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.
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.
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 :)
That’s absolutely fair! To each their own, ultimately this is still a case of a rising tide raising all ships.
I’ve made a shortcut in Firefox to add the kbin mobile site to my home screen and it is essentially indistinguishable from a mobile app like this.
While PWA sites are nice I’ve never personally used one that felt as good or as consistent as a native application.
As much as my web dev heart would love to say they were haha.
Agreed but if a lot of effort is put into the mobile web it can get very very close. Now Lemmy ui will have a rust/tailwind version, things are going to get very interesting 😀
It’s nowhere near as nice as a mobile app, but nowhere near as horrible as you’d expect either. All in all, I’m happy enough with it, but am anxiously waiting for Artemis to release (and for an official API to be created to allow others the ability without having to scrape).
That’s fair, I suppose more specifically I like the Lemmy mobile apps that are currently out, I’m enjoying the interface of Voyager and Thunder.
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).
Isn’t one of the primary benefits of the Fediverse and ActivityPub that you have the freedom to select the better alternative and still benefit from the activity on the “lesser” instances?
Ehhh. kbin’s quite feature-incomplete in its own right, it’s just a different set of features that are incomplete. I don’t think there’s anything about kbin that’s actually superior to lemmy, just… different. Meanwhile, Betamax had inarguably better video, and inarguably worse capacity.
Which features are missing from Kbin that are on Lemmy?
I lurked on both for about a week before going with Kbin so don’t really have experience of using Lemmy apps etc
Off the top of my head:
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API’s a big one. Mobile app development for kbin is deeply hampered because of that.
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The ability to quickly filter your timeline by Local/Global, which is a big deal for regional or themed instances.
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A (more) easily accessible subscribed community/magazine list (slower/smaller communities are kind of totally smothered in kbin).
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PeerTube federation.
Meanwhile, the domain block touted by the OP is buried and kind of a pain to get to, and the search claim is… overstated (kbin search still only reaches other sites that the given kbin instance is subscribed to).
kbin has a nicer UI, IMO, and it’s fine. It’s perfectly fine. Lemmy is also perfectly fine. Neither is excellent, and that’s ok. Neither has reached version 1.0, either, and both are being developed by small teams (for some flexible definition of “team”).
I personally think Lemmy will have better UI as time goes on. It’s already coming slowly altogether as time goes on.
Yeah, 0.18 came with subtle but really impact changes.
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Not being able to collapse comments is why I ended up on Lemmy instead of of Kbin
Not having a quick step to go to your subscribed magazines.
I know you can via settings but honestly on a mobile it’s a mission.
No apps yet support kbin, no way to change post layouts.
All of that said, what works for you works and the beauty of the fediverse is the choice to be able to choose the source and still see everything.
what works for you works and the beauty of the fediverse is the choice to be able to choose the source and still see everything.
This is the main point for me really, everything else is just quibbling. Although collapsible comments on Kbin definitely need to happen!
A mobile app (or even api), RSS feeds (AFAICT).
Kinda. If you could watch VHS on a Betamax player and vice versa. The betamax player may have more features or do things a little differently but you can see the same stop on both players.
Good point.
It “seemed” superior but it was super lagging in total recording time
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.
If by “everyone” you mean “porn,” then yeah, I guess. VHS won for the same reason that DVD won and now streaming won:
Porn access is cheaper because of it.
Incorrect. It’s a common misconception that porn was the leading factor that doomed Beta to lose the format wars. In reality, Sony’s strict licensing of the beta technology, short recording times and higher cost doomed the system. A large part of the betamax development history is trying to lower its superior quality just to have the runtimes a standard vhs tape would have.
Begin, the Fediverse Wars has.
You were supposed to bring balance to the Fediverse! Not leave it in darkness.
Spot on
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
I know this is a bad take, but my hate for PHP is why I’m in Lemmy.
Same. As a Rust lover and PHP hater, the choice was easy.
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.
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.
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.
yes connect has all of these features. It’s my main app on mobile and wefwef for pc (i refuse to call it voyager, because it’s a generic name)
Are there iOS apps for kbin you recommend?
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.
Fedia is just another kbin instance, not really a fork. It is tracking the development branch a bit closer than kbin.social, but it’s still the same repo
Makes sense, still working out the lingo of fork v instance!
A fork would be a duplicated custom copy of the software that can have its own changes or improvements added and is usually maintained by a different person/group than the original. When a new update of the original is released, the maintainer of the fork can bring those changes into their custom fork.
Instances are (mostly identical) copies of the same fork. They’ll have custom names and different logos, but the software that’s running them is all version 0.18 of the same fork. They may install updates at different speeds ie v0.19 is released, some instances will update immediately, some may take a week, but eventually they’ll all be updated to v0.19.
There’s a PR out that’ll show your subscriptions at the top of the sidebar in a simple list. I think that’s a decent start but I’d like to add left to right swipe handlers to just have it as a fly-out menu on mobile.
The back button is definitely something we need to work on, especially if your been posting serveral comments in a thread, I expect the back button to take me to the place I was at before I clicked into the article, not show me previous comments etc. Lots of this just needs tweaking
PR?
Pull Request. It means someone is asking for their code to be added to the main codebase of a project.
Basically, the feature is in the works, waiting to be finished and then added (merged).
Currently there are no apps for kbin
Artemis is in private beta currently
Kbin mobile site on Safari/Firefox works pretty well tbh, that’s what I’ve been using. Really nice to not need another app taking up space on my device.
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?
Probably something you’d notice more in the number of concurrent users each solution could handle per web server instance. Rust theoretically would let you serve more users with less resources.
Disclosure: I dislike PHP.
Right, essentially this is what I was thinking - more vs. less users per CPU core.
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.
Thanks for the insights!
“tracking pixel” issue
Sorry, what’s that?
Embedding in a comment a invisible image that, when loaded, can tell the poster few information about the reader such ip address
I knew that it’s a thing in the emails, but what this has to do with Lemmy, and why kbin should solve this issue? That’s what I’m not understanding
Lemmy allows markdown in comments and it automatically displays images without filtering for “safe” host websites.
It is potentially dangerous for doxxing, but I am not sure how easy it is to exploit it in a useful malicious scenario. But I am not a secops expert.
It was introduced recently and will be fixed soon I understand
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You can’t black instances though, instead of blocking 100 communities you can just block one instance…
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Kbin? Sounds like a Korean refuse recepticle. It’ll never catch on.
If you really want to know, Kbin comes from the polish word “karabin”, which was the original name of the project. Also the reason why communities are called “magazines”.
Ernest (the kbin developer) has addressed this more than once, and this take is untrue. kbin come from the Linux folder sbin.
See one of his comments on this here: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/344/What-is-Kbin-Join-the-Fediverse#entry-comment-969
You can tell this is true because the kbin logo is literally a folder.
Huh. Neat. Thanks for the info. 👍
That’s super cool. How are magazines related to polish? I don’t get the link.
Yeah me neither. They said it like it’s so obvious.
@Fantomas said
Kbin? Sounds like a Korean refuse recepticle. It’ll never catch on.
Is this supposed to be some kind of joke I’m too millennial to understand? Not only do I not get the joke, it also appears racist as fuck? Someone please help me understand.
It is some kind of joke you don’t understand.
It is not racist.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, totally not vague or unhelpful. /s
Who said I was trying to be helpful?
I think they are comparing KPop (a Korean music genre) with KBin.
I prefer the interpretation where BIN = Buy It Now. So get into kbin now, basically.
Are there any mobile apps for kbin?
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.
I’ve been working on the API, and it is pretty much feature complete (barring feedback) and should be entering review very soon.
Amazing, thank you!
When I first started doing fediverse stuff I used kbin. The best mobile layout was to use mobile browsers with extension to enable “kbin enhancement script” which made the web interface much better.
Still not great though as voyager and memmy are the reasons I stopped using kbin
There is an app on Testflight and Play Store at the moment.
But you won’t be able to login yet, besides the test Kbin api server.
Not that I’m aware of. Better put, not any high quality ones that I’m aware of
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?
kbin is newer, and there are apps on the way. Artemis should be available soon, and I know there are at least one or two more being worked on. But yeah, none available rn so people are using the PWA.
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.
OK following up on my own comment here. I decided to use a masked email and am giving kbin a try. (I forgot I had a seldom-used email provider that makes masked emails easy).
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!
Yeah the current challenge with searching is if no one has subscribed to a magazine or user on another instance, you have to search the exact name@domain to get it to show up. Ideally Kbin instances would implement a user bot that subscribes to all the users and communities it can scrape from all federated instances until this search limitation is fixed.
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