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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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