Great summary, and I think kbin is in a great position because although maybe not a feature rich or mature as Lemmy currently is so many migrators have said they’re here because “it just seems nice.” I think that’s an incredibly difficult feeling to capture and maintaining that friendliness and approachability as the platform grows will be key.
It’s a simple UI. Was looking up several alternatives to Reddit and so far kbin stands out the best, featuring functionalities from Reddit and in general intuitive to use - which is key to success
Kbin stands out a bit because it’s not just trying to be a “reddit alternative” like Lemmy, but also uniting it with features from Mastodon like microblogging. It honestly feels better suited what the “fediverse” was trying to accomplish.
Boosting vs upvoting / downvoting is needlessly confusing and very different from Reddit. Maybe there’s a good reason I haven’t heard of as to why they did it like that but… Most people haven’t even seen the “you should know” post explaining how it’s even a thing. That’s my only Kbin complaint
It’s easier to understand with a bit of background about ActivityPub I think - there a mechanisms that are being repurposed.
So on Mastodon (twitterish equivalent) you have Boosts and you have Favourites. It’s fairly simple. A Favourite is a message to the posetr that “I like this”, it doesn’t really do anything other than give the poster a nice pat on the head. A Boost is a signal to all your followers that “Hey look at this” - they get notifications about boosts in their feeds - a bit like a retweet.
Roll-on Lemmy and Kbin - the Favourite gets translated into an ‘upvote’ - but does it have any algorithmic importance? That was something that needed to be sorted out. The Boost is left as it is more or less - except ‘followers’ is less important on Kbin/Lemmy - so what’s it for, exactly? Downvotes - ooh, they are new - ummmm.
Yeah I see a lot of good things about Kbin but the terminology is not one. I don’t even think calling communities Magazines and threads Articles makes a whole lot of sense. Does anyone know where that comes from?
Right now though the two most pressing issues are the poor notification alerts (very slow, sometimes doesn’t work and defaults to off) as well as the super slow federation sync with Lemmy instances. Those two problems combined makes participating in conversations very hard, and almost impossible if trying to cross the border to Lemmy. I’ve also had issues where posting on a Kbin magazine from a Lemmy account, the comments don’t show when viewing it from the Kbin side.
I believe Ernest is Polish which may explain the terminology like magazine. But remember that you are using software that is early release and 4 weeks ago it was basically Ernest and about 3 other people posting at each other as they tested out some ideas.
You’re using someone’s hobby website and it is extraordinary that the server is still running at all, funded by people’s donations to buy him a coffee. Federation was entirely turned off for a few days the week before last and he had to turn on Cloudflare protection to keep the instance up at all
Meanwhile Lemmy is also faced with a massive influx of new users and the federation logic is faltering in some of the largest instances. Again, it’s amazing they are still up at all.
So yes, a group of volunteers running experimental software on self-funded servers may be providing a UX which is a bit rough around the edges
For me amongst the small handful of reddit alts I oh so briefly tried, kbin didn’t necessarily feel the most friendly, but it did feel the most authentic sans toxic. Beehaw felt reverse toxic - it felt like an echo chamber, sanitized clean, proudly marketed. That gives me the jeebies.
Lemmy is too fragmentary and meme-heavy atm, requires too much from me. I fear that despite all it sells itself to be the contrary, Lemmy will eventually centralize. The market demands it. The incentives all point toward it. One instance to rule them all. Is that terrible? No. But it feels too familiar, and the narrative that Lemmy is beyond that somehow doesn’t sit well with me.
Kbin doesn’t feel like it’s pretending to be a force of misguided decentralization. Again, not a bad goal, just wishful thinking without safeguards. People here argue and debate with some semblance of what feels like common respect. If I’m gonna find a social aggregate home, this one feels most authentically homey.
In brief, I guess it’s kbin’s “we just kinda is” ism that drew and is so far keeping me here so far.
