They’re both built on ActivityPub and look very similar, but Kbin is talked about like an alternative to Lemmy instead of an instance of it. Is it a fork? Why is it better or worse?
Lemmy very much tries to be "federated Reddit". It's Reddit as it was in 2010ish, and that's all it tries to be. And that's fine, but it limits the development of what the Fediverse is. You can use a Mastodon account to browse Lemmy, but you can't use a Lemmy account to browse Mastodon (and the devs aren't planning on adding it - I asked).
Kbin, however, looks at things from a different perspective. On Kbin, you have both threads and microblogs. This replicates modern Reddit's ability to post to your own profile, except instead of going to some user subreddit that nobody reads - it's treated like a post on Twitter or Tumblr and shared more widely. You can follow people on Mastodon from Kbin, and vice versa. There are plans in the future to support more things that make the Fediverse great - you can read the roadmap here.
Note Kbin as a project is less than a year old, and this "main" server only came online a month ago. Until very recently it was just ernest talking to himself... this amount of growth wasn't planned for!
Long-term, Kbin will be somewhere that connects the Fediverse platforms - you won't need a Mastodon account and a Pixelfed account and a PeerTube account. I really like that approach. Rather than trying to do one thing to the detriment of everything else, it goes beyond just a Reddit clone and is also its own thing. That's why I joined; it's a completely different approach to how the Fediverse should be interacted with.
This. As people already said, it's not that important which admin is running certain instance. On the other hand, I think it's just better to not use lemmy.ml as your main "entry point" to the Fediverse.
For me personally it does not feel right at all to actively use a resource administered by a person sympathizing with bloody monsters such as Xi or Stalin. It's like if they had swastika as their logo and said that Hitler was a fine guy - really the same thing.
I'm not sure that should really matter much though. Lemmy is federated, open-source, and makes zero revenue. It's not like the developer has much control over instances other than his own or even the code it runs on, ultimately.
It's not super surprising that communists would be drawn to the fediverse's design philosophy and while I might think he's misguided politically the software isn't really his at the end of the day, even if he is the lead maintainer.
It's not the same issue as closed platforms have like Facebook+Zuckerberg or Reddit+Spez. If he starts messing with the project the community can take it and leave.
Not only that but the design encourages that the majority of the community not be on the instance he controls from the outset.
There's a certain amount of distance from any particular instance, where the magazines there are "local" and the magazines at another instant are remote. That means that people at, say, lemmygrad, while they can reach out to off-instance magazines, are less likely to, and because of founder effects, people who join are far more likely to be tankies or people who are okay with tankies. I totally think they should have a place, but i don't want them making up the majority of discussion in the instance I am local to.
Lemmygrad also makes most of them really easy to just block.
Like, the primary issue really seems to be that Lmemygrad is where tankies go to be performative and edgy, so they end up trolling and harassing people.
So as a mod or admin you get a lot of mileage out of just blocking Lmemygrad at the domain level.
You're 100% right and I completely agree with you.
But to play devil's advocate: people are saying that drawing attention to Lemmy will mean more donations to Lemmy's dev team, which in turn supports them.
I personally don't care what the politics are behind a good piece of software. I don't know Linus Torvalds' politics; I don't know the politics of the folks behind Mastodon; I don't know the politics of Jimmy Wales. I can guess, of course, but regardless of their politics they've made a good product and that's found success.
While that may be true - and I can't stress how highly I disagree with genocide denial and Stalin apologetics - it's not logically consistent with how people treat basically anything else.
Reddit is backed by Tencent and Peter Thiel. Tencent is a massive Chinese company, and therefore has close relations with the Chinese government. They are Tankies in practice, whether the executives are ideologues or not. And Peter Thiel is an isolationist, white supremacist, and fascist.
But who the the people who support capitalist endeavours support never really gets brought up as a reason to avoid those endeavours. And that's even when just using those products and services directly financially supports the fascists and the people who happily take their money. Using Lemmy doesn't directly support the project maintainers.
I agree - I actually made a bit of a longer post originally, but I realized I was ranting a bit so I cut it down. But I suppose I can rant a little bit.
The thing is... actively denying a genocide is a bad look. Standing against so-called "imperialism" while simultaneously supporting Russia's imperialistic invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is a bad look. Taking down posts critical of China for so-called "orientalism" is a bad look (and shows you don't really understand what orientalism means - I took a whole-ass class on orientalism in college, and the definition is definitely not "anything critical of China").
It's true that most people can overlook Tencent being part of the PRC. You'll see some grumbling, but nothing huge. People don't like it, but they also don't see Tencent or TikTok as actively doing the worst that the PRC can do. And you see that same grumbling with the bad actors of capitalism - Nestle gets a lot of hate (rightfully!).
But at the same time, Nestle isn't calling for a return of Nazi Germany the way Lemmygrad (and those affiliated, e.g. Lemmy's maintainers) calls for the return of the Soviet Union. Peter Thiel wants a fascist ethnostate, but Peter Thiel isn't the CEO of Reddit and his influence over Spez/Reddit's board is likely minimal.
Again, there is absolutely the point of "the maintainers of open source are not the project". I completely agree with that. I fact, I will even give an example:
You know Truth Social, right? Do you know what Truth Social is built on? Mastodon. Do you know what protocol it uses to communicate? ActivityPub. Truth Social is part of the Fediverse, same as Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc.
Does that mean the people behind Mastodon agree with Truth Social? Absolutely not. They are completely independent of each other. Mastodon has no influence on Truth Social and vice versa.
Lemmy is the inverse of that. The "main" instance is distasteful politically, and there are child instances (like Beehaw) which are more neutral/progressive. Beehaw can fork if they wish and be fully independent of Lemmy; but they are of the same mind as me that good software is not political, and it is impossible to only use that which is morally righteous. Lemmy is a tool fit for their purpose, and while forking is always an option... they don't see the point in abandoning good software just because they disagree with the maintainers politically.
The issue... people get squicky when they find out the platform they use is associated with tankies. It's turned a lot of people off, because they see "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China is the true beacon of democracy" and don't want to be affiliated with that group. Knowing that they're contributing their effort to making that platform better - and thus elevating the developers to a spot where they can more easily get donations and improve it - just doesn't sit right with some folks.
If Peter Thiel started his own open-source project and everyone started flocking to it, I'd reject it on principle. I don't care how open it is or how good everyone says it works; if he's actively running it and making day-to-day decisions there's zero chance I'd support that. Just like I don't support Truth Social.
I joined Lemmy back in 2020, when it was a little babby project. I watched the tankie community bud and fester. I'm left-leaning myself (but not that left-leaning), and originally I thought I had found a group of like-minded folks... until the masks started coming off. And then I realized that Lemmy was so small that there was no choice but to interact with them. I spun up my own instance for a hot second where tankies (and fascists) were banned... before just giving up and shutting it down because the only people on Lemmy were people I didn't want on my instance.
So I returned to Reddit. I didn't like Reddit much, either (hence why I tried Lemmy), but at least the worst parts were segmented into T_D and PCM and GenZedong etc., where I could pretend they didn't exist.
When the protest started, I was hesitant to come back to Lemmy. I knew at some point the userbase was going to discover that fact and have the same reaction I did when I realized how far down the rot went. I returned reluctantly, hoping that when the drama started people would at least go to another Lemmy instance instead of back to Reddit.
I'm glad I found Kbin, though. Kbin seems nice and friendly. The most drama is due to a tech issue (Cloudflare), which is totally solvable and something I can live with. It feels a lot more like Mastodon here than it does on Lemmy.ml. (Lemmy.world seems alright too, if people must use Lemmy.) And at the very least if the Lemmy guys pull something shady and people start leaving en masse there's https://fedia.io/ (another Kbin instance) to point them at.
I am not convinced that these donations will be an enormous sum. Furthermore, I also assume that according to his political worldviews, he will use the donations as intended. :D
In the blog post of mastodon.world, the maintainer of this instance, got something around €1000 the month (see here https://blog.mastodon.world). While the Lemmy dev could probably receive a bit more, this is still nothing you could start a revolution from, while coding on your open-source project.
Most things have been mentioned already. In terms of development time Lemmy is much older. I don't know who the main developer is over there so Kbin seems more focused at the moment, which is a good thing. In terms of userbase and instances Kbin is smaller.
you have to take into account that kbin.social is not yet totally federated with other instances, because the website is under a Cloudflare protection. this is to let the main dev focus on more important thing that dealing with a direct attack on the website servers. it will be re-federated gradually.
other instances like https://fedia.io are federated if I'm correct.
I'm not gonna lie, outside of a few communities im not really sure how much I care about this site federating with lemmy instances. Especially ones like lemmygrad.
At least we have the option to turn off federation. I haven't done so yet, but I have noticed a dive in post quality since federation was turned back on. Everything on kbin itself that I've seen has been cordial and civil, but there have been a number of comments from lemmy users I've seen in just the last day that led me to block some channels of theirs, and a bit more shitposting than I'd like in my feed.
I still can't log in on beehaw. Got lemmy.world working, but yeah this is one of the big problems for the Fediverse that I haven't had a problem with at all here (or at, say, Squabbles).
Yeah I have stopped trying with beehaw, I have no clue if they did not accept me or if it's issues with the amount of new people but I tried for 3 days to even log in with no success and am just done, kbin and squabbles has seemed the best so far to me.
Register on one instance and subscribe to communities from all of them. Some of them will say "Subscription pending", don't worry about that, you'll still see posts from them in the "Subscribed" feed.
Just wish we could see federated content on Kbin. Right now it feels like its own lonely instance while the Lemmy instances are thriving from multiple other instances federating their content.
Personally, I think the fediverse just confuses new users and is a big barrier to entry. Id love to see Kbin or a Lemmy instance just be it’s own centralized thing with no federation. But I’ve only had a few days of experience with this so perhaps I will change my tune eventually.
Reddit relies on mods to make the site work. The owner of Reddit has decided that the moderators are serfs, bound to the community, and that therefore, the mods' opinions are of no account. Mastodon is moderated, if it is moderated at all, by the server owner or the server owner's deputies. The difference is that the users and deputies can switch to another server fairly fluidly-- they aren't stuck with one owner. kbin and lemmy are both trying to create communities where the mods and users aren't serfs. Federation makes it easy for users to quit a server without quitting a community.
I agree. I think Kbin and Lemmy can learn a few things from how Mastodon operates right now... Very easy to sign up (though there's still the weird barrier to entry of figuring out which instance to sign up for), and then you're exposed to the entire federated Mastodon content pretty transparently.
By contrast, on Lemmy, you have to select "All" to see all communities across servers. And Kbin doesn't currently see federated content at all, so...
And then, ultimately, you're stuck with a new problem that the Fediverse is creating : if I want to subscribe, say, to a gaming community/magazine, which one do I pick? Every instance has its own communities on popular topics.
I partially and I found it myself. However, there's been enough posts from people who couldn't find it, or who weren't aware of it, etc, that it's at least a small barrier to use. And like 1bluepixel said, in my case the settings have reverted for me a few times.
Personally, I think that once you've registered, and once you've subscribed to something, it should automatically be the default. Then be able to be changed, but it'd be a UX improvement.
I don't think there is anything necessarily wrong with multiple gaming communities/subreddits. I look at it as competition. Right now on reddit, we have r/gaming. And it's PACKED FULL of people/posts. So maybe that fragments just a bit, as there is a decent Kbin gaming community, a good one on lemmy, and a good one somewhere else. So less users per, or the users browse all three. But maybe less shit posting. Maybe less spam. Maybe less worry that one goes to shit, cause the other two can take over.
There is definitely value to having a lot of people move over to one community. We need a certain mass adoption for it to take off. But we don't necessarily need everyone. There may be plenty of people to form 3 separate, quality, gaming communities.
I'd argue the opposite though. I lurked on Lemmy a bit to compare the 2 and despite having a lot more users, Lemmy looks less active. The front page has days old threads. Once federated, I expect Kbin to be the clear superior option.
You mean threads vs microblogs? The simplest answer is that threads are "supposed" to be used like reddit. whereas microblogs are "supposed" to be used like twitter.
It's kinda silly and holds no real merit, but I like the name Kbin more than Lemmy. Lemmy reminds me of Lemmings and the idea of creatures running off a cliff. Kbin is shorter, doesn't really mean anything, and feels cooler/more technical. Just my 2c though.
Kbin is a shortened version of 'karabin' (polish for carbine/rifle
That would explain the magazine nomenclature.
Edit: Ernest clarified here. Karab.in was just a play on words. Kbin is actually referencing Linux terminology.
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