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?
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".
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 heard about Lemmy on reddit, and heard about kbin on lemmy, possibly after they already made an account.
Im not going to not interact with Lemmy because of its developers but it was enough I decided id rather not be tied exclusively to their tankie ass politics.
There's a really interesting discussion to be had here about open source software and whether the political opinions of developers mean the platform itself is poisoned. Like, I'm in the same boat as you regarding using Lemmy vs kbin - I set up a kbin instance because I'd rather support and contribute to a developer who doesn't openly have what I consider to be problematic opinions. But at the same time, I don't think I could fault someone for viewing the options completely pragmatically, choosing Lemmy for certain features or whatnot, and creating their own instance which doesn't support those political views.
Like, if Lemmy ends up being the far and away better solution for the Threadiverse at some point in the future, does someone decide to fork it and continue to develop it separately, and would that be better, or is that still a problem because the foundation they're working with is still poisoned?
Lemmy has been around for much longer than kbin. So it obviously has more number of users in total. A better figure to compare is the monthly active users. According to FediDB, kbin actually has more monthly active users than Lemmy.
When I went to sign up for the fediverse, I tried kbin first, but signups were broken, so I just chose the next thing on a list of recommendations I found (outside of any reddit posts)
I have been using Lemmy initially, but have switched over to trying Kbin. I am still unsure which I will use mainly.
I think Kbin has a much cleaner UI, but I think I like the process of commenting on Lemmy much better. Many little things, like having a "top" sort option to see the top comment, and comment box under the story as opposed to at the bottom of the page. Also, you can minimize comment trees in Lemmy, which is a necessity.
Lemmy's one big issue right now is its main page sorting is broken and needs desperately to be fixed.
yeah i started my fediverse journey on lemmy, but i wasnt a big fan of the interface. The mobile apps in testflight didn't scratch that itch for me either. But the kbin website w/ kbin enhancement script has made me an ideal experience on both desktop and mobile so I believe I will be staying with 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.
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.
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