This is not an attempt to convert Lemmy users, nor is it a slight on Lemmy. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why Lemmy works better for some, and I love the fact that we not only have multiple choices, but multiple choices that allow us to interact with each other regardless! It's amazing. Lemmy is great, no shade.

With that said...

Why YSK: I see a lot of users posting frequent questions about Lemmy that are currently answered by kbin.

For example:

  • The ability to block a whole domain, or subscribe to one
  • The ability to subscribe to individual users
  • A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
  • Mitigation for the "tracking pixel" issue

I find that almost every day, I see Lemmy users asking about features and I think, "well, kbin does that." I think it would be worthwhile for more users to check into both platforms and decide which might be best for them.

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[–] 95 points 3 years ago (6 children)

You are correct about all of those things, but KBin doesn't have any currently released mobile apps and I like to have a mobile app. Ultimately KBin will probably have mobile apps soon and some of those features above will probably eventually be added to Lemmy, so it's just a case of what's the most important to us now.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    There's been a heap of development on making the PWA really useful on mobile specifically. Being a community project it all takes a while to get these various changes out into prod (like the comment toggling functionally)

    Soon I'm sure we'll get a mobile app with the upcoming API release, but until then hopefully these mobile changes keep everyone happy :)

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    [–] 74 points 3 years ago (7 children)

    It's obviously not a competition, but this kind of reminds me of back in the day when you had to choose between Betamax or VHS. One seemed superior (kBin)--but "everyone" was adopting VHS (Lemmy).

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    The advantage VHS had was tape length. Betamax standard tapes were 60 minutes. VHS was twice that. Whole movies could fit on VHS. Also, VHS VCRs were far cheaper that Betamax players.

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    [–] 47 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Begin, the Fediverse Wars has.

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    [–] 26 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I would consider kbin more if the naming for things wasnt so bad. “Magazines” as a name is in my opinion is terrible.

    I also like that lemmy uses rust

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  • [–] 17 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I know this is a bad take, but my hate for PHP is why I'm in Lemmy.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Same. As a Rust lover and PHP hater, the choice was easy.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago*

    As a recent Rust convert, I chose Lemmy because I expect it to be the better platform in the long run, and maybe one day I'll be able to help fix bugs myself. I also just like to support a Rust project and have no love for PHP. In fact, with all the good tools out there these days, it strikes me as odd to begin a project of this scale in PHP.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago*

    Lemmy.world was my first choice, and I'm glad I stuck through it. I'm 4 weeks in and I've seen this community grow and iron out the kinks. The hell if I'm ever going back to reddit.

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  • [–] 16 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Are those features client or protocol specific? My Lemmy client, connect, let's me block instances and has search for posts, communities, users, comments, etc.

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    [–] 16 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Are there iOS apps for kbin you recommend?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (6 children)

    Not currently, I think, but multiple are in beta and sending out invites. I use kbin as a rich web app and it works well about 85% of the time. Biggest issues are random log-outs, using the back button sometimes loses place in the never-ending scroll list, and there isn't a good way to see your subscribed magazines (you have to go to your profile and scroll to the subscriptions section to select it).

    But I'm really liking Kbin so far. I'd rather not be on the instance that is hosting everything; just seems easier for it to get too big and fail quickly, and I'd like to stay in one location if possible. Kbin seems big enough to last but small enough that it isn't growing insanely quick. Another option is Fedia.io, which is a kbin fork. Very similar imo, just a little different.

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    [–] 15 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    What I've been curious about is the relative performance of kbin (PHP) vs. lemmy (Rust) server code. Rust is supposed to be many times more efficient performance-wise than PHP as far as I know, but has anyone compared this in practice? The presumed ease and speed of adding features to kbin because of PHP may come at a high performance cost (read: carbon emissions too). Does anyone have any further insight into this?

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    PHP is fine as long as you don't try to do too much with it. For simple GET/POST requests I wouldn't be surprised if there's not much difference performance wise. If you start trying to do any complex processing or data aggregation in PHP (which should probably be done on the database side with queries anyway) then the performance will really fall off a cliff. Especially because PHP is (for web) single threaded. Threading is possible but it'll cause far more headaches than it's worth. Best to keep it simple and use a more appropriate tool if more complex processing is needed.

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  • [–] 15 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    "tracking pixel" issue

    Sorry, what's that?

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  • [+] 11 points 3 years ago (2 children)
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    [–] 10 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    Kbin? Sounds like a Korean refuse recepticle. It'll never catch on.

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    [–] 9 points 3 years ago (4 children)

    Are there any mobile apps for kbin?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    No, Kbin hasn't released their own, or an API yet. I believe the developer is working to stop it crashing after the recent migrations, so has been mostly focused on that instead of the app.

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    [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    kbin is attractive to me...except an email address is required to register. I know that's a common thing on a lot of sites, but it's not info I want to provide, and setting up a burner email is kind of a nuisance.

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    [–] 8 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I saw in the comments here there are no apps yet for Kbin. So are Kbin users just using the website on their devices for now?

    I'm enjoying Connect for Lemmy and awaiting Sync for Lemmy to be released. Can or will those work for me if I made a Kbin account and will I gain these Kbin perks you speak of?

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    [–] 8 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    What do you mean by the built in search tool to find communities all over Fedi? From what I can tell the search bar only searches communities that are already federated with kbin, so you'd still need to use something like lemmyverse.net/communities for small communities anyways.

    And also if you want to have access to a community that hasn't been federated already, I think you need to use a different search bar. On Lemmy you can use the same for both.

    For me Lemmy is better. The web UI is simpler and easier to understand for me, and I have no use for the microblogging features. And more importantly there are Lemmy apps but no kbin ones. I'm glad there are options for everyone, and hopefully they both get the features that they're missing but the other has!

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    [–] 7 points 3 years ago

    Maybe it's a grass is always greener thing but I've been having issues with kbin that apparently other instances don't have. Furigana is supported on some Lemmy instances, I've had issues embedding links from Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/etc, I frequently interact with threads (preview content or upvote) and get redirected to an error page, goes on.

    I did sign up with kbin for a reason though and I'm overall mostly satisfied. Having a good FAQ with how all the features of kbin work, what's on the roadmap, etc would be my biggest change.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    As soon as Artemis opens their beta testing for the iOS app (or someone else develops one) I’m in. But I hate using web apps.

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    [–] 6 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    I tried Kbin, I just don't like their UI as much, plus no good Android clients that I know of, and I find things like upvotes vs. boosts really strange and confusing, its just completely unnecessary imo.

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