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.”
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.
I’m still searching everywhere for the ability to block entire instances in kbin (on mobile). Can you please elaborate on how it is done? I only see magazine pages with the block option.
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
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.
I saved this one the other day but haven’t tried it out yet
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 subscribed channel and then look microblogs, 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!
You can subscribe to people on Mastodon from Kbin
Yeah, you can.
Also, if you look in the “microblog” section of a kbin magazine, it collects Mastodon posts that use whatever hashtags the mag mods have set for that magazine and you can interact directly with the Mastodon users.
Eg. on @worldwithoutus the microblog section has these Arctic sea ice reports in it from Mastodon, because #Arctic is one of the magazine tags. It’s really neat.
Can you connect to the same user if you switch? For example a Kbin user can use a Lemmy app like Voyager or the opposite?
Thanks, now I understood.
So it’s not like having a user in Lemmy.world Vs Lemmy.nl. It’s beyond that.
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.
From a brief look at their public API, it only seems to users to GET stuff, and not POST stuff yet, so that would limit the possibility of apps.
Can you explain more about the politics bit? What specifically is different regarding how political discussions are handled over there?
People say that the devs are extreme left, though I haven’t seen anything extreme first hand, simply being communist is a very valid opinion but I guess there’s more to it. Besides politics, the project is very nice and promising, and I’ve had very useful feedback from the devs while trying to make a pull request for a new feature.
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 with Hot, 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.
Hmmm … it seems fine to me. I’d heard it was broken before though.
In what way is it broken?
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.
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
