Without knowing what you mean by "I can't seem to find my groove there" it's difficult to comment really - what's the problem - not finding active communities? People not replying to you?
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."
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.
Kbin seems to be pretty ambitious in that it's aiming at being a hub for (almost) all of the fediverse. So Lemmy's reddit-like forums, mastodon's quick posts a la Twitter, and peertube's youtube - style services - it's looking to bring all of those fediverse platforms so they're all accessible in one place rather than having to sign up for each. That way it's an easy place to go to for your decentralized social media content. So really it's just looking to make the fediverse more easily accessible and improve the user's experience.
It's a pretty big idea and it's pretty damn impressive what Ernest accomplished before this big fediverse boom. I'm excited to see where it goes.
I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I've come to.
"It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software"
I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.
It's almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren't connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.
Whether we need what it's trying to be, I don't know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven't used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.
I don't think it's too confusing to combine Mastodon natively. Reddit was filled with screenshot and links of Twitter, so if Mastodon is the Twitter replacement and kbin is the Reddit replacement, I'd much rather have the posts natively federated than reposted with the author having no idea.
If implemented correctly, comments on kbin would appear to mastodon as replies to the post, right?
If I remember correctly @ernest once described kbin as a "gateway for the fediverse" (but at the moment I don't have a source for that).
This would allow kbin to gather and integrate even more services from the fediverse - maybe
It's a decentralized link aggregator in the design of Reddit with federation support for Lemmy & Mastodon content.
I use kbin because it's simply easier to use and more familiar for me as a Reddit user. Lemmy's layout is just confusing to me and I don't like the extremistic ideology of the admins.
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