on the instances with the most popular communities and that’s causing timeouts and errors in federation. While many many instances are just one user.
My experience with Kbin is that it seems more limited on Federated posts and that the smaller Kbin instance (I use Readit.buzz) seems to be lacking some of the posts and thumbnails that I see on Kbin.social. It seems like Lemmy works better on the smaller instances (not Lemmy.world) than Kbin does (not kbin.social).
I have not really used the Kbin microblog—I am using Mastodon for that.
I’m curious about what aspect of Kbin is similar to Facebook / Tumblr? I can’t tell the difference between a post and a thread, but both seem to be posted in magazines (communities).
You can also follow people which is more twitter territory but facebook allows that too. It has a private messaging feature too. I guess those along with the microblogging features can make it a viable competitor to facebook if given the chance to mature. All it needs perhaps is a dedicated friends list and magazines can be repurposed to groups. Maybe pages and it would be a full fb experience.
The warning is just a general reminder that kbin is in beta and remote communities won’t always work 100% perfectly
I think the reminder is just what it says. It’s unlikely you will ever have all the historical content from a remote instance’s community. So that message is just telling you that. It’s the same on lemmy when connecting to a remote community.
I get the point, but the presentation is a “It is very important that you do not miss this warning”. The message (and attitude) is less “We have technical details to work out” and more anti-federation.
Take my answer as snark, but: it has a catchy name that sounds like a thing. And it’s not invite only.
Lemmy has been around for a while. I was lemming back in early 2022. Lemmy had time to iron out their technical challenges and have a solid product before the Reddit drama began.
I tried kbin and lemmy, and although initially it was harder to find communities as new instances were popping up and growing, ye overall feel of lemmy was more compatible to how I felt using reddit. Being a Sync user, Jerboa and wefwef (and the other developing apps) were just a bonus. Once I learned how to use lemmy, I felt it was more intuitive than the kbin interface.
The fact that multiple people came together to work on the code, provide instances for users, and commitment to continuous improvement keeps me in the lemmy game. While I know ernest@kbin is doing a great job, I feel the nature of multiple instances in the fediverse gives lemmy an advantage.
But that’s just my experience and opinion. Just happy the fediverse exists despite whichever platform users choose as their primary access to it and thankful for all who have contributed to its growth and development.
Tildes felt like an unpolished pre-alpha to me.
kbin’s doing pretty well isn’t it? I thought it was sort of comparable to lemmy in active users. I don’t know anything about tildes though.
I know for my part, I probably contributed to overloading kbin.social by opening an account there. I guess I read that it’s best in lemmy to choose something other than the really big instances to spread the load a bit and did so, but somehow in my mind I thought kbin = kbin.social?
The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.
That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don’t even think there’s an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.
Agreed. I think one of the main deciding factors starting out here was the availability of mobile apps. Seems Lemmy already has a handful while kbin only has the mobile web for now and an application is only in a closed beta at the moment.
It’s in beta testing atm. I’m really interested to see what the dev has in store, but I have to say the PWA for kbin is pretty flawless as it is. What UI complaints I have, I’m sure will come and I’m happy to be patient.
Lemmy was far more confusing for me, and every time I go over there to check unfederated content or grab a community address, the colors hurt my eyes. I only check out my leftover Jerboa app rarely, whenever kbin’s updating and I’m too lazy to do something else. At any rate, we all get the same content
It’s down to the apps available from my point of view. Using wefwef and enjoying the fresh content through a very Apollo-like interface.
I am also a complete noob when it comes to the fediverse and Lemmy just seemed more accessible.
kbin
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
tildes
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
That is it?
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
FWIW I went KBin before Lenny. Since it’s federated I didn’t see a reason to change. I’m also still new to all of this and haven’t had the time to really dig in and understand the difference.
I’m also on Tildes- the whole invite process probably stymied their growth as people couldn’t sign up while the iron was hot, but it appears that was intended over there.
Also trying Squabbles. I like the default layout the best but like the content on the others better.
Has Lemmy passed kbin? Last I heard they were growing pretty evenly if you compare the biggest individual instances at least. Maybe creating your own instances is simpler with Lemmy?
Not sure as to the actual statistics. But for me, lemmy feels more active than kbin. Though that in itself is subjective. I do like the interface of kbin for sure. But lemmy feels more active so I’m conflicted. Will explore more communities to see if this view holds true though.
On kbin I get the kbin interface with lemmy content. Win Win.
I just browse the front page so it’s all a blur to me. But I have noticed Lemmy’s shitposting sub being quite active (because it annoys me).
I finally just blocked that community, since it was so spammy. That and 196. Nothing against either community. I just didn’t want other stuff becoming buried under them. Now I’m seeing a lot more variety in overall posts.
I keep thinking about doing that. They have some sick memes, so I always decide against it, but I am curious about everything else I’m missing.
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
I joined because it was mentioned on /r/piracy. Seems everyone I hear says something similar.
I’d say it has better growth because it got better advertising. I have no idea if it’s the ‘best’ instance.
Most things like this don’t happen because the thing growing is the best, it becomes the best because people come to it and it gets resourced.
Lemmy was mainly ready for it.
Kbin’s cloudflare on top of the stability issues made it unusable for the first few weeks. Tildes wasn’t an option.
