Here are mine! A handful of things come to mind right away, but there are plenty more:
⭐ The admin @ernest is an incredibly hardworking, kind, supportive, and an all-around good person. This is my tip top most favorite thing because good leadership and communication is essential to a good and thriving community. Ernest is a star!
⭐ The ability to edit titles!!! This is sooo convenient!
⭐ The ability to customize mags with CSS! I could spend hours doing this, it’s so fun! I don’t know any other social media site that allows you that level of freedom of customization. It really makes it feel more personal. All my mags are decked out :3
⭐ I enjoy making scripts/styles for kbin. kbin is the reason I began learning JS, HTML, and CSS. I am so happy I started learning, and it’s all thanks to kbin.
⭐Posts and conversations here are much more GENUINE. It feels like I am interacting with real people, with the goal of socializing just for the sake of socializing, which I don’t get elsewhere. Everywhere else it’s a competition to say the wittiest thing and get the most likes/upvotes.
⭐ No malicious, tricky, over-calculated algorithm. It’s very straight-forward and honest here. I love seeing a mix of upvoted/downvoted comments in comment sections too, rather than just top upvoted, because it makes me feel more apart of the conversation with everyone. Your contributions and thoughts won’t get drowned out by upvoted witty remarks, that is truly unique to kbin (and maybe elsewhere on the fediverse?).
⭐ kbin gives me the urge to contribute, interact, and create because our contributions have actual impact. Can’t say the same for other sites. Everywhere else is lurk only.
⭐ Tightknit but welcoming. kbin is small enough that I run into familiar people all the time, and I recognize usernames everywhere.
⭐ Authenticity. kbin is authentic and real. It’s not pushing a product, not manipulating what you see, not building an ad profile. It is what a forum should be.
That only scratches the surface! How about you guys? If you guys share the same favorite things as me, I would love to hear your thoughts on why.
Not sure if I can think of a favorite, but here are a few candidates:
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The fact that Kbin is built for both microblogs and threads. They’re neatly distinguished from one another, and the UI accounts for their unique formats. It’s very clearly thread aggregation + microblogging, not thread aggregation with microblog posts crammed in there or vice versa.
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The UI, which is what made me pick it over Lemmy. I just find it a lot cleaner and more pleasant, especially with the Tokyo night theme.
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The community around userscripts and userstyles, or at least what there was initially. It’s dwindled a ton, but it’s what got me to learn HTML/CSS. Being able to make a userstyle is also really nice for improving Kbin’s UI to my tastes.
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@ernest. Alongside just being kind, he also keeps us up to date and lets us be involved in the development process. The daily updates on @kbinDevlog have been awesome for seeing and helping the platform develop.
hey, someone else who got inspired to learn html/css from kbin! speaking of recognizing usernames, i see you around a lot :D. yea, i really miss the community on @kbinStyles. its sad that it’s pretty much gone now. that was the most fun for me, the scripts and styles. im always scripting and making styles, maybe ill post there soon, i wont let it die completely lol
Also recognize you as well! I’d love to see @kbinStyles revived sometime and to contribute to that goal if given the chance. I’ve just imagined that a thread for every idkbin update would be more annoying than appreciated. It’s also helpful that the magazine is in the official kbin collection, so that might help visibility.
EDIT: Fixed link
i’d like to see it revived as well, maybe we can both try to post a bit, even small stuff! this is the first im seeing of kbin collections, that’s pretty cool :D. and i didn’t know you made idkbin! thats awesome! coincidentally, i was just looking at the css for that to see how to select pinned posts in mags. its so neat and nice lol, whatever you’ve been doing is working bc ur waaaay better than me at css lmfao.
Wow, I might need to clear some space on my imaginary trophy shelf (｡◕‿‿◕｡)
Thanks, that’s really nice. But honestly, all those cool changes lately are thanks to you guys. I just lent an ear ;-)
Easily the mobile experience. Sure, I’d like Apollo back, but the mobile site is so much better than Reddit could’ve ever dreamed.
true, i am really impressed with how well kbin works on mobile browsers. it’s very easy to use and navigate, most other sites cannot say the same, which is weird, since people are on mobile devices more often than desktop so you’d think it would be perfected. kbins mobile browser experience feels like an app.
also rip apollo (◞‸◟）
Recently, I’ve really taken a liking to the ‘Mark new comments’ feature. I generally dislike getting too many notifications, and this allows me to keep an eye on interesting discussions.
You can find it in the options in the sidebar.
Same content as Lemmy and better UI. Been here (and the startrek.website lemmy) since reddit imploded, and spend way more time in kbin than any other fediverse service.