Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
It’s obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is “better” or more “long-term viable” or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it’s all one happy family.
That said, it’s notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the “Reddit-like fedi instance” game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.
Anyway, the more, the merrier!
KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986
I really like Kbin’s microblog feature. Basically able to “tweet” in a community without making a whole post
I tried kbin but it currently slow as hell at least for me. It definitely is more inviting with its design though.
Despite the tankie stuff I prefer the interface of Lemmy, though I have accounts on both. Love that they federate. Things are happening.
I’ve been having a blast on Lemmy so far. Just had to unsub from the Brazil community because Brazil has a lot of tankies for some fucking reason.
I choose to believe Brazilians have dealt with fascists in their government for so long it’s all they want now.
Agreed Lemmy is a lot cleaner IMO. I’d be all-in if it weren’t for the political baggage, even with federation we’re empowering these guys and giving them a bigger platform. l’m still uneasy about that.
I’m pretty uneasy about the association, but the attitude of Beehaw is the antithesis of it so I guess it balances out…?
I did play with Kbin first but the interface felt kinda broken to me, buttons not reacting and the like…
Tbh, it’s floss so I don’t care who’s working on it. I just don’t really get kbin ui myself, lemmy is far closer to reddit for me. If I wanted the microblogging I already have Mastodon so I don’t see why it’s trying to do both. I prefer the old unix philosophy myself.
I want I like Kbin, and in time I think I will, but the UX is a little too unfinished right now. I’ll keep checking in on it and I’m excited to see two things that conceivably offer a similar experience to Reddit gaining traction. Big-up the fediverse!
Kbin just feels like a home project to my eyes. Hope it goes well and the federation will be absolutely amazing.
Federation also works between kbin and Lemmy so if you’re worried about that, the only solution is defederation from them.
You can just block a community or user and you won’t see it. Main thing is that its not corporate owned
Can I use kbin to read Lemmy content?
Yes. Check out the biggest currently active instance of Kbin, https://fedia.io/ — plenty of stuff from Lemmy instances.
What I don’t understand is why there are SO many missing comments when reading threads in one instance from another instance. For example, the top “Hot” post on Fedia right now is a post about community fragmentation on Lemmy. When viewed from Fedia, it has 8 comments, but when view within the source Lemmy instance, it has 40.
This is an issue I’ve seen in every instance on both Lemmy and KBin and it’s a huge issue. One of the main reasons I joined the Beehaw instance, since it seems less affected. In fact, Beehaw shows more comments than even the NATIVE Lemmy instance, at 57!
What are the pros and cons of one platform over the other? Is KBin just Lemmy+Mastodon? Can Lemmy see KBin magazines?
Yep, thread based communities are shared perfectly between Lemmy and kbin. Other than currently the largest kbin community is having federation issues due to the influx of users
So does that mean that any thread in the fediverse can be shared together? Or is kbin another Lemmy instance? I thought we could only look at other Lemmy instances.
They both use a similar protocol to talk between servers, but they are different software.
So we can interact with any software in the fediverse?
Yes, I’m on mastodon and can go on any lemmy thread and comment. There are some caveats but if it’s in the fediverse it can interoperate.
@TheOneCurly I’ve been noticing massive #Kbin federation issues, even from the small instance that I’m on, kbin.projectsegfau.lt
Agreed, Fedia.io was mostly working this morning but at some point federation just stalled.
Same here, I was using Fedia but I’ve switched back to lemmy.world because I straight up couldn’t subscribe to some communities. And then realised the homepage is bugged and sorting by new doesn’t actually show you the newest posts. I’ll try it again when it’s less of a buggy mess.
That mstdn.social and the whole “lemmy = tankie” (whatever the fuck that means) is doing a disservice to the whole unreddit movement. I have seen plenty of discussion on reddit now of people not leaving because of these posts…
I did not say “lemmy = tankie”, I said Lemmy has certain tankie baggage, and that is in fact true. The developers are pretty clearly tankies, they also run a strictly tankie instance (Lemmygrad; many Lemmy instances do not federate with it).
Pretending this is not the case is not going to help in the long run. It might slow down the “unreddit” movement now, but I’d wager a bet it will make it more long-term viable and resilient, if people understand that choice of instance is important (there are quite a few great Lemmy instances that I would recommend wholeheartidly, like BeeHaw), and that there are alternative, independent implementations on Threadiverse (like Kbin).
Can you provide a source to your claim that lemmygrad is ran by Nutomic or Dessalines?
It used to be deployed on the same IP address as lemmy.ml. I don’t have the receipts. Take it or leave it.
Edit 2: another person expressing concerns (with receipts) about moderation policy on lemmy.ml
What I don’t get is, I don’t see how that’s a reason to be concerned about Lemmy when the whole point is that there’s no central control over instances, which literally anyone can spin up.
Technically speaking, you are completely right. The problem is that the negative association rubs off on the project regardless of the factual context. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether the political views of the developers influence the political direction of the software. The association that sticks is: Lemmy is the one with the Stalinist developer.
Exactly.
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Most were able to get past it and simply not subscribe to subs they found objectionable, but I’m sure many people just stayed away once they learned that certain subs existed and were very much known about by Reddit admins.
One key difference here is the way that your instance is able to enforce rules and to some extent influence and filter your user experience, and that’s worth consideration too.
I’m also curious if and how an instance like lemmy.ml can, for example, delete comments, ban users, take down content in cases of cross-instance interaction. Could the admins of lemmy.ml, for example, ban a user from another instance from Lemmy completely? From their local communities? Could they remove that person’s comments? Can they prevent their own users from seeing content they don’t like on other instances? Can they moderate content from their users that is posted to communities on other instances?
It’s analogous to the way that Reddit knowingly allowing some subs to exist repelled some users.
Let’s be absolutely clear about that:
For years (2008-2011), Reddit hosted forums for pedophiles to share “legal” pictures of young girls for other pedophiles’ erotic entertainment; e.g. upskirt photos showing children’s underwear.
For years, Reddit hosted forums for misogynistic men to encourage one another to perpetrate violence against women; for racists to promote and plan violence against black people; etc.
I do indeed use a Lemmy instance that is not aligned with tankie politics. That being said, I am also acutely aware that technology is political and developers of a given piece of software make decisions based on their personal politics, sometimes even without knowing it. So it is important, I feel, to be aware of that.
I will choose to leave it. Thank you.
No prob.
I can understand where mstdn.social is coming from and it is an “uneasy” situation. But the fact is that you have a choice here in which with whom you communicate.
The irony though of Reddit discussing to stay on Reddit and actually comply with the Autocratic leadership it has.
Just note that kbin.social currently has Cloudflare DDoS protection enabled which is breaking federation. Until this is removed, the communities are seperate.
Thanks, I just made a test post and could not figure out why they were not in sync.
There are other instances, like https://fedia.io/ for example.
I’ve got my lemmy instance proxied through cloudflare. It can work if you make it work. It does take a page rule to get around some of the bot detection nonsense.
It may be worth passing that rule/config over to @[email protected]
The captcha bot detector thing seems to be making it wonkier.
Good to know, I was wondering why I couldn’t see any kbin stuff here
The cloudflare protection of their main instance is breaking federation right now, which is a bit annoying. I hope this will be resolved soon.
The lack of app for KBin kills it for me.
I have a account with KBin and I may use it as well if there’s an app
Yeah an official app would be great.
/cries in iOS
God, what I would give for Apollo to rip the Reddit API guts out and refit with Lemmy’s. He open sourced it so I’m sure someone will.
Would be hilarious if all the third party reddit clients updated at the same time to connect to a completely new board.
Didn’t he open source the server backend? Not the app
Server backend stuff was to contradict the Reddit CEOs claims about Apollo being inefficient on the API.
Not sure honestly.
You can do the whole ‘add to home screen’ and it sort of functions like an app in iOS.
But kbin looks fine in browser on iOS? Actually, I’m really happy I don’t have to download another app to use it.
On Android, you can add it to your home screen and it functions kind of like an app… it could definitely benefit from a native app, though.
Nobody is going to fly with mobile browser these days. It’s App or die in this regard.
The biggest social media sites have apps. It’s suicide. Heck, the reason these sites are having the mass infux is because Reddits app sucks. If it was amazing nobody would of really cared and the spez drama wouldn’t have happened.
Just my 2c.
kbin.social currently has 20k + users. However it currently has federation disabled due to the traffic is receiving. Edit: It isn’t 100k
is this why I’m currently unable to access kbin from within Jerboa (Lemmy android client if you weren’t aware) aside from [email protected]? or would that not work anyway?
Yeh. That and some instances are just slow right now.
It’s a bit funny to be like “federation is what will make this great” and then “federation blows us up, so we’re turning it off”.
It was just too much greatness all at once. Like a fire hose of greatness when you just wanted a small sip
Federation isn’t disabled directly. The admin put the instance behind a cloudflare proxy, which breaks the ActivityPub federation without further tweaking to open up the relevant ports. He’s working on loosening up that restriction to get federation working properly again.
Edit: Also kbin.social currently sits at ~126k users.
honestly federation is one of the major things that confuses people about fediverse stuff, so that’s probably helping them.
Great news to me I’m not “pro-lemmy”, I am “anti-reddit”.
Same! I use a Lemmy instance myself. I’m just happy to see there is diversity in terms of software projects in the Threadiverse.
“Threadiverse” – i really like that :)
I wish I came up wit it myself! Sadly no, noticed it in a few threads over the last few days.
Humans are amazing.
Personally, I’m loyal to Beehaw. I like the culture that it is trying to grow. But I like how I can subscribe to things outside of beehaw as long the instance has federation enabled.
I don’t like that beehaw doesn’t allow community creation (or nsfw).
Is kbin also part of the fediverse? Can you interact with kbin from lemmy, and how is it different?
Use other instances then? Afaik beehaw is more of a family friendly place and not for nsfw. lemmy.world allows both community creation and nsfw
Any ideas what are the pros and cons of each option?
Lemmy is written in Rust, has been around for a while, and there are a bunch of established communities on established Lemmy instances already.
KBin is sadly PHP, relative newcomer, arguably better interface, and no baggage.
That’s all I got myself. Hope others will chip in.
Why is php a bad thing in this case? It seems like exactly the kind of application that php is well suited for. Plus there’s the maturity of php’s major frameworks. While I’m not saying Rust is necessarily bad for building web applications, it’s web frameworks must be less mature and battle tested. Plus, it seems like a lower bar to get community dev contributions for a php project than rust.
Well, to me Rust suggests that a given software project might be somewhat more performant, and somewhat more secure — but it all also depends on the developers, of course.
Well, that kind of sounds like the normal rust propaganda, don’t get me wrong, I do think the language is decent, it’s just tiring to see so many people just buying into and parroting some weird claims like “it’s rust, so it’s secure”
I like rust a lot, but it’s definitely in the place Go was a few years ago, where people just assume “written in rust” = good for some reason.
Exactly :) That’s what I mean as well, sure there are great things written in rust, but they are great because they are great, not because they are written in rust :)
I mean the reason people believe that is because it’s a very explicit language. It knows what’s in its memory at all times, and so at the lower layers it’s more secure by nature.
As opposed to php, you’re less likely to introduce a vulnerability by being sloppy with data sanitation - the language demands you tell it exactly the data structures you want it to put into memory. For that reason, the language is more secure - the parse json function is going to be less likely to be able to run rogue code maliciously embedded inside it than php, and if it does manage to do so, it’s easier to write php to blindly open a hole in the system from inside an interpreter than it is to break out of or hijack the runtime.
Obviously that doesn’t make it secure. It just means that all else being equal, rust is less vulnerable to a sloppy mistake at any given layer in the stack. Doesn’t mean you can’t make a logical mistake and open up a glaring security hole
And obviously you can write bulletproof php code, but every layer of the stack needs to be just as bulletproof. Including the interpreter and all your libraries - which historically were very much not bulletproof (it’s definitely much more strict than it used to be, and I think I heard fb tried compilation and I’m not sure if that’s become a thing, but it’s generally is more secure than interpretation for similar reasons)
All that being said, humans are just dumb and sloppy. We write shit code, and we try to minimize the surface area for mistakes. Rust has a much smaller surface area than php
I’m very much aware of that, I have programmed stuff in rust as well, but claiming that it’s secure and “better” because it’s rust is just pr, believe me, I can write some really sihtty rust code.
I’m no evangelist for PHP, but I say use the tool that you know, when I make a new program I’m going to do it in nim, because it’s the langauge that I have the most fun working with. It has mostly the same pros as rust, just with a lot nicer syntax and it’s generally more flexible.
No shade on people liking rust, but this constant parroting of the same point by people who probably never even used the langauge is getting kind of old.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally do not want to work with PHP ever again. I’m sure it’s gotten better, but when I last used it (>15 years ago), the standard library was super inconsistent and performance was pretty terrible. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and I now prefer client-side rendering.
But aside from my personal dislike for PHP, here is why I prefer client-side rendering:
- easier to have a solid caching strategy - means faster initial page load on mobile/slow connections
- performance issues are usually limited to database access
- you get the API for free for third party apps
- can separate frontend concerns from backend concerns, so it makes development a little easier to split into teams with different skill sets
That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load. I just personally am not interested in helping with kbin, but I would be totally on board with helping with Lemmy.
That said, for a federated system, it doesn’t really matter that much since people can just increase the number of instances to help share the load.
This is only partially true. There is a finite number of people willing to run an instance, and increasing the costs associated with a given size of instance means that we need more of them, or that they may not find it worth the time to pay $X per month for hosting when it only fits so many people.
Federation is a beautiful thing, but we have some economic issues we have to reckon with.
Yeah, it shows you haven’t used php in a while. Most of the gripes people have with it have been fixed over the years, and every framework encourages you to build an API-first app these days.
“Tankie baggage?”
Lemmy devs are tankies.
It’s funny seeing a communist use the word tankie unironically
It’s not weird for ancoms to say it, we say it all the time.
I mean, there are very different flavors of communist, so it kind of makes sense. You can believe in communal ownership of all non-personal property without supporting the violent oppression of dissent.
I keep hearing similar things, but not a single person has linked to a comment or anything the devs have actually said.
Where can I read about this? I want to see what they said.
I don’t see much proof there outside of some “this definitely happened” type thing. Not that I don’t believe them but that’s not the strongest proof.
Here is some evidence, not proof but a strong lead: Lemmy documentation . In paragraph 6+7 or so.
To me that looks like a fairly non-controversial perspective amongst leftists and communists (especially internationally). But that’s just my (communist) perspective.
The authors do clearly NOT “endorse, defend, or deny the crimes” by communist leaders in this text. They might however “have a bias in favor of authoritarian communist states, such as the People’s Republic of China” Yes, I just cited the definitions from Wikipedia. Maybe it is not a strong lead as I have said. Just one lead? I also heard that the two instances Lemmy.ml and lemmygrad were hosted on the same place. But this is hearsay and I am to lazy to confirm or disprove it.
the devs don’t even deny it, they’ve posted to reddit, but that’s gone now.
Heh, I just used another instance throught doubt just in case. They’re overloaded anyway. Code doesn’t have a political opinion (well, licences might), and other instances don’t show signs of what the commi instance is being accused off as far as I can tell
I suspect both the tankie, extreme right and left wing content is being suppressed by the slew of new content being posted now. And that shit not getting the votes it needs to be seen anymore.
deleted by creator
Nice to see the fediverse growing no matter where it is. As long as we can all communicate it doesn’t matter what instance or software we’re on.
Sidenote: is kbin a fork of lemmy? Or a different codebase entirely?
Entirely different codebase, I believe
Completely different codebase, written in PHP instead of Rust.
That’s good, I prefer that rather than development efforts being split between similar forks.
I thought it was the other way.
