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.
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.
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.
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.
On top of elements already mentioned by others, an initial draw for me was the tenor of exchanges I was seeing on kbin. Of course the instances all interflow and I won't claim that Lemmy instances are not the same. But that was my initial experience. I like having a home base where there's some effort made to be communal and give thought out answers.
I like that there's both an update, downvote and boost feature. Recently the sorting / weighting mechanism was changed where boost = 2 upvotes so it's nice to upvote something + give it a boost so it sorts higher.
There's a lot of customization user wise also, I've been exceptionally busy working with the other contributors to make the mobile UI/UX a priority. There's been a heap of dev work going around so keen to see when that all gets into prod.
I've got a feeling that with another solid month or two of updates, tweaks and features that kbin will be really solid.
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-plans
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.
Seriously 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.
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 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
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
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.
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.
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 with Hot, which is I think the default sort on kbin too.
Can you change the default sort on kbin? I could work how to.
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, Hot seems to do what I’d want. Combine with a bit of New or Top for an appropriate time window and I’m all good.
For comments, Hot/New/Top all do what I’d want too.
Yep, that looks bad (obviously). I just went to the science community, sorted by Hot, and yea similar things appear towards the bottom of the feed.
Seems like the sort of thing that would be a minor and fixable bug. I don’t have time to chase down github issues right now, but I’ll try checking older communities to spot these occurrences. Naively I’d guess something like dates or vote-scored being truncated badly or something.
OK, I couldn’t help myself, and checked GItHub. Seems the issue may have been fixed hours ago. Don’t know when the new version will ship though.
Seems the issue may been to do with the process that updates the ranks of posts not being able to catch up to older posts, and so they show up with out of date ranks/scores. That process has been optimised, apparently, and should have no problem keeping up with all of the posts.
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.
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.
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