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?
Kbin also has Mastodon integration (though it's still being worked on and isn't in its final form yet), which I think is handy because I'm hoping that Kbin doesn't defederate from Meta, so that I can also still have an account to keep in touch with people I care about who are going to be using Threads without having to manage another account elsewhere.
I also prefer the layout to Kbin better. While the stock Lemmy layout is nice (it does a fantastic job of emulating the old.reddit layout), I like the fact that Kbin shows a little bit more text about each post. It also keeps more data public (like your votes and reputation scores), which I actually prefer being out in the open, as it helps weed out people who may be giving bad faith arguments in various discussions.
The votes being public to end users is a big thing I really like that kbin has; I hope that functionality eventually makes it over to lemmy’s front end once a lot of the fires are put out.
Transparency in online interactions has continually been whittled away over time. Seeing who wants to boost or bury something gives so much more context to content, especially to outside observers passing by.
This is a very contentious topic right now, and it’s not clear at the moment whether votes will remain public or be made private. There are some very vocal proponents on both sides.
Literally was that Kbin started with the letter K, and thus matched with my going DE, KDE. So really just a matter of taste I guess. I always recommend people to use what they like.
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.
I set up both, and kbin was up while I couldn’t get on world for 36 hours. Granted it turns out I had to just quit the app to get it loading but I didn’t know that for a couple days and kbin worked fine
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)
And no, kbin and Lemmy both federate with each other, but are otherwise different apps, so you can’t use the same mobile app for both unless it explicitly supports both.
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.
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 subscribed channel and then look microblogs, 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: 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.
Oh yea … that character limit man … once you have a decent one (>2000) you can’t go back!!
I’ve actually though of suggesting to some communities that do regular posts like star trek’s episode threads to post them from a mastodon account just to get some engagement.
It’d be cool if there was some bot that made this easier.
It’s one of those use-cases (and I understand why it’s not a thing, but still) where I’d love to have quote toots. Just being able to share the Mastodon version of a post but add a bit of text and hashtags and stuff so people on there see it and can easily interact with it. Commenting works but is a bit awkward on one side and a bit spammy on the other.
So many ways the integration could eventually go! But what we do already have is still pretty cool, just gonna keep experimenting with the best way to get people talking to each other.
Anyway consider me a recruit to your Lemmy/Mastodon crosspost revolution! 😄
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.
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.
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.
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.
What specifically is different regarding how political discussions are handled over there?
Absolutely nothing. But the devs (or at least one, not sure), have strong political views that a lot of people take offense with. Search Lemmy & tankie if you want to know more.
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