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
This is great. It suddenly feels like the internet of 2003 again, with small communities popping up, competition and less of a corporate chokehold. Only this time they have a shared login and crosstalk, which was sorely lacking back then. If we are lucky this event might establish a stable, new part of the internet, which is separate from the consolidated platforms. The Fediverse doesn’t have to replace sites like reddit, just be a next step for people fed up with the corporate net (corponet?).
This is actually more like a return to the 90s of Usenet and mailing lists imho.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking all day that’s it is like Usenet 2.0 in a way. Back when Usenet actually had enthusiast conversation happening on it.
Maybe its just Nostalgia, but ill take that. Where you actually go to a place that has something to do with what your looking for, rather then a giant, centralized site where random people pop in, talk crap, and pop out.
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.
I thought it was the other way.
That’s good, I prefer that rather than development efforts being split between similar forks.
in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail
Umm, you really should have launched this before shutting down the current tools mods use.
They’ve been promising better mod tools for years
They are totally right around the corner though, and won’t be a buggy mess at all!
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.
I hope I just witnessed the beginning of something we’ll casually use in a few years.
I tried kbin but it currently slow as hell at least for me. It definitely is more inviting with its design though.
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 meta@kbin.social? or would that not work anyway?
Yeh. That and some instances are just slow right now.
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.
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
If I were to switch from Lemmy to KBin (or vice versa), would I have to start over (e.g. create a new account there and lose all my comments etc.)? Or would it be possible to “migrate”?
For now, you would have to lost everything and create a new account. But maybe we’ll see a solution for it coming
This would be cool regarding the current scaling problems with too many users choosing the same instance (it would make “distributing” the load easier my making it possible to move already created, existing accounts, if the user wishes to), and also would it solve the problem if an instance is to be shut down for whatever reason, people also could “take their stuff” and go “somewhere else”. Let’s see, maybe it’ll be possible in the future.
You can’t just subscribe to their communities?
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!
Can someone explain the “tankie” baggage? I’ve seen it thrown around quite a bit but no one seems to explain it in detail.
I linked the “tankie baggage” phrase to a post about it now. Check it out.
(Some) Lemmy devs seem to have political ideologies that are within the “tankie” settings. That’s mostly it. Some people express they feel uncomfortable about it. Such devs hold an instance separate from the flagship instance (lemmygrad.ml), which in my opinion is not bad at all, I think it’s better they keep them to themselves giving an option to other instances to block it. They’re not trying to shove tankies ideas down anyones throats or anything.
Well, TIL a new word: tankie.
Purge it from your mind before you fall down a rabbithole of some of the most brain-broken people on the internet.
While true, there’s still some pretty questionable/pro-CCP moderation on lemmy.ml.
That’s true and I added it later by an edit in my original post which appears not to have synchronized to Beehaw yet. I wholeheartedly agree with the final paragraph of that post.
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 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.
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, and instances can communicate / ban each other as they please. It’s impossible for the politics of the creators to have any real effect on the software, by design. I feel like people aren’t grasping how this all works. If you’re concerned about their politics, just don’t use instances that align with those politics, even spin up your own if you’re really worried about it.
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.
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 will choose to leave it. Thank you.
No prob.
And the nice thing, It doesn’t hurt the users of one or the other, all content on both platforms are accessible on both platforms! the more the merrier
Since I’m new here, how? When I click on Communities, it does not seem to show me anything from KBin.
Kbins cloudflare ddos protection fucks federation up at the moment when its working again you do as you would any other community. If no one in your instance subscribes to it, it wont be in the list, then you aearch for it with !communityname@kbin.social and your instance will federate with it
Just note that kbin.social currently has Cloudflare DDoS protection enabled which is breaking federation. Until this is removed, the communities are seperate.
Good to know, I was wondering why I couldn’t see any kbin stuff here
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 @Ernest@kbin.social
The captcha bot detector thing seems to be making it wonkier.
There are other instances, like https://fedia.io/ for example.
Thanks, I just made a test post and could not figure out why they were not in sync.
I gave up on kbin almost immediately as I could not figure out how to subscribe to communities besides using their search, which doesn’t show all communities. And even when subscribing to communities I could not figure out how to make the feed show my subscriptions rather than whatever the default is.
Can’t tell if it’s bad UX or missing functionality.
Might just be a case of a relatively new project still figuring stuff out.
I find kbin’s interface to be a bit cluttered. But I really like the ease of following microblog accounts. If I could just have a “microblog only” feed in kbin I think it would make me switch my dartboard.social domain from Akkoma to kbin.
We will see how it shakes out after a few updates.
