Looks like the admin for kbin.lol has some pretty valid gripes with the current status of Kbin. I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.
Kbin looks visually great but the backend just isn’t there. Check out his statement, it’s worth the read.
Kbin wasn’t that old and @ernest has been pretty open about everything. Like, they had this set up for a few friends and their friends. Kbin went from a couple hundred to thousands of people in zero time. Kbin gets a bit of space to make something.
Kbin has only existed publicly for a little over two months.
Lemmy has been around for four years.
It’s rather significant imo that Kbin is on par functionally with Lemmy, and Kbin.social has higher active user counts then all but a few Lemmy instances. Kbin seems to solve issues faster as well in the several weeks I’ve been here anyway.
From what I've read about lemmy it's not in much better shape, the backend is not optimized for scaling up and is held together by wishes and prayers.
On one hand, I feel like there are software devs that would say that about literally any piece of software in production just to feel superior or because of their lack of experience. On the other... they are probably right. These are passion projects done in free time, jury-rigged in any way they could do it just to handle the absurd influx of new users.
We all knew that this is young tech being developed "live in prod", of course it won't work as flawlessly as something made by a corporation with 2000 employees over the last 10 years. Or you know, be as stable and reliable as Twitter, the biggest social network that even governments use, owned by a multibillionare geniu.... ok that's it, can't do it more😁
I'm sure these issues will be ironed out eventually. Mastodon is in a pretty stable spot right now and hopefully kbin/lemmy get to a similar state in 6-12 months.
Newer uses of the fediverse also don’t realise yet that Lemmy is older then Kbin, years older. Kbin has only really publically existed for a couple months.
I was here before any surge when there were about 200 users and Ernest followed everyone MySpace Tom style. It’s damn impressive how the site held up even when he had to introduce cloudflare protection temporarily. It was slow, but never crashed completely.
Some Lemmy instances did go down for a bit, even the bigger ones that didn’t had more synchronising issues then Kbin. I’m not trying to knock Lemmy by any means, but I think this goes to show that Kbin is alright if at a few months old, it can keep up with software that’s been around for several years at this point.
As a user, I plan to continue sticking with kbin.social for now because it's working well enough. Not perfectly, I can see Federation issues, but I'm comfortable with an imperfect experience in exchange for giving it support.
I don't actually have a big issue with the Tankie devs behind Lemmy. It's open source, they have no control over it, if they try any funny business they'll be forked away lickety-split. But I think it's vital for an open standard to have more than one independent implementation. That keeps the implementers honest, nobody can just slip in a convenient little "extension" because theirs is the only client using the standard anyway.
Yeah, and kbin.social is really the only Kbin instances right now so you’re going to see everything from those users and federated Lemmys are indeed showing up as well, it should get better.
I’ve seen the Lemmy dev’s post on GitHub about Marxism. I don’t know the context behind him posting that, but some folks were also saying they supported the events at Tiananmen Square or something? I haven’t seen any proof of that.
As far as their Marxism support is concerned, that’s a whole different conversation. Many goodhearted people support some concepts of Marxism, because on the surface, Marxism does look like an appealing society to live in, but it almost never works out due to the style of governance required to make it work. Those put in power of a Marxist society will always become corrupt because power corrupts absolutely. But some of those concepts could potentially influence a better quality of life and that’s okay to discuss. Let me not get any further than that.
Personally I prefer Kbin to lemmy; as other have said, we must put into account that kbin is much younger that lemmy, but @ernest has been amazing in managing to keep it all running when the users went basically from 0 to 1000 in a matter of hours!
In addition to the backend, I'm not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.
Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?
Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.
Yeah, I know. Some of those terms come from Mastodon (the Twitter alt). In Mastodon, you can boost posts (tweets) which is akin to a retweet (without quoting). And a Favorite is similar to liking a tweet, although Mastodon makes it so that you can see all your favorites in a list, which is nice.
How those operations function on a Lemmy instance, I have no idea. From what I remember Kbin was supposed to blend these together so you could use your one Kbin account to check out Lemmy communities and Mastodon posts in one spot?
The whole magazine thing, yeah, just not needed in my opinion - call it communities.
The idea of combining the two isn't necessarily bad, Kbin has some good ideas and I guess that's why it's gotten popular, there are just some baffling stuff too.
The leftover terminology from Mastodon makes some sense (haven't used that one myself), maybe the founder thought the majority of users would join from there, but the magazine thing just confuses me since they are clearly just communities filled with threads. When I browse single picture meme posts or questions on AskKbin my first thought isn't "ah yes, Articles in a Magazine".
I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.
It's OSS, you can contribute to improve it. Otherwise just sit tight and wait.
There's not a multi-million dollar VC investment back these projects, they owe you nothing. You (as in the wider community) contribute to improve it or you wait for the one guy to decide your feature request is worth tackling.
I'm surprised you're having trouble federating with kbin.social- that's always been working for me from my personal instance. I have trouble federating with a few lemmy instances though. Lemmy.ml is still blocking the kbin useragent. And the communities of infosec.pub, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, among others- cannot be discovered from kbin.
Unfortunately it does. Imagine that some time ago, everyone was on reddit. Now the people who leave reddit split between many lemmy instances and kbin. In addition, some will stay on reddit.
No it doesn’t. On lemmy or kbin or lolite you can have as many instances as you want across those platforms and the communities, comments and posts are all shared.
I’m on lemmy but I can post in kbin communities and interact with their users. I can view posts from lemmy on mastodon ( and the reverse once the devs get around to it)
You're probably wanting something like Reddit's "multireddit" functionality. I know of this issue for Lemmy, with some links to related issues in the comments. Kbin has one here. That would allow multiple communities to look like a single one from the user's perspective.
I’ve been trying for over a week to delete my account at kbin, and it always says success, but my account is still there. Glad to know I’m not crazy and it’s an actual issue.
Important to note that’s not necessarily Kbin. Some of the major instances of Lemmy had an issue where they were blocking inbound Kbin traffic but allowing their traffic out.
It was unclear if it was somehow intentional or the result of a bug in their most recent upgrade.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.
I don’t thinks that’s accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. I’ve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.
The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. I’m not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.
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