I noticed that kbin has stalled in development recently and the ongoing problems with federation etc. made me use it even less for the past few weeks. I even spent more time on reddit than here.
Today, I decided to give my abandoned lemmy account a try and see how that goes.
As many others, I disliked the UI of lemmy, compared to kbin, but soon enough found this one https://p.lemmy.world and it’s been very smooth so far.
So yeah … hello from the other side of the fence 🍷
I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for “Hot” posts, etc.
Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like “communities” instead what KBin terms them (“magazines”), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.
The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It’s good for the Fediverse that choices exist.
Ernest, the main developer of Kbin, has given an explanation of what has happened: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded#entry-comment-3006120
I tried Kbin, but I don’t know why it just never clicked with me. I kind of like the barebones lemmy UI.
Also, the instance I’m on has an “old.reddit” style page that is really nice when I’m on PC.
Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren’t being merged in and deployed.
Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.
The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.
TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors’ proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.
Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin’s main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn’t exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.
Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).
I used to follow ernest and kbinMeta to keep up with the updates, so I’m fully aware of the current situation. The thing is, I don’t want to stay there and hope that things will get better one day. I’m here to read the latest happenings on my favorite topics, and engage with people. And, unfortunately, kbin just doesn’t give me that experience.
There’s even an option to hide the fantasy Internet points entirely. I love that option because I find fantasy Internet point chasing completely risible.
‘point chasing’ e.g. karma farmers on reddit is fucking stupid, but I find the metric useful on an individual post. I think of them like an online extension of a facial expression: if I read a post attempting to explain something, and it’s got way more downvotes than up, the kinda tells me the poster is full of shit, which is especially useful in threads where I don’t know enough about the topic to actually identify the bullshit myself. Like a flat-earther trying to give a lecture to an auditorium of booing geological scientists - my clueless medic ass is going to be gauging the audience as much as the speaker.
Or, say I post some joke: if it gets a lot more upvotes than down, that tells me other folks folks got a kick out of it.
It’s just another tool to communicate - and communication is hamstrung right out the gate in a predominately typed medium, so I’ll take the crutch.
