Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
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.
A writeup in PCMag!
I can’t get into calling subs “magazines”. Communities is much better.
Just call them "clips." /s Seriously though, the aesthetic of Kbin is its best feature, but the concept behind the threads seems. I dunno. Weird. Lemmy feels janky and basic, like old Reddit. 💗
Coming off years of old.reddit.com, Lemmy felt like major bloat :) I'm used to it now though, definitely nothing compared to regular Reddit.
And, yeah, the jank is 💗
I'd argue that kbin's UI is no longer a standout feature. Beautiful custom frontends for Lemmy like Alexandrite have been popping up left and right.
Same. This is just bizarre to me. Paper magazines aren’t as common in the world today as they used to be, but neither are they some ancient thing that has passed out of history, allowing the word to be used for pure metaphorical value. Maybe some people are young enough for it to be so, but certainly not me.
I think these long explainations of instances and federation are really not necessary. It should just say "pick a server and start browsing. You'll be able to see everything*."
"*If you really want to get into the weeds, blah blah blah."
Yes. Anytime someone starts trying to explain the Fediverse to someone signing up I want to put my hand on their face and tell the newbie right this way.
For real. Wanna try Mastodon? Make an account on mastodon.social. Wanna try Lemmy? Make an account on Lemmy.world. Once people buy into the platforms they can migrate to smaller/niche instances if they’d like. Simply things at first, active users will then slowly figure out the rest.
It sucks migrating between instances right now. I've found no way to port my subscriptions from one instance to another. All of your subscriptions are saved on your current instance as websites, but to subscribe on you new instance they need to be formatted ![name]@instance Lots of work needs to be done
It’s like how there aren’t articles comparing email options. We all just kinda picked an email site and stuck with it until something goes wrong and then pick the next one. No one’s really investing time in debating ones over the others or trying to convert others to Team Hotmail or somethin.
Unless you're crazy like me and host your own email server :)
I like the direction Lemmy and Kbin has provided in terms of providing a messaging environment on the internet where it is more decentralized much like the internet of old.
Email on the other hand has taken a serious step in the other direction with email monopolies from the big names such as Google and Microsoft etc that have made self-operated email servers quite a bit more difficult to operate then it really should be, at-least from the perspective of actually sending email to other people using their servers and getting it in their inbox.
I find it ironic that Google/Microsoft etc use the excuse of spam/malware as the excuse to block self-hosted email servers with little to no email history/reputation yet most of the worlds spam comes from their servers.
But a negative consequence of that was the centralisation of email providers.
Agree completely. It just makes it all sound much more complicated than it is in practice. I’m used to the fediverse now and my eyes glazed over reading all that.
Another issue I have with the article is that he doesn’t even touch on third-party apps, which are abundant and pretty damn robust considering how new they are. The fact that much of Reddit’s self immolation was directly due to their treatment of third-party apps. At least worth a paragraph in my opinion.
Otherwise, nice write up.
I am not sure I agree. It does not need paragraphs of explanations but something that says the server you sign up for decides what you can see, should still be mentioned.
I have signed up for multiple servers in the beginning and found quite big differences in what I could see because of what was already blocked. Or servers that have not federated with each other yet. Then I stuck with lemmy.fmhy.ml and well, I guess you know the story.
So I think it definitely should mention server choice may influence content and one should try out several in the beginning to see whats best for yourself.
So long as the federation of servers is based on the whim of the few people who own the instances, the server you choose is most currently relevant. The people running these communities need to realize that cutting of groups just because you don't agree with them or have personal issues with them is going to cause an extremely fragmented experience, alienating new users who don't understand the landscape this ensuring nothing but monolithic servers and communities exist and no small communities will ever be populated.
There are also some quirks in how Kbin handles things that differs from Lemmy. Linking to Lemmy instances works fine when viewed from Kbin, but it doesn't seem to work when linking Kbin communities. All fairly minor though!
Agree
Surprisingly a good writeup that details most of the features of both platforms while being forgiving of their flaws.
I especially enjoy the x-eyed frowny snoos all over the orange background: perfect touch, and exquisitely appropriate.
-chef's kiss-
At the moment, I login on kbin.social and lemmy.world interchangeably, since both are growing, and both are kind of unstable, but thankfully I can read the exact same posts on both. Will probably settle on one of these, or a different one eventually
You use kbin in the browser? And in the desktop?
Yes, and yes
A little harsh on /kbin given that it's been released for less than two months and the author doesn't even mention this. Otherwise seems reasonable.
I personally don't like KBin's UI. It's an immediate turn-off for me. Text too small, vote buttons look weird. Also I just loaded the homepage and the top posts are "🤔🤔🤔", "ich🚗iel", "Every time I leave or enter the house", and a generic meme. No thanks, there's enough trash like that already on the Reddit homepage.
I'm building my own Reddit alternative zsync.xyz. I'll open source it in a week. Hoping to federate it one day and make it into a pcmag article. I def respect the Lemmy dev(s). To an outsider a Reddit clone might look trivial to build but it's actually a ton of work, and of course an enormous chicken & egg problem to overcome to actually get any users.
What's unique or special about yours, as opposed to lemmy or kbin or any of the others? Especially if your issue with kbin is just the ui, it seems like making an app for an already established user base might be a better use of your time. If you're just doing it for kicks that's fine I'm not trying to bash that, I'm just curious. If you're planning to federate eventually does it do anything differently to lemmy? What's the use case?
I agree with low effort posts here on lemmy and kbin. But it's mostly a end-user problem, not the software
I guess federation is a way to get an egg.
I rather like kbin and feel no need to go back to the other place.
At least not until it starts randomly logging me off.
I have not used kbin yet. Is there any feature that really makes it worth using over Lemmy ? I'm curious as I want to try it out sometime.
P.S - I use Lemmy through wefwef
I have a few kbin communities subscribed from Lemmy and interaction works fine.
If you don't use the webinterface a lot, it probably doesn't matter which one of the two you are using.
Lemmy had a better backend when I tried kbin the last time. And lemmy has just gotten better since then.
I think the main thing that makes its nice is it federates with both Lemmy and Mastodon under one interface. While Lemmy can post to Mastodon instances and vice versa, it's not a part of the Interface really, you have to manually copy URLs
Does lemmy use google or Facebook as an idp yet? That makes things pretty easy on kbin.social.
I chose Mastodon to be my Reddit alternative. For one, I love the change of pace and how different it is. And secondly, I can post on Lemmy through Mastodon, which is the coolest thing ever.
At least one mistake in there though, since you can definitely block instances in Kbin too. It's not the most obvious though.
At least one mistake in there though, since you can definitely block instances in Kbin too. It's not the most obvious though.
Also:
Why join trashbin when you can be a lemming! Ha ha ha. I love all the new terms and crazyness.