I see a very small minority of people using Kbin, but I don’t understand why.
Is this just a coincidence and did some people choose Kbin over Lemmy or is there a good reason to use Kbin?
Apart from what has already been said (politics, basic UI) there are a couple more things worth mentioning:
- Kbin’s interface is muuuch more customizable than lemmy’s: browsing form a web browser (desktop or mobile) let’s you modify your viewing experience as much as any mobile app for lemmy (but lemmly itself doesn’t). From infinite scrolling vs pages to font sizes and such.
- kbin allows for (mastodon-like) boosting of posts, which is like a super-upvote that lemmy just doesn’t have.
- on kbin you can subscribe to mastodon users aka federate with mastodon. Something that lemmy also can’t.
Other than that only personal taste matters in the end, and both federate with eachother, so enjoy it from wherever you are.
I was confused what boosting is. Docs said it’s basically a repost/share.
So I think super like is misleading. Even if your super liking is the reason you share it, they’re two different things.
(I may not necessarily want to share/share-promote hat I super-like. What I share is curation too.)
So I think super like is misleading
It’s literally not. Over here, on top of the “repost to your profile under your boosts section” functionality it’s intended to have, it also counts as 2x rep for the poster. It really, truly is also a “super-like.”
Key word also
The presence or absence of that single word doesn’t change the fact that nothing OP said was wrong eh ;P
Nobody claimed what they said was wrong. The thesis is that it may be misleading (through omission of the second half of what it does).
See, the problem here is that you’re treating an off-the-cuff casual explanation as a “thesis.” Please don’t bring this absurd habit over here, where people have to feel compelled to cover absolutely every interpretation and hedge every outlier for fear of getting nitpicked to hell and back. Literally no one enjoyed that environment.
I think it’s reasonable to argue, “a super like that also shares the post is functionally different from just a super like.” It doesn’t seem nit-picky when discussing the reasons why someone might choose one service over another to want to be precise about the mechanics of one of those services, no?
I pointed out it does more. You replied claiming “It’s literally not.” which is simply factually wrong.
Are you saying nobody should point that out? On this discussion platform?
You could have just left it there. If you have that much of a problem with the word thesis maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t take things so literally. If you have a problem with how this went, maybe you should not make false statements or let it go earlier.
I don’t think there’s a need to cover everything at all.
Also the ability for users to block instances and domain like mastodon has, which is pretty cool.
This is a big one. There were some contributions from either instances or bots on my feed I didn’t like that I just blocked, and my feed is fine now. No need to ask for defederation of the whole community when you can do it yourself.
You can block users/bots on Lemmy too
But not instances or servers, that’s a much needed feature to de-porn my feed.
Yep, although it’s almost been a year since the request so I don’t know how high it’s priority wise.
Since the question was why people use Kbin that is a big one for now, at least for me although I have an account there I just prefer lemmy since Kbin seems to be too much on its infancy and also the fact that because it doesn’t have an open API as of now, there are (almost) no apps developed.
Given the massive uptake in the last month I’m hoping a lot of old issues are now being looked at!
There’s also several contributors who are actively working on improving the settings and adding in new features. I’ve been proposing a few changes for the mobile UI, letting you change up the mobile layout but all of that things take time (and add complexity) so it’s slow moving
It’s like lemmy + mastodon - you can microbilor and boost posts and comments. But after using it for a while, I switched back to lemmy because:
it has no APIAFAICT the API is read-only, so there aren’t any apps (the dev is making one but I don’t think it’s finished and can’t compile it)- it has some performance issues
- it doesn’t work sometimes
- the UI looks worse
- there are way less instances of it
- it’s written in php instead of rust
- Personal taste, but I think the user interface is far superior to Lemmy. Even with scripts to help Lemmy, kbin still looks better.
- Politics. Some might have issues with the political positions of the Lemmy devs, no matter if they influence the software or not
- It doesn’t matter that much. They are both federating with each other, you can subscribe to magazines from Lemmy, and to communities from kbin.
I prefer Lemmy’s UI. Good to have choices though.
Has anybody made a kbin script/userstyle that has the same information density as old.reddit? One of the things that drives me nuts about most of the fediverse is that every damn site seems to love this wide spread out low information density mobile web awfulness.
Is there good android apps fir kbin?
The REST API is still in development. Once that gets released I’m sure app devs will spring up and build something fancy. I think Artemis is already working on an integration but that’s with html scraping.
There’s been a heap of work on the mobile UI/UX and I’m constantly pushing to get more mobile centric features into prod.
Official API is almost getting there. I’m alredy updating the app to start using it with my test instance that has it deployed. Just to get ahead of it.
Can you explain more about the politics bit? What specifically is different regarding how political discussions are handled over there?
What specifically is different regarding how political discussions are handled over there?
Absolutely nothing. But the devs (or at least one, not sure), have strong political views that a lot of people take offense with. Search Lemmy & tankie if you want to know more.
You can subscribe to people on Mastodon from Kbin, though, right? You can’t do that from Lemmy.
Yes you can follow users on kbin, which you can’t do on lemmy, and this applies to both users on mastodon/mblogs and lemmy/kbin.
However, from what I can gather, kbin is still community/magazine focused. For instance, I don’t think you can get a feed of just the posts of those that you follow, as you would on mastodon. You can select the
subscribedchannel and then lookmicroblogs, which can get you close, but is really a view of all the posts from the people you follow and that have the hashtags for all of the magazines you follow (I think). THe important bit here being that kbin puts posts form mastodon/mblogs into magazines based on hashtags, where each magazine can defined what hashtags it will “scoop up”. And so “subscribed microblogs” includes all of those posts tagged with hashtags scooped up by the communities/magazines you follow.I have no idea what kbin’s road map is for this, but for me personally, who has a mastodon account on an instance I’m rather happy with, as well as this lemmy account, it doesn’t offer something that would prompt me to migrate as a user.
One thing I’m probably missing here is whether one can more easily post to both communities/magazines and one’s mastodon followers from kbin. I don’t know enough about whether that is so and why and how far lemmy would be from achieving the same, but at this point in the fediverse’s development, it’s a not insignificant factor, as, IMO, so many are on mastodon and other microblog platforms that bridging that gap is vital to creating a sustainable and healthy ecosystem of platforms on the fediverse.
Fwiw you can post to both Lemmy communities and Mastodon at the same time, that does work pretty well, but it has to be from your Mastodon account and you tag the Lemmy community as a user. (First line of the Mastodon toot becomes the post title on Lemmy, fyi if you’re going to try it, and you can tag the community at the end it doesn’t need to be the first thing in your toot)
Not actually sure if that works the same way for Kbin magazines, I’m subscribed to plenty of them but most of them are kind of inactive so never had chance to test it. If anyone’s done the science and can report back, that would be interesting to know!
Kbin’s UI is just better. I realize both can be customized, but I’d prefer not to mess around with any of that yet. Plus I know people on mastadon, so that sealed it for me.
Subjective. I don’t like the UI on Kbin more than the Lemmy one.
Customizations brought vulns on Lemmy with the custom emojis introducing XSS vulns and a few takeovers in the recent weeks.
but that’s not the fault of the UI, that’s the fault of the server and/or operator for allowing something like that to be even theoretically possible in the first place.
This is why you place UIs on separate domains from the servers, and always treat user input like it’s radioactive AND toxic.
The custom emoji’s was a developed feature of Lemmy pushed out in their UI code. Even the project mainters instance was affected. Its why 0.18.2 was released.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-07-11_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.18.2
Thats not on server/infra operators. It was a vuln in the core UI code. Some operators DID patch it themselves (i think Beehaw is one), others were less affected (ie: My instance is closed and i dont use custom emjis anyhow), but those are features introduced by the maintainers and some of the bigger instances would get requests for them anyhow. So it was a problem.
but the fundamental vulnerability is not in the UI, by that logic you could just run your own UI and get into servers without issue, the vulnerability is always in either the server software or in the specific deployment.
The vulnerability was in the ui.
again, that makes no sense whatsoever, by that logic anyone can just merrily wreak havoc by using a client specially made to have vulnerabilities.
It was a csrf issue. The vulnerability isn’t on the attackers side, it’s on the user’s side. I’m telling you this as the owner of the instance. I’m sorry, but you are wrong here.
The UI! It’s so much better than the other Lemmy instances. Also I can curse without getting banned lmao
Uhhhhh. Not sure which fucking Lemmy instance banned you, but sounds like a real bum out.
Kbin has a way better UI, but it needs better servers and having apps for Lemmy like liftoff makes me wait to get something similar before switching back to kbin.
Why I joined
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had a more intuitive interface
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had a better aesthetic
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had a much cooler name
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the dev seemed like a cool guy
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before federation it felt exciting like being on the ground floor of something
Why I stayed
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has heaps of cool features and functions that are easy to use
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I like the Mastodon interface too
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turns out the dev definitely is awesome and everything is very open
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it has a really chill community
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I still just like it more than the various Lemmys
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For people who prefer Kbin for the interface: Lemmy has alternative interfaces of their own. See https://alexandrite.app/ for the most common one.
A working link: https://alexandrite.app
Also https://vger.app/ for mobile.
If you’re on lemmy.world, they’ve put vger natively on the instance at
m.lemmy.world.I would prefer staying on Kbin but until voyager implements Kbin accounts I’ll have to stay on this one. Voyager is just OP.
Kbin does a better job of putting new posts in front of you even before you have subscribed to anything, so I think it is easier to find interesting things to read. Kbin is newer than Lemmy, so Lemmy had the advantage in familiarity for people. More people had heard of it when Reddit’s API drama blew up and that gave Lemmy a distinct advantage when people picked a new platform. Kbin also has some annoyances like not being able to collapse comments and vote buttons being at the top instead of the bottom of posts and comments. If someone has written a lengthy comment, I want to read through the whole thing before I decide how to vote and I don’t want to scroll back up to get to a vote button. To reply to a post you also have to scroll through the comment section. In some cases it’s good to see if someone else has already said what you are going to say, but in other cases if someone is looking for personal stories, you don’t necessarily need to read everyone else’s story before submitting your own.
Personally I have this kbin account and a lemmy account as well. My Lemmy server seems to go down more often and the default sort always shows the same days old pinned posts from my server admin that I can’t seem to hide after reading. On Reddit, I didn’t have to switch sort to see newer stuff so Lemmy comes across as pretty stale sometimes even though there is a fair amount of posting going on.
On lemmy the default is
Active, which basically boosts any post that still has some recent chatter going on but is otherwise “stale”. In the settings though you can change the default sort. I’ve gone withHot, which is I think the default sort on kbin too.Can you change the default sort on kbin? I could work how to.
But Hot is broken in Lemmy, it shows old stuff like it’s hot. The system is broken, but I think there is a PR on the way.
I think kbin is more promising than lemmy. The admin seems a good guy, kind and levelheaded. Since a month ago, before the blackout, he build kbin by himself and since then someone even volunteered to help him polishing the site.
The site looks polished but still in beta and they’re actively ironing out hundreds bugs and feature request by us users.
Ultimately also the users are nice people. Many of us have donated money and right now the admin have enough money for nearly a year. Source: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/177112/kbin-project-management-costs-financing-future-plansSince a month ago, before the blackout, he build kbin by himself
Per that link you gave, ernest started building kbin in January 2021, launched the first instance in September 2021 and started to work on kbin full-time in the end of 2023 (EDIT: 2022, of course; always refreshingly embarrassing to make mistakes when correcting others). Not directly mentioned in that link, but hinted by the graph there, the kbin.social instance launched in April, now close to three months ago.
Yeah you’re right. I meant until a montth ago, before the blackout.
Thank you for letting me notice it. For me corrections are always welcome.It didn’t occur to me that you wanted to say “until”, my response would have been much shorter otherwise ;).
I have a kbin account which I switch to everytime lemmy.world goes down and the only real advantages I see are the better UI and the integrated microblog thing. It’s basically Lemmy and Mastodon wrapped up in a single piece of software.
I mainly just wanted to try Kbin after having already tried Lemmy before.
I have both and prefer kbin from a UI side on desktop, but the lack of android app means I dont use it on mobile yet.
Kbin also has Mastodon integration (though it’s still being worked on and isn’t in its final form yet), which I think is handy because I’m hoping that Kbin doesn’t defederate from Meta, so that I can also still have an account to keep in touch with people I care about who are going to be using Threads without having to manage another account elsewhere.
I also prefer the layout to Kbin better. While the stock Lemmy layout is nice (it does a fantastic job of emulating the old.reddit layout), I like the fact that Kbin shows a little bit more text about each post. It also keeps more data public (like your votes and reputation scores), which I actually prefer being out in the open, as it helps weed out people who may be giving bad faith arguments in various discussions.
I tried both, lurked a while and Kbin just seemed a bit more user friendly for me. Nothing deeper for me, just a matter of taste really.
