I was introduced to kbin first, and after giving both kbin and lemmy a shot, I decided on kbin as my primary. I prefer the layout mostly. Yes I know you can customize lemmy to get it to a similar look and feel, but kbin feels great straight out the box. The Mastodon integration is interesting, and its nice to keep up with what's going on there at the same time on one site. Also as federation users, we are encouraged to join smaller instances to lighten the load of ml and world, and kbin seems to be a good compromise of joining a smaller instance that isn't too empty. Also, with the recent hacks happening with the bigger lemmy instances, I feel like I made the right call sticking around here.
You should be able to search them in the same format as you'd search for federated Lemmy communities. For instance, !askkbin@kbin.social should let you access Kbin's version of this community (assuming I know how to format the text correctly).
From there, you can subscribe to it from within your instance on lemmy.ml, and it'll show up in your feed as the rest of your content.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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?
App development will probably be slow for a bit. As others have mentioned, Artemis is in development, but because Kbin doesn't have a public API yet, I believe that Artemis is having to use their own web scraping method as a stop-gap until the API is released. I imagine that's probably a taxing process for the dev's server to handle, which is probably why the private beta is having such a slow rollout.
Once the API goes live, I imagine there will probably be several apps that pop up pretty quickly.
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