What's the benefit of using Kbin over Lemmy?

UnanimousStargazer@feddit.nl to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 241 points –

I see a very small minority of people using Kbin, but I don't understand why.

Is this just a coincidence and did some people choose Kbin over Lemmy or is there a good reason to use Kbin?

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Kbin does a better job of putting new posts in front of you even before you have subscribed to anything, so I think it is easier to find interesting things to read. Kbin is newer than Lemmy, so Lemmy had the advantage in familiarity for people. More people had heard of it when Reddit's API drama blew up and that gave Lemmy a distinct advantage when people picked a new platform. Kbin also has some annoyances like not being able to collapse comments and vote buttons being at the top instead of the bottom of posts and comments. If someone has written a lengthy comment, I want to read through the whole thing before I decide how to vote and I don't want to scroll back up to get to a vote button. To reply to a post you also have to scroll through the comment section. In some cases it's good to see if someone else has already said what you are going to say, but in other cases if someone is looking for personal stories, you don't necessarily need to read everyone else's story before submitting your own.

Personally I have this kbin account and a lemmy account as well. My Lemmy server seems to go down more often and the default sort always shows the same days old pinned posts from my server admin that I can't seem to hide after reading. On Reddit, I didn't have to switch sort to see newer stuff so Lemmy comes across as pretty stale sometimes even though there is a fair amount of posting going on.

On lemmy the default is Active, which basically boosts any post that still has some recent chatter going on but is otherwise "stale". In the settings though you can change the default sort. I've gone with Hot, which is I think the default sort on kbin too.

Can you change the default sort on kbin? I could work how to.

But Hot is broken in Lemmy, it shows old stuff like it's hot. The system is broken, but I think there is a PR on the way.

I've heard that the "hot surfacing old posts" bug is more prevalent on instances that haven't restarted for a while. It still shouldn't happen, but I don't think it's universal.

Hmmm ... it seems fine to me. I'd heard it was broken before though.

In what way is it broken?

Like the parent said, it surfaces old (as in years old) posts as "hot". Not sure if that's the case still, but I have definitely noticed it before.

Ah ... right ... yea I've seen that happen occasionally ... I had actually presumed that something had been changed with that post, perhaps by an admin or something cleaning stuff up, and that triggered a new timestamp for the post.

Maybe still a bug. I'll keep track now of when it happens as it might help sort it out.

But still, that's rarely the case for me. Just went down a fair way in my feed now and there wasn't a single occurrence of it. Could it be particular communities causing it, maybe from instances on older software?

Otherwise though, Hot seems to do what I'd want. Combine with a bit of New or Top for an appropriate time window and I'm all good.

For comments, Hot/New/Top all do what I'd want too.

It's still a bug. My server is at 0.18.2 and I regularly see old posts if I sort by Hot.

Links to Communities or Instances?

FWIW, just checked mine and no problems (and I'm subscribed to plenty of communities).

This is the bottom half of the first page of my subscribed feed and I restarted my lemmy instance yesterday to make a config change.

OK, I couldn't help myself, and checked GItHub. Seems the issue may have been fixed hours ago. Don't know when the new version will ship though.

Seems the issue may been to do with the process that updates the ranks of posts not being able to catch up to older posts, and so they show up with out of date ranks/scores. That process has been optimised, apparently, and should have no problem keeping up with all of the posts.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3617

Yep, that looks bad (obviously). I just went to the science community, sorted by Hot, and yea similar things appear towards the bottom of the feed.

Seems like the sort of thing that would be a minor and fixable bug. I don't have time to chase down github issues right now, but I'll try checking older communities to spot these occurrences. Naively I'd guess something like dates or vote-scored being truncated badly or something.

Thanks!!

Hey! Thanks for explaining. How can I use/Download Kbin?

Just go to kbin.social, this is the largest instance. There are other, smaller instances, too. Just like Lemmy.