1y ago

YSK that a lot of common questions/complaints about Lemmy are presently answered by kbin

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.

137 comments

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.
  
  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
- 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.

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
  
  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
- Currently there are no apps for kbin
- 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.
- Artemis is in private beta currently

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)

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.

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

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
  
  That's super cool. How are magazines related to polish? I don't get the link.
- @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.
  
  I think they are comparing KPop (a Korean music genre) with KBin.

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.
- 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

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).

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.

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.

Maybe it's a grass is always greener thing but I've been having issues with kbin that apparently other instances don't have. Furigana is supported on some Lemmy instances, I've had issues embedding links from Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/etc, I frequently interact with threads (preview content or upvote) and get redirected to an error page, goes on.
I did sign up with kbin for a reason though and I'm overall mostly satisfied. Having a good FAQ with how all the features of kbin work, what's on the roadmap, etc would be my biggest change.

I tried Kbin, I just don't like their UI as much, plus no good Android clients that I know of, and I find things like upvotes vs. boosts really strange and confusing, its just completely unnecessary imo.
- I hear that. There are some good-looking Android apps in the works, but nothing yet. Also, ftr, the upvotes vs posts thing is now synced up with Lemmy.
- @hariette is working on Artemis, currently in closed beta.
  
  I saw that, but isn't it closed source? That's a deal breaker for me.

As soon as Artemis opens their beta testing for the iOS app (or someone else develops one) I’m in. But I hate using web apps.
- I've got no problem with web apps and I'm happy with how Kbin works as one... BUT I am looking forward to Artemis just to see what they do with it 🙂

I have accounts on both, and I like the look of kbin better, so I've tried to use it more. However, the functionality you mention has been undiscoverable to me: I have no idea how to get a list of non-local magazines, and I've looked around for that quite a bit. On lemmy, it's as easy as clicking "All" when searching communities.
Is there any document that would help me find those features on kbin? Or, for that matter, a similar sort of documentation for lemmy?
- In the magazine tab on Kbin, it functions similarly to Lemmy. You can search for a community/magazine there, local or federated. If something doesn't show up because it's not federated yet, you can use the @ tag with the @ domain name. You can also use it as a list of all communities currently federating with your kbin instance by not typing anything into the search bar, selecting "local and federated" in the dropdown, and clicking search.

I think these are all features that are being worked on, along with better administration and moderation tools. The Lemmy devs are very busy 😀

me on kbin not knowing lemmy didn't have these things... damn lol
- Same, every time I see those posts thinking, "Kbin does that."
  Ernest is kinda the best, gotta say. Everyone should buy him a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
  
  Kbin was where I first signed up but they didn't have an app (yet). I'm only on Lemmy because I can use it on my phone. I kinda like Kbin better.

I've been using kbin mostly on my computer, and its interesting to see the lemmy.world feeds pop in. still learning all the function of kbin. on my phone I just use wefwef.app as there seems to be a lot more of the low brow content I am looking for when pooping like funny memes.
- Does wefwef (voyager) support kbin? It sounds like that's what you are implying, just want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding.
  If so, I may make a kbin account and see how that works. Mostly I am looking for a familiar "post/subscribe into categorical communities" solution with no extra fluff. That's why I like Lemmy, but I haven't looked into kbin at all, in truth.

Do they have an API yet?
- From what I hear, it's being tested/reviewed currently, but it's basically ready and will be available soon.

It's good that there's multiple ways for people to enjoy the fediverse. I'd also point out that there's a heap of people actively looking into improving kbin (you can follow the PRs coming here)
I'm super keen to get in some of the usability ones, tweaks for mobile and other features to make the mobile experience more exciting.
Eventually I'd like to tackle the core search functionally so we can search for users, magazines, posts and other content with more filters and options. Right now it's good enough, but having more granular control would be handy for finding just that right community or post

Not sure what the diff is, or what openness they have, which came first, why the next one was developed etc

I'll give it a shot. Lemmy not having any search is a bit of a bummer.
- There is https://search-lemmy.com/

I've been enjoying mlmym.org it mimics oldreddit. Still needs some flushing out, I would love to see it developed further.

Kbin how does Lemmy taste

Can someone tell me why the back button doesn't work in Kbin and why my phone starts to heat like there is not tomorrow?
- The back button doesn't work?
  
  Yes, if I click on a post on my phone and I want to go back the android back button doesn't work.

A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
I didn't realise this was something only Kbin did. It is extremely handy.
I like Kbin a lot - there's no OS app but the PWA does me alright. It was the UI that win me over but I couldn't do without having a good search tool now I've got used to it I have to say
- Yeah, the search is the main thing that drew me to kbin, but I do also strongly prefer the UI (even if it has a couple of quirks).

Kbin has been great. It's always odd seeing all the complaints and not knowing why people wouldn't just migrate over here. Waters warm.
- Honestly, I think most people don't know about kbin/know about it's feature set. I made this post hoping it would help raise some awareness.
  
  For my understanding, is it different content as well or just a different instance where I would still scroll through the same posts such as this one.

137 comments