this site has been very interesting so far, looking forward to see what it has for the future. I have been looking for a good reddit alternative for a long time and this feels right.
while waiting for kbin.social to get rid of the cloudflare stuff (which i understand is necessary right now, don't get me wrong) and federate with the other lemmy and kbin instances, i've also been happily returning to my mastodon account from back when twitter had a similar exodus last year!
i am so excited for when kbin and lemmy get to the same UX polish levels that mastodon is currently at. it's gonna be wonderful :)
kbin has 25k users. The statistics page shows users it's seen, so including all the polled federated servers.
lemmy.ml has 35k users, and lemmy as a network has 120k.
And Lemmy is still federating properly (both ways)
I'm not sure how the user count matters here. Kbin.social only came online very recently. Lemmy.ml has been operational for years. Of course it has more user accounts. The graph above indicates visits, or activity. In other words, kbin.social has much more activity, and is growing faster, than lemmy.ml.
I don't understand the comparison. The Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub facilitates the creation of lots of instances, or servers. Lemmy isn't just the service, it's also a front-end. Why would we compare all of the Lemmy front-end instances with one instance of Kbin? Kbin is built on top of the Lemmy service. They all share the same scaffolding. This means we can be thankful that one instance of Lemmy, such as Lemmy.ml, is not gaining momentum, while being thankful that another instance, like Kbin.social, is.
What I fear is that the big reddit subs will come online one after the other and prove right those who say "it's just the latest pointless protest and it will pass".
I don't think it will happen, but I can't deny I'm a bit afraid of it.
Most of the large subs are back online, but we actually are beginning to have enough traffic to show up in my search results. I think that bodes really well for the future of this platform. We're large enough that Reddit no longer completely overshadows us, so the next time Reddit fucks up we'll grow even larger.
Is there a way to see how many posts / comments are posted on reddit as a plot? I remember seeing one where you can see the waves of that. I'm interested to see whether the blackout made a difference.
this is 100% the main reason i chose kbin over lemmy. to me, lemmy feels like "new reddit" design-wise, and kbin feels like a refined hybrid between classic message boards and the unrivaled desktop-focused functionality of the "old reddit" UI
What is a visit over time? That sounds cumulative, but is it just the total visitors over 28 days divided by 28?
... honestly confused about how you can have one day spikes. edges are surprising enough, if you things go up by 5x and then go right back down I think there's a bug in the code. Did the spike go away on June 2nd and get removed from the sum?
It doesn't really matter, this isn't a race and all the federated clients... federate... it's just a strange graph.
Im pretty sure it can’t be cumulative since you have peaks and valleys in the plot. I think it’s just showing the visits per day during a period that goes from 16th May to 11th June. They’re just saying “over time” since the “time” is the x axis. The y axis is simply the number visits on that day (I think)
yes, they are scaling up! sorry if i was unclear. i was just noting that for the time being, there are moments when its faster, moments when its slower due to traffic changes
Not necessarily. Yes, in the long term, and it will be. Right now, we're managing ok, and the two other kbin instances that can federate are taking the load off our struggling one. We can't communicate with others right now, but I can't see it lasting very long and while it is slow, I think it gives us time to develop our corner a little before the floodgates open again.
I'm going to keep banging the drum here that the fact Kbin.social exists and is basically the instance is why it's gaining traction over Lemmy, which is far more splintered.
Not having to choose an instance massively reduces the barrier to entry for newbies. I really don't think we should be pushing people to other instances if we can help it right now, that can be a consideration further down the line.
It would be great if there was a way to use a single named instance but split it between many persons resources. Essentially what happens with activitypub and fediverse in general. But I agree a single website name would be better. Curious to see how these sites evolve
A pleasant surprise, too. Lemmy is massive, but kbin seems to be gaining anyway, despite being in its infancy and lacking an app. I wonder if it's partially due to the fact signing up isn't so daunting for beginners. That was what got me here, and I have to say I'm really glad I reconsidered my initial choices
I am on both, admittedly. Hard to say which one I prefer so far, but I really wish kbin had an iOS app. Lemmy has mlem, but I still have to use the site in a browser to do much of anything right now
That's what I did and, honestly, it's a better use experience than Mlem. I started with Lemmy, but the amount of pro-China content floating around was off-putting.
My only concern with KBin is getting enough instances up to support the population.
FYI Kbin is built on top of (or at least interoperates with) the Lemmy service. In other words, you can interact with other instances exactly the same as if you had signed up on one of the Lemmy front-end instances. I think there is some limitation on federation at the moment due to traffic.
I've heard from a few that the documentation needs some clarification, so at the moment spinning up a new instance is tricky. Once that gets cleared up, I know there's definitely interest out there for creating new kbin instances. Hopefully before the 30th and the next potential phase of Rexxit.
For me, ease of sign up, and the overså user experience feeling now akin to reddit tbh. I have lemmy accounts too, kbin just feels more polished to me, in spite of its relative youth.
Same here, I clicked a Lemmy link back when I first heard about it, maybe early May, but I didn't stay long because I didn't have the energy to figure out how to sign up.
That really does make me happy, now that I know about it. I would have felt so left out had I realized after going somewhere else. Not that I have that much to talk about atm, but I have the option and I'll come up with stuff
Part of what attracted me here and keeps me here is (1) the popularity as a Reddit alternative before I got here, (2) the promising interface, (3) the fact that the preponderance of activity here seems to center around normal stuff rather than just politics/ideologies, and (4) the fact that it’s written in PHP which means I’ll be a lot more likely to be able to contribute to development.
Being able to just sign up without any dramas (like waiting got invite codes from places like tildes) was one of the main factors for me.
The main page and layout of the site is also pretty good compared to some of the others I looked at.
There's a few things I miss, like being able to toggle close / open deeply nested comments, sliding from right to left to open the sidebar and other small niggles, but overall it's a decent looking site that seems to have active content.
I got here after experiencing several bugs over on Lemmy.world. The last one, just before I deleted my account, was seeing me logged in on someone else's account briefly before it loaded up mine. I could see what communities they were subbed to and the list was considerably longer than what I had subbed to over there. Yeah, while kbin.social may be having lag issues due to server load, at least I'm not seeing stuff out of place. The software seems much more solid here.
The onboarding experience was very smooth. As someone who's prone to analysis paralysis, I'm kind of glad kbin isn't as splintered as lemmy is—which does defeat the decentralization motive—but kbin's good UI/UX helped a lot as well. A few more QOL updates on that front and we're golden.
Even on mobile the web app is decent, but the lack of automatic opening links in another tabs regardless of device is certainly painful.
Having a few little things to improve the QOL would be top notch, most of the major bits you get from native apps you can get in progressive web apps (PWAs)
click to toggle deep comment threads
click to show actions on comments (moving the reply, boost, more into it's own section so you can see more comments on screen at once)
having the comments endlessly scroll instead of being paginated
It's a really nice site considering it's still early
Signup was key for me joining here, but what's keeping me here now that I'm more up to speed on how things work is that kbin feels like a mashup of both Lemmy and Mastodon, with both magazines and microblogs as first-class citizens.
A Reddit mod that spearheaded Reddit migration first promoted Lemmy and then changed his promotion to kbin upon learning some questionable human rights issues with Lemmy. I’m only giving a synopsis of what they said and they had a large write up with links to a variety of sources that I did not look into. I’m just reporting what the mod spearheading this effort said.
Yeah, I was already panicking more than a little with the vast array of unexplained options, so hearing and seeing that for myself was really the nail in what was already a really stressed out coffin. Hearsay is the admin of lemmyworld (ruud) is pretty standup, so that bears mentioning. But kbin's sign-up felt like it would take a lot of the guesswork out of something I didn't understand, and I already liked what I saw from Ernest. He seems down-to-earth and honestly dedicated, and I'm much more comfortable seeing where he takes kbin than I would be with them and lemmy.
My other option was going to be beehaw. I was really interested in their avowal to talk problems out as humans rather than insta-banning without giving users a chance to improve, as well as their removal of the downvote button. I'm still curious to see what that will do to the dynamics there. But then I dallied in actually applying to it, and I found out Beehaw is among the top instances that's blocked the highest amount of other instances already, which I'm not pleased with. To be blunt, it makes the whole thing feel like a really progressive North Korea.
Sure enough, glancing at their mod log as I type this, there's already one ban for "orientalism" and another for posting a comment telling beehaw and lemmy to stop fighting with each other ("homophobia"). Don't think I'm really regretting that decision. Just gonna kick back in my chair and not read any more of that, I think.
Ordering of instances of Beehaw's block list (alphabetically from some point) suggests, that administration had imported one of many block lists tailored for Mastodon.
The Lemmy developer and Lemmy.ml owner, Dessalines, is a Marxist-Leninist who is banning anyone critical of China and Russia. I was banned because he denies the Xinjiang genocide is occurring and I questioned him. He’s been careful to remove any mention of his political views from the signup process. So my first discovery of the cult-like community he has cultivated was in a meta post where all the users were speaking about how amazing and democratic China is, and how the West is evil. I feel more people need to understand that they are fucking nutjobs in Lemmy.ml.
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