While I agree with everything you said, it did also serve a tangible purpose on some subreddits as a barrier-of-entry to prevent bots from posting OF spam or whatever or stop new troll accounts from being able to post.
Coelacanth
joined 1 year ago
Makes just about as much sense as communities being called "Magazines" and threads being called "Articles". There is a lot to like about Kbin but also a lot that boggles my mind.
I'm sure most Lemmy apps will add Kbin support down the line, too. The lead developer for Sync for Lemmy already said he's looking into it, I believe. At the moment, Kbin doesn't have an API though, so it's less straightforward to approach I guess.
For an app designed for Kbin first and Lemmy second, Artemis is under way and you can follow it here: https://kbin.social/m/ArtemisApp
I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it's much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don't understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of "Favorite", "Reduce" and "Boost" are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since "Post" sounds more like a new thread than "Article" to a newcomer.
There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn't have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.
Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.
Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.
I'm waiting for both Sync and Boost to come out with their Lemmy offerings and will probably end up with one of those. In the meantime, I'm trying Thunder and WefWef, but have also heard good things about Liftoff. Here is a list of the current (and upcoming) crop if you want to experiment: https://lemmy.world/post/465785
Yes, 60 is pretty much a goldilocks number that is small enough to be easily graspable for most humans, but still a highly composite number (11 factors!) so it is neatly divisible into many smaller units.