I was initially put off by the UI of Lemmy that I encountered when I first went to the Lemmy site. I was a little confused as to which instance to join. That's when I stumbled upon kbin.social and that's where I landed my new account. Overall I am most comfortable here.
Since joining, I've encountered Lemmy posts that take me to their instances proper, and the formatting looked different, more like here just with a different colored background. Overall, Lemmy instances seem okay, I just like it here better.
Maybe it's the overall familiarity with the instance, calling main topic pages "magazines," the microblogging option, etc. Lemmy's resemblance is a little closer to Reddit, so that might account for why people decided to go there instead of a kbin instance.
And those who were stubborn enough to keep looking at all options despite what could easily feel overwhelming to a non-tech user.
I am not very tech-inclined, so trying to understand the fediverse as a whole felt like deep water and lemmy really didn't do any job at all at explaining what it was I was committing to by choosing an instance, when I didn't even know what instances were and had trouble finding out.
Since Lemmy was and is by far the most mentioned alternative and I found it too anxiety-inducing, it's mostly stubborn desperation that brought me to kbin. Which says nothing to how much I'm genuinely enjoying it here, to be clear, I was just relieved to have a simple option at that point.
Being made anxious by a new platform isn't great and I would guess that most people who didn't like the experience they had with Lemmy didn't bother clicking other links that would take them to the same fediverse. They're likely to assume they won't enjoy that one either, and resign themselves elsewhere.
So kbin naturally got fewer users just by word of mouth, and then the necessary brief isolation didn't help either when people were still getting comfortable here. I don't particularly mind it other than those rare times I'm accidentally excluded, either by a question addressed only to Lemmy or their recent version of r/place disappointingly being incompatible with kbin.
Kbin is about 3 months old whereas Lemmy is about 3 years old. Kbin simply wasn't ready for growth, and still has a few major feature shortfalls. Lack of API access is a big one.
Because Lemmy is older and already has a lot of established communities. Kbin saw the larger growth rates though (in the context of the recent Reddit drama). Kbin also currently lacks native mobile apps, and a lot of people browse this type of media form their phones.
Regarding the articles: tech journalists all use microblogging sites like Mastodon, so for them Kbin’s microblogging integration is a major advantage. Also, IIRC Kbin made it easier to follow certain people, like industry leaders, while Lemmy is more focused on communities.
Personally, I really dislike microblogging, so for me it was a major reason not to use Kbin. I think there may be a large silent group that feels the same way, but I haven’t seen any statistics on this.
Very cool! I installed it but it looks like custom instances are disabled for a bit. I don't feel like setting up an account on the Artemis instance so I'll wait. Exciting to see progress though
but it looks like custom instances are disabled for a bit
I think its because the API the app uses isnt officially in the kbin code yet, so only the developers server supports it. Thats another great thing that only the fediverse can offer, spinning up your own server for your own versions.
a big attraction of Reddit—that its main page is a kind of greatest hits of an enormous community.
No, r/all was the lowest common denominator, full of karmafarming, ragebait, and reposts. Every time I looked at r/all I regretted it, so I mostly stuck to subreddits.
It wasn't too bad when you started to filter out some specific subreddits. But I feel since they applied a lot more content moderation to /r/all, causing a lot of potentially interesting things to not even show up there, it's been kind of garbage for a while now. Something similar can be said about kbins "all" page at the moment too though. I rather wish they'd give the users the tools to tailor their feeds according to their own preferences instead of interfering themselves. "All" should be all, excluding whatever my personal filters & settings get rid of.
Something similar can be said about kbins "all" page at the moment too though. I rather wish they'd give the users the tools to tailor their feeds according to their own preferences instead of interfering themselves. "All" should be all, excluding whatever my personal filters & settings get rid of.
Is it....not that? Am I misunderstanding or mistaken. My experience has been a very "All" experience, I thought, only playing an endless whack-a-mole with porn, sports, and whatever really good sub is sadly dominating the rest of the feed.
From kbin- how do you see a list of communities on lemmy.world? I've been navigating to https://lemmy.world/communities in a separate browser window to discover communities to individually search/subscribe to from kbin.
Go to https://kbin.social/magazines and turn on local and federated, then hit the search button. For some reason all the top "hot" are kbin but the "new" and "active" are various.
Then if you specifically want, say, lemmy.world, type that into the search field and hit search again. It will all show.
Yea, a lemmy instance will show the same kinds of results for federated communities but there is no substitute for viewing the local communities from that instance.
Click on the tab Magazines at the top, select local and federate, put lemmy.world in the search box to see all lemmy.world communities. If you want to check for community with certain keywords you can try putting [keyword]@lemmy.world. It can search for the keyword in both the name and description, but not extensive as if you'd search on lemmy.world.
This can use some improvement, but it's not a Kbin problem though, since Lemmy is even worse when it comes to searching for communities outside each instance.
Ah, I see what you mean now. In that case I don't think you can do it on Kbin natively rn. There is this website though, which might help a bit. At least imo it's easier to use. https://lemmyverse.net/communities
You can just filter for only lemmy.world. When you find a community you want to join you'll have to type the handle of the community in the search icon to the right rather than in the Magazine tab for communities that doesn't already have a copy on your instance.
The article specifically says you can't search federated communities from kbin, but you can from Lemmy. This is just incorrect, both allow you to search local or local and federated.
@melroy@Hairyblue This is one of the reasons I use kbin over lemmy. The devs don't seem to have the same problematic beliefs as the lemmy devs. Also from my experience, the majority of the lemmy user base don't seem to share in their beliefs either.
A thorough, consumer-facing breakdown by a major tech news site? I think we’re moving up in the world…
Though I wish they would’ve added a couple more paragraphs going into the data privacy/security concerns that some people have. I guess the average consumer isn’t particularly bothered these days, kinda gotten used to it. Would’ve been nice though.
pcmag.com
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