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 agree. so far kbin is my favorite so far out of everything i've checked out. my worry is lack of mobile apps and the api not being up to snuff. kbin needs to catch up and convince one of the big app makers to come along. sync already says lemmy :(
I don’t use it as a PWA because on iPhone ar least that takes away the back button and URL bar
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.
I don’t think you fully understand federation. I’m happily reading and posting on communities in Lemmy from kbin. Why on earth would I want centralisation?
Yes, but you haven’t really explained why you don’t think it will be sustainable.
The most likely threat is probably a large actor maliciously trying to embrace-enhance-extinguish it it’s not inevitable that would succeed.
I saw somewhere that kbin.social is around the 50k user range which is really impressive. I think getting into the 100-500k range would be a nice step up. Everyone likes good engagement and active comment.
There were plenty of normal people who left to Voat a well. Anytime it was mentioned on Reddit there was a surge of vitriol but if you made it past the "hazing day" conversations were fairly normal (tho I never subscribed to politics subverse)
Your username is so long it's partially broken the UI on kbin! I've put it in an issue here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/579
I'm finding lots of little UI fixes I've been cleaning up recently. Wonder how many other parts of the UI look a bit wonky when you've got a long username :o
I really liked voat, and then the reddit exodus happened and poopy heads ruined it.
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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.
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