Love Reddit but tired of what’s happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.

  • Stopkilling0@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Every article or thread I read comparing kbin vs lemmy, kbin always comes out on top and yet lemmy has way more users and I just can’t figure out why.

    • Hypx@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Kbin is about 3 months old whereas Lemmy is about 3 years old. Kbin simply wasn’t ready for growth, and still has a few major feature shortfalls. Lack of API access is a big one.

    • Madison_rogue@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I was initially put off by the UI of Lemmy that I encountered when I first went to the Lemmy site. I was a little confused as to which instance to join. That’s when I stumbled upon kbin.social and that’s where I landed my new account. Overall I am most comfortable here.

      Since joining, I’ve encountered Lemmy posts that take me to their instances proper, and the formatting looked different, more like here just with a different colored background. Overall, Lemmy instances seem okay, I just like it here better.

      Maybe it’s the overall familiarity with the instance, calling main topic pages “magazines,” the microblogging option, etc. Lemmy’s resemblance is a little closer to Reddit, so that might account for why people decided to go there instead of a kbin instance.

    • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Because Lemmy is older and already has a lot of established communities. Kbin saw the larger growth rates though (in the context of the recent Reddit drama). Kbin also currently lacks native mobile apps, and a lot of people browse this type of media form their phones.

    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      I wonder if it’s as simple as the name - lemmy is easy to remember and say, and kbin isn’t.

    • Malta Soron@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      Regarding the articles: tech journalists all use microblogging sites like Mastodon, so for them Kbin’s microblogging integration is a major advantage. Also, IIRC Kbin made it easier to follow certain people, like industry leaders, while Lemmy is more focused on communities.

      Personally, I really dislike microblogging, so for me it was a major reason not to use Kbin. I think there may be a large silent group that feels the same way, but I haven’t seen any statistics on this.

  • Sinnerman@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    A fair-minded article. This sounded off though:

    a big attraction of Reddit—that its main page is a kind of greatest hits of an enormous community.

    No, r/all was the lowest common denominator, full of karmafarming, ragebait, and reposts. Every time I looked at r/all I regretted it, so I mostly stuck to subreddits.

    • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It wasn’t too bad when you started to filter out some specific subreddits. But I feel since they applied a lot more content moderation to /r/all, causing a lot of potentially interesting things to not even show up there, it’s been kind of garbage for a while now. Something similar can be said about kbins “all” page at the moment too though. I rather wish they’d give the users the tools to tailor their feeds according to their own preferences instead of interfering themselves. “All” should be all, excluding whatever my personal filters & settings get rid of.

      • Nepenthe@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Something similar can be said about kbins “all” page at the moment too though. I rather wish they’d give the users the tools to tailor their feeds according to their own preferences instead of interfering themselves. “All” should be all, excluding whatever my personal filters & settings get rid of.

        Is it…not that? Am I misunderstanding or mistaken. My experience has been a very “All” experience, I thought, only playing an endless whack-a-mole with porn, sports, and whatever really good sub is sadly dominating the rest of the feed.

        What would you mean by tailoring?