The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.
That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don’t even think there’s an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.
Agreed. I think one of the main deciding factors starting out here was the availability of mobile apps. Seems Lemmy already has a handful while kbin only has the mobile web for now and an application is only in a closed beta at the moment.
It’s in beta testing atm. I’m really interested to see what the dev has in store, but I have to say the PWA for kbin is pretty flawless as it is. What UI complaints I have, I’m sure will come and I’m happy to be patient.
Lemmy was far more confusing for me, and every time I go over there to check unfederated content or grab a community address, the colors hurt my eyes. I only check out my leftover Jerboa app rarely, whenever kbin’s updating and I’m too lazy to do something else. At any rate, we all get the same content
Yep, same here. A couple of subs I followed mentioned Lemmy explicitly so I gave it a look. Lemmy.world seemed the most active at the time so I joined here.
Same. The fact that Lemmy has several iOS apps also sealed the deal, as I do almost all my browsing on mobile. I made an account on KBin at the same time, and an eagerly watching both to see how they develop, but Lemmy just has more to offer right now.
The fact it was recommended more, and doesn’t require an invite like Tildes. I only heard of any of these because of the migration, and only heard of Kbin here on Lemmy.
I wanted to try Tildes after seeing the page, but I have no friends there to invite me to try it.
Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.
I tried kbin and lemmy, and although initially it was harder to find communities as new instances were popping up and growing, ye overall feel of lemmy was more compatible to how I felt using reddit. Being a Sync user, Jerboa and wefwef (and the other developing apps) were just a bonus. Once I learned how to use lemmy, I felt it was more intuitive than the kbin interface.
The fact that multiple people came together to work on the code, provide instances for users, and commitment to continuous improvement keeps me in the lemmy game. While I know ernest@kbin is doing a great job, I feel the nature of multiple instances in the fediverse gives lemmy an advantage.
But that’s just my experience and opinion. Just happy the fediverse exists despite whichever platform users choose as their primary access to it and thankful for all who have contributed to its growth and development.
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
Lemmy
Kbin
Squabbles
Tildes
Raddle
I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)
Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison
Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.
Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.
Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.
I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.
Has Lemmy passed kbin? Last I heard they were growing pretty evenly if you compare the biggest individual instances at least. Maybe creating your own instances is simpler with Lemmy?
Not sure as to the actual statistics. But for me, lemmy feels more active than kbin. Though that in itself is subjective. I do like the interface of kbin for sure. But lemmy feels more active so I’m conflicted. Will explore more communities to see if this view holds true though.
I finally just blocked that community, since it was so spammy. That and 196. Nothing against either community. I just didn’t want other stuff becoming buried under them. Now I’m seeing a lot more variety in overall posts.
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
tildes
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
That is it?
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
I’m not sure if that’s true. Lemmy only calculates active users as people who have posted or commented a time frame. The graphs that I’m seeing for kbin’s active user count matches their total user count.
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
I go back and forth between Kbin and Tildes, with a toe still left in reddit for a few niche communities. I like the idea of the fediverse, but there are definitely a lot of growing pains that it seems to be going through, and kbin just seemed like the most modern, polished, choice. (plus the devs are much less sus than Lemmy)
Tildes on the otherhand feels a lot more close knit, and more about discussion specific topics rather than being a collection of different communities. I kinda like the smaller size, plus the overall tone there is very respectful, so it’s great for more nuanced conversations. This is where I come for my memes and my random conversations though.
Kbin is pretty new, no apps, and faced a lot of issues during the wave of incoming redditors. Some lemmy instances did, too, but there were more of them so there were alternatives when one crashed. If we compare kbin.social to a big instance like lemmy.world, it’s not doing too bad.
Tildes is invite-only so I don’t think they wanted to grow that quickly in the first place.
You are correct about Tildes. They are very intentionally cultivating a different atmosphere and don’t want Reddit’s huddled masses. There is a subset of reddit users who fit there but it’s not the shitposting crowd.
I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.
Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.
Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve read lemmy is a few years old already while kbin is just a few months old (3-4 mos?). Add the number of instances (i only know of 3 kbin instances) and you can see why it didn’t take off the way lemmy did.
I agree. Purely text-based sites need a certain kind of audience/users. I love a good discussion/debate, but I need my memes, too. Lol.
The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.
So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.
And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.
Without an API, all clients would need to rely on scraping, which is slower and more resource intense - almost orders of magnitude. Until Kbin develops an API, it will always be less used.
This is interesting. Thank you for the info. Quick question, though: does this mean kbin will inevitably face scaling issues when it gets too big? And there’s no way to prevent that?
My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.
I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.
Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉
That analogy really drives the point home. Basically, lemmy already has a built-in advantage due to the tech they went with. But like any program/machine, it’s only as good as the people behind it. Thank you for the answer.
In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.
Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.
There’s also the issue that during the first big influx, Kbin turned off federation while the dev tried to fix things up. It was off for days, so any fledgling magazines there couldn’t take advantage of Lemmy traffic, we couldn’t sub to them and made our own communities instead, and by the time they turned federation back on a lot of Lemmy communities were already pretty established as “the main one”.
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The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.
That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don’t even think there’s an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.
Agreed. I think one of the main deciding factors starting out here was the availability of mobile apps. Seems Lemmy already has a handful while kbin only has the mobile web for now and an application is only in a closed beta at the moment.
It’s in beta testing atm. I’m really interested to see what the dev has in store, but I have to say the PWA for kbin is pretty flawless as it is. What UI complaints I have, I’m sure will come and I’m happy to be patient.
Lemmy was far more confusing for me, and every time I go over there to check unfederated content or grab a community address, the colors hurt my eyes. I only check out my leftover Jerboa app rarely, whenever kbin’s updating and I’m too lazy to do something else. At any rate, we all get the same content
For me I heard more about lemmy on Reddit and Apollo was in its final days. So I gave it a try
Yep, same here. A couple of subs I followed mentioned Lemmy explicitly so I gave it a look. Lemmy.world seemed the most active at the time so I joined here.
Same. The fact that Lemmy has several iOS apps also sealed the deal, as I do almost all my browsing on mobile. I made an account on KBin at the same time, and an eagerly watching both to see how they develop, but Lemmy just has more to offer right now.
The fact it was recommended more, and doesn’t require an invite like Tildes. I only heard of any of these because of the migration, and only heard of Kbin here on Lemmy.
I wanted to try Tildes after seeing the page, but I have no friends there to invite me to try it.
Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.
removed by mod
The name, it’s the best of all of them.
I tried kbin and lemmy, and although initially it was harder to find communities as new instances were popping up and growing, ye overall feel of lemmy was more compatible to how I felt using reddit. Being a Sync user, Jerboa and wefwef (and the other developing apps) were just a bonus. Once I learned how to use lemmy, I felt it was more intuitive than the kbin interface.
The fact that multiple people came together to work on the code, provide instances for users, and commitment to continuous improvement keeps me in the lemmy game. While I know ernest@kbin is doing a great job, I feel the nature of multiple instances in the fediverse gives lemmy an advantage.
But that’s just my experience and opinion. Just happy the fediverse exists despite whichever platform users choose as their primary access to it and thankful for all who have contributed to its growth and development.
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)
Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison
Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.
Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.
Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.
I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.
Honestly, I’d say because I’ve never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
Has Lemmy passed kbin? Last I heard they were growing pretty evenly if you compare the biggest individual instances at least. Maybe creating your own instances is simpler with Lemmy?
Not sure as to the actual statistics. But for me, lemmy feels more active than kbin. Though that in itself is subjective. I do like the interface of kbin for sure. But lemmy feels more active so I’m conflicted. Will explore more communities to see if this view holds true though.
I just browse the front page so it’s all a blur to me. But I have noticed Lemmy’s shitposting sub being quite active (because it annoys me).
I finally just blocked that community, since it was so spammy. That and 196. Nothing against either community. I just didn’t want other stuff becoming buried under them. Now I’m seeing a lot more variety in overall posts.
I keep thinking about doing that. They have some sick memes, so I always decide against it, but I am curious about everything else I’m missing.
On kbin I get the kbin interface with lemmy content. Win Win.
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
kbin as about the same amount of active users as Lemmy
i thought lemmy had like 250k+ (?) in total and then kbin.social has like 40-45k
Lemmy has a shit ton of inactive bot accounts, actually active users is about even: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
I’m not sure if that’s true. Lemmy only calculates active users as people who have posted or commented a time frame. The graphs that I’m seeing for kbin’s active user count matches their total user count.
I’m weirdly nostalgic to the era of hanging out on a random phpBB forum with 40 or so active users, so a part of me feels like maybe they’re right. :)
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
I go back and forth between Kbin and Tildes, with a toe still left in reddit for a few niche communities. I like the idea of the fediverse, but there are definitely a lot of growing pains that it seems to be going through, and kbin just seemed like the most modern, polished, choice. (plus the devs are much less sus than Lemmy)
Tildes on the otherhand feels a lot more close knit, and more about discussion specific topics rather than being a collection of different communities. I kinda like the smaller size, plus the overall tone there is very respectful, so it’s great for more nuanced conversations. This is where I come for my memes and my random conversations though.
Kbin is pretty new, no apps, and faced a lot of issues during the wave of incoming redditors. Some lemmy instances did, too, but there were more of them so there were alternatives when one crashed. If we compare kbin.social to a big instance like lemmy.world, it’s not doing too bad.
Tildes is invite-only so I don’t think they wanted to grow that quickly in the first place.
You are correct about Tildes. They are very intentionally cultivating a different atmosphere and don’t want Reddit’s huddled masses. There is a subset of reddit users who fit there but it’s not the shitposting crowd.
It’s a gated community, basically, not a social network. And a very snobbish one at that.
Nothing wrong with being discerning.
I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.
Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.
Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve read lemmy is a few years old already while kbin is just a few months old (3-4 mos?). Add the number of instances (i only know of 3 kbin instances) and you can see why it didn’t take off the way lemmy did.
I agree. Purely text-based sites need a certain kind of audience/users. I love a good discussion/debate, but I need my memes, too. Lol.
The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.
So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.
And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.
Wow, I didn’t know that about the Lemmy devs, that really sucks…
Yeah… I had heard of it as a rumor, so I doubted it for a little while, until I was shown the receipts. https://lemmy.world/comment/562635
It really is disappointing.
Wow, this is like a “Too good to be true” moment. Suddenly some of the Lemmy devs turn out to be shady and pushing their own ideology.
Without an API, all clients would need to rely on scraping, which is slower and more resource intense - almost orders of magnitude. Until Kbin develops an API, it will always be less used.
This is interesting. Thank you for the info. Quick question, though: does this mean kbin will inevitably face scaling issues when it gets too big? And there’s no way to prevent that?
My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.
I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.
Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉
That analogy really drives the point home. Basically, lemmy already has a built-in advantage due to the tech they went with. But like any program/machine, it’s only as good as the people behind it. Thank you for the answer.
Exactly, and my pleasure!
In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.
Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.
I do like the microblog feature of kbin for when you have some random question, but don’t want to make a full on thread about it.
There’s also the issue that during the first big influx, Kbin turned off federation while the dev tried to fix things up. It was off for days, so any fledgling magazines there couldn’t take advantage of Lemmy traffic, we couldn’t sub to them and made our own communities instead, and by the time they turned federation back on a lot of Lemmy communities were already pretty established as “the main one”.