Why is Kbin seemingly growing considerably slower than Lemmy?
I'm a bit confused at the explosive growth of Lemmy and the slower growth of Kbin. Do the stats reflect the reality or is there a problem with the data being fed back to the various stat hubs?
I know the difference is partly because Lemmy was a larger platform, and is better known but the growth of Kbin seems suprisingly flat while the community seems to be getting more and more active?
I think a lot of people moved from Reddit to Kbin in the early days of the black out and at that point Kbin was isolated from Lemmy. So when people saw less content they jumped to Lemmy. Which just made that already big community grow. Then people told other people they went to Lemmy instead of Kbin.
I admit that I had buyer's remorse for a bit after immediately jumping to Kbin and finding out later that Lemmy existed. Lemmy's UI just looks friendlier and more colorful. But I'm sticking with Kbin-- no reason not to, really, since all (or most) of the content cross-pollenates!
I haven't quite decided between the two, but I'm planning to self host one of them. And if kbin sticks around and keeps gaining traction, I'm much more familiar with hosting and working with PHP than with Rust
Interesting. I got the opposite impression, that Kbin is friendlier and has a nicer UI (for the most part). I ended up moving from lemmy.world because of it.
Well that's an entire hassle and seems far from ideal, lol. I have a mastodon account I never use, but for now I'm just gonna stick to kbin and follow whatever lemmy folks or whatever I want from here.
Lotta bots on Lemmy. The stats I saw looked like 200k users in the last few weeks. I'd willing to gamble most are bots. Maybe some for ads, maybe some to claim names then sell 'em later.
@BananaTrifleViolin. I'm fine with it. I tried lemmy first and was met by a ton of issues from the influx. Kbin thus far has seemed more stable and honestly I like the layout a bit better.
Me too, I tried to make a lemmy account and it wouldn't work at first, and then when it did work it wouldn't let me log in. I can't imagine how much more of a pain in the ass it would be if it was one of the instances that required an essay to apply for membership.
I tried kbin and it worked first try, no problems at all. I figured I would run into the same problem I had trying to join lemmy but didn't have a problem at all.
I can't imagine how many more people would be signing up to the federation if it just worked first try.
Probably because of the endorsement of Lemmy by subreddits, which has been far greater than the endorsement of Kbin. Lemmy's also just been around far longer than Kbin. Those server issues that Kbin encountered during the whole explosion of users also likely slowed down growth a bit. Even with Lemmy's bot problem I think these have made it grow faster anyway.
I also think some of the growth of Lemmy is the ability to get the project to a functioning stance. The start of Kbin still seems a little rocky, but getting better.
It iis easier to sign up for kbin I think because kbin lets you sign up with google or facebook. I did gmail google sign up because I like being lazy.
Kbin is slightly more confusing (they named everything a little weird), so if you do make a kbin.social account lmk or ask many questions about how to do stuff. It’s easy once I knew stuff like magazine = subreddit
I have the same problem on mobile (both through browser and Memmy), but not on my desktop. Really annoying. Been using Reddit since 2009. Feels really odd to switch things up, but lemmy.world, kbin and squabbles seems like potentially good alternatives. I wonder which one will end up being "the one".
Some of that may well be real, but one issue that is a factor is that it appears that someone is having bots auto-creating accounts at lemmy instances with open-sign-up, which is believed to be responsible for a considerable portion of the new accounts (basically, many of the accounts don't appear to be active, and apparently the instance admins are banning a number of them). The lemmy.dbzer0.com instance admin has something up on GitHub to try to monitor the situation:
I'll add that that does highlight the fact that the Reddit team has put a lot of time over the years into countering bad actors, spammers and the like, and some of those are probably going to try to hit lemmy/kbin.
Even on mobile I like the look of kbin more, but functionality is better for lemmy. I think it will change in future, kbin is just too young. In any case for mobile I have to see an app in a long term.
Those are actually really valid reasons and presumably why I'm liking kbin as well. Design and feel are really big factors for user adaption, thanks for sharing your experience.
It's also surprising because there are just fewer prominent kbin-based websites. Lemmy has lemmy.ml, lemmy.one, lemmy.world, and sh.itjust.works. And Beehaw, I guess, but they specifically throttle their growth.
kbin has kbin.social, and then a bunch of instances that are just way, way lower profile.
I mean, it's so surprising that we should probably question it a little bit.
Kbins documentation for hosting is a bit of a mess and leaves a lot to be desired where Lemmy is much more turnkey for someone looking to setup an instance.
Anecdotally, from looking at Mastodon, it seems like people there are hyping kbin (and fedia.io) more than lemmy... that could just be the people I happen to be following, though.
You cannot use mastodon from kbin or lemmy. I think you might be referencing the fact that from kbin you can create Note posts, which appear on mastodon, pleroma, calckey, etc as a normal (tweet-like) post.
That's not why mastodon users are hyping kbin over lemmy. There are rumors going around that the lemmy developers are bad people and a lot of mastodon users now consider lemmy blacklisted because of that
There seems to be a lot of pass-through and mutual membership, so it isn't really that surprising. People who didn't have experience in the Fediverse before Rexxit came to Lemmy because it's what everybody was talking about, then branched out from there to explore the options.
Even setting aside user stats, kbin.social threads still manage to rise pretty high when sorted by Active/Hot from lemmy instances viewing all threads/channels/magazines. I created accounts on several instances, and we'll see which one wins out on how I actually want to use these sites/services, but for the most part there's a ton of overlap between what regular users are seeing from each service.
Most people like me came to lemmy when they first left reddit and it was just there. my first instance was lemmy.ml and they where having issues so i went to lemmy.world and it was amazing. i kept hearing about kbin but they where having issues also. eventually kbin was stable and now i'm here for the long haul. lemmy has basic features like subs and you can subscribe and create post etc.. kbin has Threads = Reddit Post, Microblogging = Twitter and Magazines = Subreddits all in one service. Make an account and see for yourself. you can have a lemmy account kbin dosen't matter!
All I know is i’m using an ipad and everytime I try to log into lemmy i’m stuck at the login screen with a spinning icon. Tried kbin and it just works, no hassle.
That seems like the bottom line. I suppose a case could be made for concern that the instance you choose is going to remain for the long term. And that it's not run by people with beliefs egregiously different than yours. Other than that, being on a main instance or not shouldn't matter too much.
kbin wasn't federated yet when we jumped. as far as i'm aware i made my kbin account like 6 hours after federation, because i did that as soon as i heard that there was a different UI
i'm from australia. australia is a federation. this country is made up of six states and a number of territories. the six states are all still legally distinct entities with their own individual laws that do not impact residents of other states. to be able to be part of a larger country tho, our different states need to comply to another, higher set of rules that are decided by our federal government. it is theoretically (but not legally) possible for a state to be ejected or to leave the federation in which case they won't have to comply to the federation-wide rules any more. for example, the country of New Zealand has had a standing invitation to join the australian federation ever since colonies on the australian mainland started talking about declaring statehood and then joining up in a federation, but those smart bastards have always told us where to go and where to tie our horse up when we get there. the fact that they've literally always had better conditions (eg women being allowed to vote and own land) might have something to do with it
Someone with way more knowledge about this subject than I can correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I gathered it's good to think of these things like this:
Instances (kbing, lemmy, mastadon,etc) are like Cities. They can function interdependently but do better by being connected (federated) to other cities. If, for example you are like me, and despise a certain city, your city can choose not to connect with that city, but doing so means your citizens won't be able to see/do anything with that city.
Some Lemmy instances don't have any sort of validation on user signup, but Kbin absolutely has user signup validation, which limits how fast we can grow(and is a great thing IMO).
Also, with the way federation works its almost a benefit since then kbin(and any other smaller server) can maintain a tighter community with the ability to cut out servers with negative experiences(read: too spammy/too many bots/too hateful)
Kbin's docs for self-hosting are pretty incomplete. Lemmy's docs are also awful but since they have a docker image and an ansible playbook, creating new instances is easier.
Yes, it's different. Self-hosting means you set up a running version of kbin (or whatever) on your own server. All the different domains you see (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, fedia.io etc etc) are on their own servers. Theoretically you could also set up a version where you are the sole user even.
Just a minor correction, kbin unfederated during the great migration due to user explosion. Kbin also activated cloud flare to keep bots from marching in. Kbin went back to being federated after @ernest felt safe doing so. Some Lemmy instances unfederated too.
Add comment