1y ago

Kbin's API is almost done and the developer is submitting for review

kbin.social kbin's API is coming soon! I've finished up all of the endpoints required for a... - /kbin meta - kbin.social

Hopefully this means it would be possible to use Sync to sign into Kbin as well in the future?

32 comments

Well, yes but not easily: this API will indeed allow developers to more easily develop third-party clients for kbin, but I don't think it is a 1:1 reproduction of Lemmy's API, so it will require significant work for clients to support both Lemmy and kbin.
Also, do keep in mind that kbin and Lemmy do not have feature parity (like Boosting or following users which are kbin-only)
- Yeah, it definitely is not a drop in for Lemmy's API, so if Sync were to support my API for kbin it would be an additional layer for them to add.
  
  That's understandable, I figured it wouldn't be interchangeable with the Lemmy API. He did mention in his Discord a little while ago that kbin support is planned, so hopefully that's still on the roadmap now that the API is almost ready.
  Thank you for your work on the API!
- [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- I would add that's it's significantly different. ActivityPub sharing fields like title and url is one thing, sso login is another.

KBin is weird. The few times I've looked it's been all lemmy content for the first several pages of the front page of kbin.social
Like it just seems like a weird Lemmy front end at this point, in practical terms.
And with its total user base much smaller than Lemmy's, it's understandable devs are focusing on Lemmy.
- Kbin federates with Lemmy and mastodon. Lemmy has more users so more people voting up things there, but a lot of that front page is posted from kbin. Devs are not focusing on lemmy unless they’re Lemmy people. There are devs focusing on kbin too. We now have an active kbin enhancement suite going, just like RES used to be for reddit. So customizing how you interact with fedi is more in your control. Artemis app is being done by @hariette, and beta users are super happy with it.
  
  I'm not saying ALL devs are focusing on Lemmy.
  But Lemmy has like 15 mobile apps, 3 web frontends, a Mac App or two, etc.
  KBin has a handful.
  It's not a contest though, just how it is
- The active userbase isn't too far off from Lemmy's, roughly 40k compared to Lemmy's 70k. As for the content, it doesn't really mater what service is hosting the community since it's all federated. There are large kbin magazines as well.
  
  In absolute numbers perhaps, but that's almost double the active user base. What's more interesting to me, however, is the respective growth. Kbin soared to 50k+ users extremely quickly, but has since then experienced a very flat curve. Wasn't Kbin's user base larger than Lemmy's a month ago? Or at least equal? It will be interesting if Kbin grows more rapidly with API and 3rd-party app support or if it will become more niche in the future, provided Lemmy's growth continues.
  As for the content, it doesn't really mater what service is hosting the community since it's all federated.
  This is definitely true, and thank god for it or this split of the Reddit refugees would have been catastrophic. It still was a problem for a while when Kbin had bugged federation, but it seems better now.
  There are large kbin magazines as well.
  I still don't understand the point of calling communities Magazines. Who would refer to this as an "Article" in a "Magazine"?
- and kbin seems to federate REAAAALLLY slowly in my experience. A lemmy post will have 100+ comments on any lemmy instance, but then you view it in kbin and there's like 5 comments. My profile when viewed in kbin is days/weeks behind.
  It feels so empty and like you're in the past lol.
  
  I assume you've onky checked the massively overloaded kbin.social instance? Or is it a general issue with kbin itself?
  
  If it helps, I can see all your most recent comments.
- Where are you seeing the kbin userbase size?
  
  FediDB is a good source and made by the Pixelfed dev.