Anyone else moved from kbin to lemmy?

adONis@lemmy.world to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 152 points –

I noticed that kbin has stalled in development recently and the ongoing problems with federation etc. made me use it even less for the past few weeks. I even spent more time on reddit than here.

Today, I decided to give my abandoned lemmy account a try and see how that goes.

As many others, I disliked the UI of lemmy, compared to kbin, but soon enough found this one https://p.lemmy.world and it's been very smooth so far.

So yeah ... hello from the other side of the fence 🍷

53

I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for "Hot" posts, etc.

Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like "communities" instead what KBin terms them ("magazines"), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.

The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It's good for the Fediverse that choices exist.

Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren't being merged in and deployed.

Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.

The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.

TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors' proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.

Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin's main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn't exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.

Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).

I used to follow ernest and kbinMeta to keep up with the updates, so I'm fully aware of the current situation. The thing is, I don't want to stay there and hope that things will get better one day. I'm here to read the latest happenings on my favorite topics, and engage with people. And, unfortunately, kbin just doesn't give me that experience.

I personally recommend https://a.lemmy.world if you're going to use an alternative frontend.

That's a really nice alternative interface for desktop! I wonder if other instances implement it other than lemmy.world? It's cool that that that instance admin has, though. It looks superb.

Its default purple theme matches my overall browser theme completely by accident, lol.

https://feddit.uk/pictrs/image/b8c7a59c-da2b-4d48-aaad-72b1fde6eeb1.png

You can use Alexandrite regardless of instance by using the official webpage for it: https://alexandrite.app/ . That's what I'm using right now.

You'd add your instance link after the /, so in your case it's https://alexandrite.app/feddit.uk . You'll automatically be redirected if you log in anyways though, which is nice.

We run them! Cole set them up and I try to keep them updated ASAP based on GitHub alerts.

  • Photon - p.lemdro.id
  • Alexandrite - a.lemdro.id
  • Voyager - m.lemdro.id
  • Mlmym - old.lemdro.id

Right? Alexandrite is the best UI to me too. Its best feature is you don't have to change page while opening posts. It just opens in one side of the page.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Alexandrite is what the reddit redesign should have been. It's just a shame that the company didn't give one single shit about actually making a user friendly desktop experience.

I started on kbin myself. It was mostly a population consideration, though I did like the downvote accounting. Community moderation is one thing Tildes does right, and that was a step in that direction.

I ultimately bailed when even the big magazines weren't being moderated anymore (spam everywhere).

I preferred the kbin ui on pc originally but the phone apps and the release of “old reddit” style ui for lemmy got me to switch

I started in Kbin. I think that the activity level was smaller in there, which made me swap. Another reason was that Lemmy feels nicer to use (I like its looks more and I found a neat app on the phone to use it. Didn't find an app for Kbin).

I also use lemmy (voyager app is awesome) but kbin also has an awesome app called Artemis, which got inspired by apollo for reddit.

Yes. The constant logouts were bad - a little on desktop but constantly on mobile, and needing to refresh/login spam 4x to get in sometimes. After awhile growth and activity also looked to be stalling out. I realized a bunch more communities I was missing out on were from Lemmy and I needed to make an account to fully interact.

When I found old.lemmy.world it was game over. I don't think I'll go back to my kbin account much anymore.

Wrt fediverse, you can keep using all of them at the same time. How cool is that!

Wow. Photon UI looks really nice. It's a lot like Sync

If you're not ready to leave yet mbin fork that integrates community fixes faster. Fedia switched to it.

I've heard about mbin, but as a developer myself I don't think PHP is the suited language for those kinds of things, where performance and resource usage are just crucial. According to ernests recent post somewhere, they're still struggling with infrastructure issues. And I'm afraid mbin will face the same issues sooner than later.

Isn't modern php supposed to be pretty good and fast? And I thought the issues were on a database / federation level anyway, not related to php performance.

No matter how modern PHP becomes every year... it just beats its previous version in performance, but the underlying architecture is still the same and cannot compete with other languages, especially when using frameworks like symfony, etc.

For example.

If you run a node/go/rust server and you hit the endpoint /hello which returns a simple "hello world", they will just return that. PHP (symfony) however, has to initialize and execute the whole framework stuff, before returning a simple "hello world"

Edit: Introducing something like Redis for caching, etc... can help in reducing the overload, but imho, it's just a bandaid

Kbin kept logging me out. At some point, it got so annoying, I deleted my bookmark.

I'm actually the opposite. I've tried using Lemmy and I still do to an extent but I dunno. I love the feel of kbin

Im on kbin and have a lemmy account but i dont really know what the difference is? Except the interface. Ive still not fully grasped the fediverse stuff since im a reddit refuge. But ive been enjoying my time on kbin. Maybe theres just something im fundamentally missing by not using lemmy but i have no idea.

Considering they're both linked to the fediverse you arent missing anything if youre browsing on Lemmy or Kbin. Biggest difference is the interface.

Your lemmy site might have some ones blocked that kbin don't but thats the only difference.

I'm still here but I also have a bunch of accounts for other instances. Between the bugs, domain blocks and defederation, this fediverse seems like a bad example of how to use activity pub in practice tbh. Either the protocol is not defined enough or not enforced well enough by the sites using it, but it seems like a mess.

I moved to KBIN, because Lemmy's namesake owned the largest personal collection of Nazi memorabilia in the world for years leading up until his death. Lemmy was an entire piece of shit human being. Fuck Lemmy.

KBIN has had it's issues, most noticeably, I haven't been able to access any of my notifications for about 3 months now at all and every time I click on the notifications number to check it throws up the "were working on it" error page, attempts to block users from certain instances doesn't work and throws up the error "we're working on it page", and you can't seem to block entire instances from KBIN without it seemingly unrelatedly weirdly losing the ability to see comments in disparate random posts (all known issues) ........ other than that I'm perfectly happy on KBIN

"I moved to X because Y has a name that reminds me of someone I don't like for bogus reasons and that made me flap my flabby arms in outrage and move on!"

Fwiw, I believe that happened bc you dared to comment on a post that was since removed by a mod from a magazine hosted on another instance. Now, that whole post is "gone", so Notifications cannot reach it, but it is "not gone" in the sense that Notifications cannot properly realize that it's gone. And it has poisoned your whole notifications system, to the point that you cannot even read other notifications from other posts.

The good news is that it only affects one "page" of your Notifications, so as you continue to operate, it will eventually fall behind to page 2, and thereby still prevent you from seeing any Notification from that whole entire page, but from then on at least you will get new notifications from page 1. Until it happens again, ofc, and the cycle continues. I have ceased recommending anyone to come to KBin as a result of this extremely frustrating bug, along with the other highly frustrating ones like constantly logging you out, and barely being able to type out a comment on mobile. Hopefully it gets better.:-|

See, I don't care about the tankie/nazzi/[insert whatever] stuff. I'm on lemmy.world which seems to have a fairly healthy code of conduct, and has blocked certain instances from federating. If there are groups of people who have their political opinions, that do not align with the Geneva convention, they have no place here. So they're free to spend their time on skinheads.social, which is a blocked instance on lemmy.world, so I don't get to see any of their BS.