2y ago

Why is Kbin seemingly growing considerably slower than Lemmy?

I'm a bit confused at the explosive growth of Lemmy and the slower growth of Kbin. Do the stats reflect the reality or is there a problem with the data being fed back to the various stat hubs?

I know the difference is partly because Lemmy was a larger platform, and is better known but the growth of Kbin seems suprisingly flat while the community seems to be getting more and more active?

92 comments

Seems pretty even to me:
https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
(Should not look at created accounts, those are spammers)
- It's actually the opposite. Kbin has been growing faster than Lemmy.
  
  And that's surprising, given it's s newer, less-established platform. But it's not like Lemmy was a household name before this.
- Those graphs are quite informative, and yeah, it seems more like similar growth for both sites based on that info.
  
  Honestly, looking at active users over the last 24 hours I’d say kbin is growing faster than lemmy.

Probably because of the endorsement of Lemmy by subreddits, which has been far greater than the endorsement of Kbin. Lemmy's also just been around far longer than Kbin. Those server issues that Kbin encountered during the whole explosion of users also likely slowed down growth a bit. Even with Lemmy's bot problem I think these have made it grow faster anyway.
- I have been trying to login to Lemmy for the past 2 days and just get a spinning wheel
  
  I have the same problem on mobile (both through browser and Memmy), but not on my desktop. Really annoying. Been using Reddit since 2009. Feels really odd to switch things up, but lemmy.world, kbin and squabbles seems like potentially good alternatives. I wonder which one will end up being "the one".
  
  It iis easier to sign up for kbin I think because kbin lets you sign up with google or facebook. I did gmail google sign up because I like being lazy.
  Kbin is slightly more confusing (they named everything a little weird), so if you do make a kbin.social account lmk or ask many questions about how to do stuff. It’s easy once I knew stuff like magazine = subreddit
- I created my Lemmy account first, because it was easier to remember for me than kbin...
  
  Same, but I've abandoned that account completely in lieu of kbin.
- I also think some of the growth of Lemmy is the ability to get the project to a functioning stance. The start of Kbin still seems a little rocky, but getting better.

@BananaTrifleViolin. I'm fine with it. I tried lemmy first and was met by a ton of issues from the influx. Kbin thus far has seemed more stable and honestly I like the layout a bit better.
- Same on the layout.
- Me too, I tried to make a lemmy account and it wouldn't work at first, and then when it did work it wouldn't let me log in. I can't imagine how much more of a pain in the ass it would be if it was one of the instances that required an essay to apply for membership.
  I tried kbin and it worked first try, no problems at all. I figured I would run into the same problem I had trying to join lemmy but didn't have a problem at all.
  I can't imagine how many more people would be signing up to the federation if it just worked first try.
  
  This is my experience as well. Tried lemmy and the login icon just kept spinning in circles. I even tried asking discords for help.
  Tried kbin and it just works, no issues, smooth.

I admit that I had buyer's remorse for a bit after immediately jumping to Kbin and finding out later that Lemmy existed. Lemmy's UI just looks friendlier and more colorful. But I'm sticking with Kbin-- no reason not to, really, since all (or most) of the content cross-pollenates!
- I like the simplicity and lack of color at Kbin! So, they're definitely different selling points.
- welcome to the fedi.
  multiple accounts are not only normal but also encouraged.
  please feel free to create a lemmy account and a mastodon account and a pixelfed account and a peertube account.
  
  Well that's an entire hassle and seems far from ideal, lol. I have a mastodon account I never use, but for now I'm just gonna stick to kbin and follow whatever lemmy folks or whatever I want from here.
- Interesting. I got the opposite impression, that Kbin is friendlier and has a nicer UI (for the most part). I ended up moving from lemmy.world because of it.
- I haven't quite decided between the two, but I'm planning to self host one of them. And if kbin sticks around and keeps gaining traction, I'm much more familiar with hosting and working with PHP than with Rust

Kbin is growing faster than Lemmy. Lemmy just saw a huge amount of spambot registrations recently.
- This is the answer.

Most people heard about Lemmy on reddit, and heard about kbin on lemmy, possibly after they already made an account.
Im not going to not interact with Lemmy because of its developers but it was enough I decided id rather not be tied exclusively to their tankie ass politics.
- What is it about Lemmy's developers?
  
  Questionable opinions about such diverse topics as:
  Is the Uygher genocide in China a thing?
  Is North Korea bad?
  Was the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually a noble attempt to liberate its people from Nazis?
  
  Tankies.

Lotta bots on Lemmy. The stats I saw looked like 200k users in the last few weeks. I'd willing to gamble most are bots. Maybe some for ads, maybe some to claim names then sell 'em later.

I think a lot of people moved from Reddit to Kbin in the early days of the black out and at that point Kbin was isolated from Lemmy. So when people saw less content they jumped to Lemmy. Which just made that already big community grow. Then people told other people they went to Lemmy instead of Kbin.

Fediverse is fediverse
- That seems like the bottom line. I suppose a case could be made for concern that the instance you choose is going to remain for the long term. And that it's not run by people with beliefs egregiously different than yours. Other than that, being on a main instance or not shouldn't matter too much.
- What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Some of that may well be real, but one issue that is a factor is that it appears that someone is having bots auto-creating accounts at lemmy instances with open-sign-up, which is believed to be responsible for a considerable portion of the new accounts (basically, many of the accounts don't appear to be active, and apparently the instance admins are banning a number of them). The lemmy.dbzer0.com instance admin has something up on GitHub to try to monitor the situation:
https://github.com/db0/lemmy-overseer
I'll add that that does highlight the fact that the Reddit team has put a lot of time over the years into countering bad actors, spammers and the like, and some of those are probably going to try to hit lemmy/kbin.

I have signed up for both in the past 24 hours. I think there are pros and cons to both and honestly I like both about equally
- Same for me. I haven't decided jet which one I'll prefer longterm.

Lemmy is having a lot of bot issues. I think once they get that sorted we can get a better comparison.

All I know is i’m using an ipad and everytime I try to log into lemmy i’m stuck at the login screen with a spinning icon. Tried kbin and it just works, no hassle.
- ernest's magic:
  https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/68541/kbin-server-update-or-how-the-server-didn-t-blow-up
- Check your email. You probably need to click the verification link. I had this problem too.

Most people like me came to lemmy when they first left reddit and it was just there. my first instance was lemmy.ml and they where having issues so i went to lemmy.world and it was amazing. i kept hearing about kbin but they where having issues also. eventually kbin was stable and now i'm here for the long haul. lemmy has basic features like subs and you can subscribe and create post etc.. kbin has Threads = Reddit Post, Microblogging = Twitter and Magazines = Subreddits all in one service. Make an account and see for yourself. you can have a lemmy account kbin dosen't matter!

The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.
that's a big part of it. people want something that just works, and they don't want to leave the site to see the latest submissions/comments.
- i've noticed that sometimes these magazines are actually fairly recent and you don't have to leave the site—the server may be incomplete but also may not be. i've subscribed to a few from beehaw that say this and seem recent enough that i can use them.
  but for sure this is not the case for all of them and it is a top issue that's gotta be addressed if we want more users to hop on without skepticism

I have been using Lemmy initially, but have switched over to trying Kbin. I am still unsure which I will use mainly.
I think Kbin has a much cleaner UI, but I think I like the process of commenting on Lemmy much better. Many little things, like having a "top" sort option to see the top comment, and comment box under the story as opposed to at the bottom of the page. Also, you can minimize comment trees in Lemmy, which is a necessity.
Lemmy's one big issue right now is its main page sorting is broken and needs desperately to be fixed.
- yeah i started my fediverse journey on lemmy, but i wasnt a big fan of the interface. The mobile apps in testflight didn't scratch that itch for me either. But the kbin website w/ kbin enhancement script has made me an ideal experience on both desktop and mobile so I believe I will be staying with kbin.
  
  I've never heard of kbin enhancement script... I guess I need to look into it.

Some Lemmy instances don't have any sort of validation on user signup, but Kbin absolutely has user signup validation, which limits how fast we can grow(and is a great thing IMO).
Also, with the way federation works its almost a benefit since then kbin(and any other smaller server) can maintain a tighter community with the ability to cut out servers with negative experiences(read: too spammy/too many bots/too hateful)

kbin wasn't federated yet when we jumped. as far as i'm aware i made my kbin account like 6 hours after federation, because i did that as soon as i heard that there was a different UI
- What does being federated does?
  
  Allow content and interaction to flow between the federated instances
  
  i'm from australia. australia is a federation. this country is made up of six states and a number of territories. the six states are all still legally distinct entities with their own individual laws that do not impact residents of other states. to be able to be part of a larger country tho, our different states need to comply to another, higher set of rules that are decided by our federal government. it is theoretically (but not legally) possible for a state to be ejected or to leave the federation in which case they won't have to comply to the federation-wide rules any more. for example, the country of New Zealand has had a standing invitation to join the australian federation ever since colonies on the australian mainland started talking about declaring statehood and then joining up in a federation, but those smart bastards have always told us where to go and where to tie our horse up when we get there. the fact that they've literally always had better conditions (eg women being allowed to vote and own land) might have something to do with it
  
  Someone with way more knowledge about this subject than I can correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I gathered it's good to think of these things like this:
  Instances (kbing, lemmy, mastadon,etc) are like Cities. They can function interdependently but do better by being connected (federated) to other cities. If, for example you are like me, and despise a certain city, your city can choose not to connect with that city, but doing so means your citizens won't be able to see/do anything with that city.

Lemmy has been around for much longer than kbin. So it obviously has more number of users in total. A better figure to compare is the monthly active users. According to FediDB, kbin actually has more monthly active users than Lemmy.

Adding to all the previously added reasons, there's also no native mobile app yet for Kbin, and that seems related to having no API released yet.
That is hopefully going to change soon since at least 2 apps are being worked on by the community - This unnamed one with the goal of being like Apollo, and Artemis which seems to be looking for beta testers - besides the hopefully soon-to-be-released Official Kbin mobile app by the Kbin team.

Lemmy was just ready first. Kbin at the time wasn't linked to the other instances yet, and was very slow, and had a lot of cloudflare issues.
It really doesn't matter long-term because Kbin can interact with Lemmy anyway.
- Just a minor correction, kbin unfederated during the great migration due to user explosion. Kbin also activated cloud flare to keep bots from marching in. Kbin went back to being federated after @ernest felt safe doing so. Some Lemmy instances unfederated too.

Kbin's docs for self-hosting are pretty incomplete. Lemmy's docs are also awful but since they have a docker image and an ansible playbook, creating new instances is easier.
- Can you explain self hosting to me? Is that different than what I did by joining kbin.social?
  
  Yes, it's different. Self-hosting means you set up a running version of kbin (or whatever) on your own server. All the different domains you see (lemmy.ml, beehaw.org, lemmy.world, kbin.social, fedia.io etc etc) are on their own servers. Theoretically you could also set up a version where you are the sole user even.

i like them both but i can see how users would prefer Lemmy's UI as it reminds them more of Reddit (this is just what i've heard a lot on this m).
I still prefer kbin.

I'm not sure if this is why, but another post here was saying there's been a ton of bot sign-ups for Lemmy: https://kbin.social/m/lemmy@lemmy.ml/t/76632/Almost-90-of-the-accounts-on-lemmy-are-now-bot#comments

1- Kbin is newer and less known and more unstable
2- The top five growing Lemmy instances are full of bot/spam accounts

Lemmy has a bot problem, they gained over a million users with zero activity in like a week due to the lack of account verification.

I know the difference is partly because Lemmy was a larger platform, and is better known but the growth of Kbin seems suprisingly flat while the community seems to be getting more and more active?
Precisely that. Moreover, Kbin is more fresh than Lemmy (Lemmy seems to have been around for a while longer), and Kbin still lists itself on the website as an early beta.
OTOH, there were already more Lemmy servers to begin with, while there were no third party servers at all iirc when the Reddit migration started.

In terms of content posted, I'm not sure that is the case.
In terms of users, there's just been a massive surge in Lemmy users over the last few days - far outstripping the growth in users that happened over the initial Reddit blackout period - which is believed to be because of bots on instances that don't have controls around sign-ups.

When I went to sign up for the fediverse, I tried kbin first, but signups were broken, so I just chose the next thing on a list of recommendations I found (outside of any reddit posts)

i think its opposite

For me it's the ecosystem. Lemmy is more mature with its API and app ecosystem.

92 comments