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.”
Key word also
The presence or absence of that single word doesn’t change the fact that nothing OP said was wrong eh ;P
Nobody claimed what they said was wrong. The thesis is that it may be misleading (through omission of the second half of what it does).
See, the problem here is that you’re treating an off-the-cuff casual explanation as a “thesis.” Please don’t bring this absurd habit over here, where people have to feel compelled to cover absolutely every interpretation and hedge every outlier for fear of getting nitpicked to hell and back. Literally no one enjoyed that environment.
I pointed out it does more. You replied claiming “It’s literally not.” which is simply factually wrong.
Are you saying nobody should point that out? On this discussion platform?
You could have just left it there. If you have that much of a problem with the word thesis maybe you’re the one who shouldn’t take things so literally. If you have a problem with how this went, maybe you should not make false statements or let it go earlier.
I don’t think there’s a need to cover everything at all.
I think it’s reasonable to argue, “a super like that also shares the post is functionally different from just a super like.” It doesn’t seem nit-picky when discussing the reasons why someone might choose one service over another to want to be precise about the mechanics of one of those services, no?
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.
You can block users/bots on Lemmy too
But not instances or servers, that’s a much needed feature to de-porn my feed.
Yep, although it’s almost been a year since the request so I don’t know how high it’s priority wise.
Since the question was why people use Kbin that is a big one for now, at least for me although I have an account there I just prefer lemmy since Kbin seems to be too much on its infancy and also the fact that because it doesn’t have an open API as of now, there are (almost) no apps developed.
Given the massive uptake in the last month I’m hoping a lot of old issues are now being looked at!
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.
If you click on the menu next to the Kbin logo, at the top there’s a clog and a triangle. The triangle is the federation one.
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
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I prefer Lemmy’s UI. Good to have choices though.
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
That doesn’t seem to work for kbin, does it?
It just gives me a 404 when I try to use it on kbin, sadly.
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
subscribedchannel and then lookmicroblogs, 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!
Yea posting from mastodon to lemmy is a nice way to join the two platforms actually.
I keep encouraging mastodon users to do it more, as they don’t have any groups and hashtags and not great IMO.
For those interested, I’ve written a little demo of doing so from mastodon, with comments/replies that provide links to the resulting lemmy post: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095. If you think it’s helpful, feel free to share it around to anyone else you know that might be interested in posting to lemmy from mastodon.
Nice! Bookmarked for when this inevitably keeps coming up in support threads haha :D
I’ve definitely found it to be a good way to get interactions going in smaller communities so far, if the topic has a decent presence on the Mastodon side. Can’t quite decide if that’s cheating or not but some of those communities need all the help they can get!
Not cheating at all! It should be happening more IMO!
- First, there’s a lot of parallel chatter and interests kept separate because people are on different platforms.
- Second, bringing down the boundaries between instances and platforms (so that don’t all have to use screenshots all the time) is what the fediverse is about)
- Third, using existing communities and platforms to activate new communities and platforms is supposed to a super power of the fediverse, as it makes it easier and easier to kickstart new things as the fediverse grows
- Fourth, and getting back to the second above, the fediverse’s “killer app”, IMO, is the eventual creation of a diversity of communities and platforms that interoperate in a useful, flexible and engaging way for the user.
At the moment, I’m actually frustrated at the lack of cross platform engagement between lemmy/kbin and mastodon. A big part of it, IMO, is the simplicity of mastodon’s UI and how integrating with any other platform with a more sophisticated UI becomes difficult. Right now, for instance, mastodon has no nice way to deal with a community/magazine or a post with multiple threads of comments beneath it, as all mastodon does is see everything as a flattened stream of posts in reverse chronological order.
Right now, posting from mastodon to a community is the only way to bring these worlds together that works for users of both platforms, except for the user making the post, which is a problem.
You’ve articulated my thoughts perfectly and emboldened me not only to keep doing it, but to do it way more.
The trickiest part so far has been wording toots in such a way that they still look and read like Mastodon content, but also are in the correct format for Lemmy. Also the fact that I recently moved from an instance with an extra-long character limit to one with the default, but such is life lol.
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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?
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Thanks, now I understood.
So it’s not like having a user in Lemmy.world Vs Lemmy.nl. It’s beyond that.
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Yeah both of those use the Lemmy software. Kbin is separate software. It works pretty much the same way as Lemmy in terms of there being multiple Kbin instances, they’re just running on the different software.
Kbin has a boost “retweet” function whilst lacking a “save post” function Kbin naturally shows user karma whilst here, it is counted but not shown (some clients display it)
Is there good android apps fir kbin?
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.
Sweet. Can’t wait to see how it all turns out! 🦙
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.
There is Artemis. You can apply to enter the beta on their community!
Can you explain more about the politics bit? What specifically is different regarding how political discussions are handled over there?
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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 withHot, 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.
I’ve heard that the “hot surfacing old posts” bug is more prevalent on instances that haven’t restarted for a while. It still shouldn’t happen, but I don’t think it’s universal.
Hmmm … it seems fine to me. I’d heard it was broken before though.
In what way is it broken?
Like the parent said, it surfaces old (as in years old) posts as “hot”. Not sure if that’s the case still, but I have definitely noticed it before.
Ah … right … yea I’ve seen that happen occasionally … I had actually presumed that something had been changed with that post, perhaps by an admin or something cleaning stuff up, and that triggered a new timestamp for the post.
Maybe still a bug. I’ll keep track now of when it happens as it might help sort it out.
But still, that’s rarely the case for me. Just went down a fair way in my feed now and there wasn’t a single occurrence of it. Could it be particular communities causing it, maybe from instances on older software?
Otherwise though,
Hotseems to do what I’d want. Combine with a bit ofNeworTopfor an appropriate time window and I’m all good.For comments,
Hot/New/Topall do what I’d want too.It’s still a bug. My server is at 0.18.2 and I regularly see old posts if I sort by Hot.
Links to Communities or Instances?
FWIW, just checked mine and no problems (and I’m subscribed to plenty of communities).
Hey! Thanks for explaining. How can I use/Download Kbin?
Just go to kbin.social, this is the largest instance. There are other, smaller instances, too. Just like Lemmy.
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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.I would prefer staying on Kbin but until voyager implements Kbin accounts I’ll have to stay on this one. Voyager is just OP.
Thanks for the pointer. This really looks much more pleasant than vanilla Lemmy, I’ll have to keep an eye on that.
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
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I tried both, lurked a while and Kbin just seemed a bit more user friendly for me. Nothing deeper for me, just a matter of taste really.
Kbin’s UI is just better. I realize both can be customized, but I’d prefer not to mess around with any of that yet. Plus I know people on mastadon, so that sealed it for me.
Subjective. I don’t like the UI on Kbin more than the Lemmy one.
Customizations brought vulns on Lemmy with the custom emojis introducing XSS vulns and a few takeovers in the recent weeks.
but that’s not the fault of the UI, that’s the fault of the server and/or operator for allowing something like that to be even theoretically possible in the first place.
This is why you place UIs on separate domains from the servers, and always treat user input like it’s radioactive AND toxic.
The custom emoji’s was a developed feature of Lemmy pushed out in their UI code. Even the project mainters instance was affected. Its why 0.18.2 was released.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2023-07-11_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.18.2
Thats not on server/infra operators. It was a vuln in the core UI code. Some operators DID patch it themselves (i think Beehaw is one), others were less affected (ie: My instance is closed and i dont use custom emjis anyhow), but those are features introduced by the maintainers and some of the bigger instances would get requests for them anyhow. So it was a problem.
but the fundamental vulnerability is not in the UI, by that logic you could just run your own UI and get into servers without issue, the vulnerability is always in either the server software or in the specific deployment.
The vulnerability was in the ui.
again, that makes no sense whatsoever, by that logic anyone can just merrily wreak havoc by using a client specially made to have vulnerabilities.
It was a csrf issue. The vulnerability isn’t on the attackers side, it’s on the user’s side. I’m telling you this as the owner of the instance. I’m sorry, but you are wrong here.
I think kbin is more promising than lemmy. The admin seems a good guy, kind and levelheaded. Since a month ago, before the blackout, he build kbin by himself and since then someone even volunteered to help him polishing the site.
The site looks polished but still in beta and they’re actively ironing out hundreds bugs and feature request by us users.
Ultimately also the users are nice people. Many of us have donated money and right now the admin have enough money for nearly a year. Source: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/177112/kbin-project-management-costs-financing-future-plansSeriously this - @ernest has done a fucking incredible job. This software is flat-out amazing from a publisher’s or author’s perspective. It really encourages quality submissions as well, and the community is extremely positive.
Since a month ago, before the blackout, he build kbin by himself
Per that link you gave, ernest started building kbin in January 2021, launched the first instance in September 2021 and started to work on kbin full-time in the end of 2023 (EDIT: 2022, of course; always refreshingly embarrassing to make mistakes when correcting others). Not directly mentioned in that link, but hinted by the graph there, the kbin.social instance launched in April, now close to three months ago.
Yeah you’re right. I meant until a montth ago, before the blackout.
Thank you for letting me notice it. For me corrections are always welcome.It didn’t occur to me that you wanted to say “until”, my response would have been much shorter otherwise ;).
I have a kbin account which I switch to everytime lemmy.world goes down and the only real advantages I see are the better UI and the integrated microblog thing. It’s basically Lemmy and Mastodon wrapped up in a single piece of software.
Kbin has a way better UI, but it needs better servers and having apps for Lemmy like liftoff makes me wait to get something similar before switching back to kbin.
It was the first one I tried 🤷♂️
Good a reason as any tbh.
The UI! It’s so much better than the other Lemmy instances. Also I can curse without getting banned lmao
Uhhhhh. Not sure which fucking Lemmy instance banned you, but sounds like a real bum out.
It’s like lemmy + mastodon - you can microbilor and boost posts and comments. But after using it for a while, I switched back to lemmy because:
it has no APIAFAICT the API is read-only, so there aren’t any apps (the dev is making one but I don’t think it’s finished and can’t compile it)- it has some performance issues
- it doesn’t work sometimes
- the UI looks worse
- there are way less instances of it
- it’s written in php instead of rust
I like the UI better, like that it interacts with things like Mastadon, and, what was honestly the biggest thing, doesn’t have a dumb auto-refresh I can’t disable (which Lemmy did (at least for a while)).
They both have a lot of growing up to do. Not being able to collapse threads in kbin is driving me crazy; especially for long threads with many nested levels, I can’t tell what is even top-level.
Lemmy got rid of the auto refresh you’re referring to. No more live updates.
That’s good news. I’m fine with it as an optional setting, but I hated trying to read something and poof
Look up kbin enhancement suit KES. They have android, iOS and Mac that I know of. Simple to add and they’re implementing a lot of features
This. Is. AWESOME! So many so cool features!
I hate that I have to rely on some other add-in, but this makes things so much easier. Thank you!
There’s two different PRs with collapsible threads in codeberg. Fingers crossed one or the other get merged soon.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/167
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls/704Nice! I knew about 167 but not 704. Here’s hoping!
There are several userscripts for collapsible threads, I’ve used them since like day 2 after the Reddit shutdown!
I use this one: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468923-kbin-improved-collapsible-comments
Works both on desktop and Android (Firefox + Tampermonkey).
This. Is. AWESOME! So many so cool features!
The auto refresh was what brought me here. The layout kept me.
I have both and prefer kbin from a UI side on desktop, but the lack of android app means I dont use it on mobile yet.
I’ve been using kbin as a mobile pwa on iOS without issue. It’s been getting better a little bit every week.
Agree 100%. I don’t feel I need an app with the pwa on iOS.
I finally got my changes out to the Android PWA and I’m super happy with how it’s working now. Beforehand it had an ugly icon and no shortcut / action icons. Now it’s fairly good looking.
There’s a change coming to the “themes” section which I’m happy for. Love getting through these updates
This may just be my device but I have to kill the PWA if I stop using it for around 10+ minutes, else I just get a black screen. Not the biggest problem but a bit annoying because I lose whatever thread I may have been reading.
I was just about to ask if there were any good Android apps for Kbin… I remember creating an account on the website a while ago but because I mostly browse on my phone I ended up on Lemmy in the end. I’d like to give Kbin a fair shot once a working Android app is released though.
That’s fair. There’s been a lot of PRs and issues focusing on mobile (like adding collapsible comments) but being a community project it all takes time to get it approved and pushed.
I’m keen on getting through as many mobile / UX centric improvements to mobile since that’s primarily how I use kbin.
There is Artemis. You can apply to enter the beta on their community
The Artemis app is in beta and it’s looking pretty promising. Definitely still some bugs, but the UI is dead simple and easy to customize. Switching to a subbed only view works well too. The official mag is m/artemisapp
