They both have the same content, you can subscribe to the same communities using either. Theoretically. In practice we are currently experiencing intermittent problems sharing content between Lemmy and Kbin, especially with lemmy.ml, one of the largest Lemmy instances. These are temporary growing pains and will be resolved soon.
Try a kbin instance, and a lemmy instance. See what clicks. You'll know within a few minutes.
You shouldn't be using or browsing Lemmy ML anyway. Unless you love authoritarian dictatorships, because the devs over there, the people who run that instance, are massive tankies.
I see content from both at the same time so… I don’t know what the difference is other than a web interface and maybe differences in what’s been defederated.
Since I use an app, the web interface differences mean shit to me.
I personally prefer Lemmy over Kbin for many reasons:
None of the Kbin names make sense. Why are communities called magazines? Threads are posts? It just doesn’t map to existing mental concepts very well.
Kbin makes you go through settings just to access your subscribed magazines.
Kbin exposes votes front and center in the UI. You can see who voted for what post / comment and personally I think voting should be private. Obviously, anyone can host their own instance and see the votes due to federation, but there’s a big difference between that and outright showing it in the interface.
Kbin’s UI looks a bit outdated and early 2000s to me. It looks like a mix of the old Facebook style and Digg.
Lemmy’s UI feels more performant, especially on mobile.
Microblogging feels like an afterthought. Makes the site feel like it’s shoving two different sites together.
Content wise, both Kbin and Lemmy federate with each other, so ideally you should be seeing the same amount of content, but there’s federation and load issues on both sides that’s preventing that from working correctly. I have faith it will be solved eventually as these are just early growing pains.
I will say that, personally, I’ve found more of the communities I want to join on Lemmy, but I am sure another person with different interests might say otherwise. Try both and make your own decision!
Naming is actually an important thing. When I see a magazine, I immediately think about a close group of authors which are allowed to write there. Magazine is a blog, not a community.
You definitely don't have to go through the settings to access your subbed feed. And the UI is exactly why I use it. Lemmy is just confusing and weird if you don't use a mobile app that uses the typical layout that also kbin uses. That kinda disqualifies it for desktop use.
Funny, Kbin’s UI design and better performant feel were major reasons why I switched over from Lemmy. It reminded me of old.reddit.com, which I feel familiar with. Shows that it might be a matter of personal taste. Or maybe you experienced a different kbin design (there are still major updates every week, the last one just yesterday).
One additional point that also influenced my personal choice was the political stance of the Lemmy developers (edit: removed my reference to these rumors, because now I‘m uncertain how much of it was true). However, that might not be that big of an issue in the open source environment than it might appear at first.
Mastodon integration feels unpolished, but I‘d rather have it than not have it.
I think that voting on kbin is private now, by the way. Only boosting (retweet) is not private. (Edit: I was wrong. See below.)
One additional point that also influenced my personal choice was the political stance of the Lemmy developers (tankies and holocaust deniers).
I think this post eases my concerns. As long as they aren’t silencing or influencing conversations in the code, what does it matter? And you’re right, the open source nature of it makes it even less of an issue.
Mastodon integration feels unpolished, but I‘d rather have it than not have it.
Fair preference, I am glad you find it useful. Personally, I just don’t think “tweet” style posts mix really well with link aggregation. It’s a very different use case for me and I’d rather use Mastodon when I need to use that kind of social media.
I think that voting on kbin is private now, by the way.
No, click on the “more” button under each post -> activity -> favorites tab.
I’m not sure on the privacy side cause I didn’t really look into it, but for content in theory you should be able to pretty much see the same content on either site. In practice kbin is still very new and has some issues / is slow with federation. This means you currently will see more posts on lemmy than on kbin.
Personally, I like kbin’s design better and use it more (if you’re on mobile its mobile browser site looks great and can be used just fine until we get an app for it). If I run out of new stuff that interests me on kbin I switch to lemmy to catch all the stuff that didn’t show up on kbin.
Being a total n00b, they seem about the same. The kbin instance I’m on seems a little more functional on the desktop, but I’ve had a better mobile experience with lemmy, solely because I’ve found actual mobile clients for it.
I seem to have been able to subscribe to kbin feeds on lemmy, if the URLs are any indication (and I honestly don’t know enough to know).
They’re basically the same. There are no significant difference in terms of privacy and contents amount is, because they’re both on Fediverse, exactly the same. If you care about privacy, host your own. It’s that simple.
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