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.
Not currently, I think, but multiple are in beta and sending out invites. I use kbin as a rich web app and it works well about 85% of the time. Biggest issues are random log-outs, using the back button sometimes loses place in the never-ending scroll list, and there isn’t a good way to see your subscribed magazines (you have to go to your profile and scroll to the subscriptions section to select it).
But I’m really liking Kbin so far. I’d rather not be on the instance that is hosting everything; just seems easier for it to get too big and fail quickly, and I’d like to stay in one location if possible. Kbin seems big enough to last but small enough that it isn’t growing insanely quick. Another option is Fedia.io, which is a kbin fork. Very similar imo, just a little different.
Fedia is just another kbin instance, not really a fork. It is tracking the development branch a bit closer than kbin.social, but it’s still the same repo
A fork would be a duplicated custom copy of the software that can have its own changes or improvements added and is usually maintained by a different person/group than the original. When a new update of the original is released, the maintainer of the fork can bring those changes into their custom fork.
Instances are (mostly identical) copies of the same fork. They’ll have custom names and different logos, but the software that’s running them is all version 0.18 of the same fork. They may install updates at different speeds ie v0.19 is released, some instances will update immediately, some may take a week, but eventually they’ll all be updated to v0.19.
There’s a PR out that’ll show your subscriptions at the top of the sidebar in a simple list. I think that’s a decent start but I’d like to add left to right swipe handlers to just have it as a fly-out menu on mobile.
The back button is definitely something we need to work on, especially if your been posting serveral comments in a thread, I expect the back button to take me to the place I was at before I clicked into the article, not show me previous comments etc. Lots of this just needs tweaking
