Downside is that it's new and has some rough edges.
Upside is that it's a nice design. It's trying to fuse microblogging and link-aggregation/threaded conversations into one platform, and so far has done well. I really hope it does well in the future.
The user counts for native kbin are much smaller even than the small Lemmy user counts. So a lot of the users you'll be interacting with on kbin will still be Lemmy users in forums homed on Lemmy servers. You'll also have the ongoing possibility of interoperability bugs and terminology confusion around things like "communities" (the Lemmy term) vs "magazines" (the kbin term) and other places terminology varies. I was pondering kbin, but decided that it was simpler to sign up to the app where the people were... the cognitive overhead of having to wonder if I'm seeing content differently than most of the users I'm talking with didn't seem worth it to me.
That said, if you want to interact with both Lemmy in redditlike ways and mastodon in twitter-like ways, kbin does seem to try to be a one-stop shop. I'm only on Lemmy for now, but my plan is to make a separate mastodon account if I end up wanting to... for much the same reasons. So much of how the fediverse "feels" depends on the app you're using, and if I want to do the tootiverse, I'm going to want to experience it through Mastodon directly so I understand how most other people see it.
That said, the fediverse exists to allow this kind of interop. If kbin is doing it for you, enjoy it.
Thank you, I already had a mastodon account but I've realised I'm not really fond of microblogging. And yes I've noticed the differences in terminology, that might be very confusing to newer fediverse users.
kbin began as a fork of Lemmy a while ago, but it's been overhauled into it's totally own thing.
It's interoperable with Lemmy, though. Like lemmy, it's a content aggregator, and kbin users can subscribe to lemmy communities (and Lemmy users can subscribe to kbin communities), but kbin communities (called "magazines") have some extra bells and whistles, most notably the ability to also bring in microblog posts that contain mod defined keywords or hashtags. This means you can also see what people are saying on Mastodon (or Calckey, or Misskey, or Akkoma, or...) about the topics the magazine focuses on.
There are a lot of interoperable website engines out here in the fediverse. Aside from kbin interoperability:
Mastodon users can follow lemmy communities and comment on lemmy posts.
Lemmy users can subscribe to PeerTube channels (check out, a random example I dug up, !techlore or enter 'https://neat.tube/c/techlore/videos' into your instance's search bar to fetch it, if it's not available on your instance yet; that's a PeerTube channel, not a Lemmy community).
Lemmy users can also view and interact with Frierndica groups (and vice versa; check out !fediversenews, which is a Friendica group).
I like the idea of both places existing and thriving. As people come over, I think people are struggling to see both lemmy and kbin as being two things that can work together rather than competitors.
I'm currently trying to figure out how exactly to subscribe to kbin magazines from lemmy though. It seems like I shoud just be able to search the url and it would show up, but that's not happening.
Is there something else I should be doing?
edit: I think it might be because kbin went down when I wanted to try figuring this out 😂 edit2: kbin back up and searching the url still isn't working.
edit3: success! I changed nothing and it suddenly worked 🎉
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