Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.
Kbin is pretty new, no apps, and faced a lot of issues during the wave of incoming redditors. Some lemmy instances did, too, but there were more of them so there were alternatives when one crashed. If we compare kbin.social to a big instance like lemmy.world, it’s not doing too bad.
Tildes is invite-only so I don’t think they wanted to grow that quickly in the first place.
I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.
Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.
Don’t quote me on this, but I’ve read lemmy is a few years old already while kbin is just a few months old (3-4 mos?). Add the number of instances (i only know of 3 kbin instances) and you can see why it didn’t take off the way lemmy did.
I agree. Purely text-based sites need a certain kind of audience/users. I love a good discussion/debate, but I need my memes, too. Lol.
The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.
So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.
And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.
Wow, I didn’t know that about the Lemmy devs, that really sucks…
Yeah… I had heard of it as a rumor, so I doubted it for a little while, until I was shown the receipts. https://lemmy.world/comment/562635
It really is disappointing.
Wow, this is like a “Too good to be true” moment. Suddenly some of the Lemmy devs turn out to be shady and pushing their own ideology.
Without an API, all clients would need to rely on scraping, which is slower and more resource intense - almost orders of magnitude. Until Kbin develops an API, it will always be less used.
This is interesting. Thank you for the info. Quick question, though: does this mean kbin will inevitably face scaling issues when it gets too big? And there’s no way to prevent that?
My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.
I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.
Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉
That analogy really drives the point home. Basically, lemmy already has a built-in advantage due to the tech they went with. But like any program/machine, it’s only as good as the people behind it. Thank you for the answer.
Exactly, and my pleasure!
In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.
Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.
I do like the microblog feature of kbin for when you have some random question, but don’t want to make a full on thread about it.
There’s also the issue that during the first big influx, Kbin turned off federation while the dev tried to fix things up. It was off for days, so any fledgling magazines there couldn’t take advantage of Lemmy traffic, we couldn’t sub to them and made our own communities instead, and by the time they turned federation back on a lot of Lemmy communities were already pretty established as “the main one”.
You are correct about Tildes. They are very intentionally cultivating a different atmosphere and don’t want Reddit’s huddled masses. There is a subset of reddit users who fit there but it’s not the shitposting crowd.
It’s a gated community, basically, not a social network. And a very snobbish one at that.
Nothing wrong with being discerning.
For me personally, it was the farewell message on RIF specifically mentioned Lemmy.
Don’t know if some of the others apps also did this but it would certainly have helped.
Sync also did this
I used Boost for Reddit and they’re creating a Lemmy app. So here I am.
Nice, I’m coming from the same place.
I love learning all about what being federated means and can’t wait to see the exponential growth along with boostforlemmy 🙂
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don’t like “magazine” for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
For me it’s straight up the fact that the guy who made Sync is porting it to Lemmy.
It’s a great client, and if he picked this I guess he thinks he can keep that quality on this platform, so here I am.
This is exactly my reason too. For me, Sync was easily the best user experience for browsing reddit. No sync for reddit? Well then no reddit for me I guess
Same here. Just waiting for the release and I am buying it.
I found out back when Chapo got blocked on Reddit years ago. I am so amazed it’s popular now. IDK even know what synce is but I’m glad it brought you here
For me I heard more about lemmy on Reddit and Apollo was in its final days. So I gave it a try
Yep, same here. A couple of subs I followed mentioned Lemmy explicitly so I gave it a look. Lemmy.world seemed the most active at the time so I joined here.
Same. The fact that Lemmy has several iOS apps also sealed the deal, as I do almost all my browsing on mobile. I made an account on KBin at the same time, and an eagerly watching both to see how they develop, but Lemmy just has more to offer right now.
To answer the question about Tildes specifically, Tildes has been around for years and remained effectively dead. Its moderation is extremely controlling and screen all people before letting them in. It’s a club of people the owner approves of that only post “quality” content (I.e. the in-group’s definition of quality). This results in an extremely inorganic experience where content is removed for little reason beyond mods thinking it’s too “low quality” (the definition of which is very flexible). Your presence on Tildes is considered a privilege that can be taken away at any time for any reason (no alts, no second chances), so there is a perpetual sense that you’re under the lense, and can’t disagree with the rest of club. It’s a custom built wind tunnel, ostensibly to screen out hate, but in effect created a gated community of the same people celebrating their own exclusivity and very concerned with strangers walking down the sidewalk.
In essence, it doesn’t want to be reddit, because it views itself as “better” than the riffraff. It’s an elitist clubhouse, not a true social network.
I vaguely recall a discussion on Tildes with that sentiment on tildes. So thank you for the reminder of their blatant elitism.
This one I think. And scrolling through it now renewed that bitter taste in my mouth.
That first comment isn’t wrong though. It was definitely an issue of growing pains that Tildes wouldn’t have to deal with, since they have a centralised model, rather than the Federated one Beehaw and Lemmy had to deal with.
The issue Beehaw had was with people firing up an account on an open instance, and then going over to cause trouble, bypassing their account creation policy. Lemmy grew too quickly for their moderation to deal with, and lacks the relevant tooling, so they just disconnected from the biggest trouble instances, until Lemmy comes out with a better mod toolkit.
I suspect that if Tildes connected to open instances, they would have the same issue.
Just read their docs on people:
I skimmed through the summary and it seems okay?
That just sounds like Metafiler with extra steps.
The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.
That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don’t even think there’s an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.
Agreed. I think one of the main deciding factors starting out here was the availability of mobile apps. Seems Lemmy already has a handful while kbin only has the mobile web for now and an application is only in a closed beta at the moment.
It’s in beta testing atm. I’m really interested to see what the dev has in store, but I have to say the PWA for kbin is pretty flawless as it is. What UI complaints I have, I’m sure will come and I’m happy to be patient.
Lemmy was far more confusing for me, and every time I go over there to check unfederated content or grab a community address, the colors hurt my eyes. I only check out my leftover Jerboa app rarely, whenever kbin’s updating and I’m too lazy to do something else. At any rate, we all get the same content
More mature, you can’t even collapse comment on kbin.
Although Kbin does have the advantage of being compatible with older devices, as a result of it using an established platform. If you have an older iDevice, for example, neither Lemmy nor most of its apps/interfaces work at all.
Kbin works fine.
Lemmy has a web interface just like kbin. Are you saying that regular websites don’t work on older iDevices? The web interface for your instance is at https://lemmy.world
Lemmy’s Web interface relies on some JavaScript that does not load properly, similar to some websites.
Trying to load Lemmy results in the site being loaded with neither CSS nor JavaScript working, rendering the site entirely unusable, since it’s a bunch of loose website bits, with no formatting or functions attached to them.
Kbin appears to not have this problem.
Other sites would also be broken, although since iOS 12 didn’t have an accessible Web console, there’s no way to tell how or why exactly. Wefwef would load as an entirely blank page, with nothing showing at all, Reddit’s redesigned website would just be a blank frame of a website, with no text at all, and Tumblr posts would disappear as soon as it tried to load the notes a post got.
Honestly, I’d say because I’ve never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
kbin
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
tildes
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
That is it?
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
Take my answer as snark, but: it has a catchy name that sounds like a thing. And it’s not invite only.
I heard a lot about both Kbin and Lemmy over on Reddit, and at the time, Kbin seemed to be getting more positive mentions, at least where I was looking.
I tried out Kbin first, and it felt confusing and there were a lot of little annoyances. Then a few days later, I signed up on Lemmy, and I liked the experience a lot better. Then a bunch of 3rd party apps started coming out for Lemmy. There was just no reason for me to log on through Kbin anymore, especially since the small handful of communities that I liked on there could also be accessed from Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, I made an account on kbin and it feels more feature rich, albeit a bit sluggish. Might give it another try soon. It feels like it could be a fediverse alternative for Facebook more so rather than reddit.
I’m really put off by the “warning warning this content isn’t from this instance” attitude of Kbin. I’ve also had a heck of a time getting some content to federate. I’m having a much better experience on Lemmy, so I’ll put up with the UI quirks - I use the memmy app most of the time anyway.
On closer look, I think Kbin feels more like an alternative to facebook or tumblr than to reddit, although it has its own “communities” as well. Though once federation matures, I guess it won’t matter too much.
I see little difference beyond the ability to microblog on Kbin. I think it was unnecessary to rename communities, and causes confusion. I still keep an eye on my kbin.social and fedia.io logins, but I just can’t access content I can find from multiple lemmy instances. I was also swayed away from Kbin by an admin who was running it but ultimately gave up on it and switched to lemmy because Kbin is unstable. (I’ll update this comment with a link if I can find it)
You’re right. The microblog on Kbin is very tempting. But it’s sluggish right now, at least for me. So I’ll probably still make lemmy my home base and keep an eye on kbin. I definitely see its potential as an alternative facebook or tumblr or even twitter if it can’t compete as a reddit alternative.
It’s still in the fediverse but like you, I’ll be keeping my eye on my kbin.social account, as well. :)
My experience with Kbin is that it seems more limited on Federated posts and that the smaller Kbin instance (I use Readit.buzz) seems to be lacking some of the posts and thumbnails that I see on Kbin.social. It seems like Lemmy works better on the smaller instances (not Lemmy.world) than Kbin does (not kbin.social).
I have not really used the Kbin microblog—I am using Mastodon for that.
I’m curious about what aspect of Kbin is similar to Facebook / Tumblr? I can’t tell the difference between a post and a thread, but both seem to be posted in magazines (communities).
You can also follow people which is more twitter territory but facebook allows that too. It has a private messaging feature too. I guess those along with the microblogging features can make it a viable competitor to facebook if given the chance to mature. All it needs perhaps is a dedicated friends list and magazines can be repurposed to groups. Maybe pages and it would be a full fb experience.
Is it sluggish on other kbin instances? I think a lot of the problems with federation right now is the sheer load of users on the instances with the most popular communities and that’s causing timeouts and errors in federation. While many many instances are just one user.
FWIW I’ve had as many issues with federation between Lemmy instances as with Lemmy-to-kbin. So I’m my view the accurate warning is the main difference.
shrug I’m just speaking of my experience. I’ve been able to access the communities I’m interested in on multiple lemmy instances, but I’ve had zero luck on Kbin. Frankly, the “connect to remote community” UX for both lemmy and Kbin is complete crap, and is likely the #1 turnoff for new users. I’m very disappointed that neither have chosen to fix it.
The warning is just a general reminder that kbin is in beta and remote communities won’t always work 100% perfectly
I get the point, but the presentation is a “It is very important that you do not miss this warning”. The message (and attitude) is less “We have technical details to work out” and more anti-federation.
I think the reminder is just what it says. It’s unlikely you will ever have all the historical content from a remote instance’s community. So that message is just telling you that. It’s the same on lemmy when connecting to a remote community.
@cerevant @Frostwolf Content from remote instances is sometimes going to act a little bit weird in the Fediverse.
Would you rather be warned about it, or notice it yourself? Kbin seems to be the most pedantic fediverse app, with its insistence that users be aware of the implications of the use.
That isn’t a feature, it is a bug. With the exception of during recent slowdowns, it almost never happens on Lemmy. If you want to post a warning, at least give the ability to dismiss it - I don’t need to have an oddly colored banner at the top of every community.
@cerevant Like I said, pedantic.
They could do a much better job of raising awareness without annoying users.
Same. Signed up with both and Lemmy clicked, kbin didn’t. So here I am
I avoided Lemmy because tankies developers. But lemmy.world is run by different people, and the interface is honestly so much better than kbin… so I’m staying here now
Lemmy seems to be more established than KBin with more instances, also additional features of KBin don’t really appeal to me - but as a Lemmy user I interact with KBin quite a lot, so in that respect I feel like more of a citizen of the fidiverse than of just Lemmy.
I’ve never heard of Tildes in my life.
Kbin is written in php and lemmy is written in rust which may scale better in long run.
I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).
The other poster failed to mention the biggest advantage of Rust - it’s inherently a lot more secure and a lot less vulnerable to bugs compared to other languages. For starters, Rust is designed to eliminate common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races, which can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.
Also, variables in Rust are immutable by default, which means they cannot be changed once they’re set. It’s also strongly typed, which is strictly enforced and there are no implicit conversions. PHP, however, is loosely typed and does perform implicit type conversion, which can lead to unexpected results and potential security vulnerabilities.
I could go on, but then we’d be getting a bit too technical for this space.
Thank you for explaining. I grew up on php-based forums and websites. So Rust is pretty new to me. TBH, I haven’t heard of it until Lemmy. :)
In terms of raw performance, compiled languages like C, C++, and Rust are much faster than interpreted languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby.
The difference between compilation and interpretation is the difference between you reading the translation of a foreign book versus an interpreter reading each line in the original book and telling you its meaning in your language every time you want to read the book.
Java, Kotlin and Scala are somewhat in between in terms of speed. Code that gets called a lot gets compiled just in time.
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
- Lemmy
- Kbin
- Squabbles
- Tildes
- Raddle
I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)
Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison
Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.
Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.
Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.
I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.
