I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the identity (or purpose) of Kbin.
I tried out #Lemmy and #Kbin for a little more than a week each and found Lemmy a lot easier to onboard. You create posts that you post in communities. And you have threads of posts within communities that are centered around a common topic. Very similar to a forum. The terminology used is relatable since “community” also has meaning in other parts of life.
The curiosity in me always keeps going back to Kbin and really wanting to understand it more. Partially because Kbin’s UI/UX was more engaging. But the terminology was a bit confusing at first until I did some research and read the FAQ posts. Magazines = communities. Articles = posts that goes within the magazines. But the one part that still confused me was the “post” option that goes to a completely different microblog section. For the life of me, I couldn’t grasp what or why there was a microblog section for a link aggregator software. And when do I create an article versus a post.
It finally all clicked when I came across this thread in Kbin’s code repo: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/406. I finally understood the reasoning behind the Microblog section and that it interacts with other parts of the Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon). And that if setup properly, Magazines can pull in Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) posts based on tags and it goes to the Microblog section for that Magazine.
My question to the community is this. What is Kbin trying to be? What is its purpose? It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software, but I could be wrong. Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
If set up properly, Mastodon can pull in Lemmy and Kbin posts and comments. What is Mastodon trying to be?
The answer in both cases: it depends on how you set them up.
Kbin identifies as ‘Not Reddit’ and that’s good enough for me.
I agree the terminology, etc, is confusing. I do hope it gets revamped a bit.
At the most barebones level, I think kbin was meant to be “Lemmy and mastodon with a cohesive UI on one account.” So far it has ended up being, “Lemmy but for people who were eeshy about tankies when they were trying to figure all this out to get away from Reddit.”
For consistency,
Threads should be renamed to “Articles”
Microblog should be renamed to “Posts”.
As for Kbin identity - well… I guess it’s a “user interface to fediverse”.
Fediverse, in turn, is a sprawling network that publishes and makes different types of ActivityPub objects available to users.
Kbin has tools to work and interact with some of those object types.
Aren’t threads and articles separate concepts on Kbin though? I agree that it’s confusing however, and perhaps should be simplified.
My understanding that an article is closer to a reddit text post, while the others (link, photo, video) are all what reddit considers “links”.
So articles are threads, but so are links, photos and videos. To be clear, that’s my understanding, not fact.
That would confuse me even more to be honest. A submission that people discuss and reply to is not what I would think of as an article - to me, that would be more like a standalone publication.
I do feel like using different terminology could help in understanding how this all fits together though.