this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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I noticed that kbin has stalled in development recently and the ongoing problems with federation etc. made me use it even less for the past few weeks. I even spent more time on reddit than here.

Today, I decided to give my abandoned lemmy account a try and see how that goes.

As many others, I disliked the UI of lemmy, compared to kbin, but soon enough found this one https://p.lemmy.world and it's been very smooth so far.

So yeah ... hello from the other side of the fence 🍷

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I've read that. And I wish him all the best. I can imagine how difficult it can be to maintain such a big project while also taking care of private/financial stuff.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I tried Kbin, but I don't know why it just never clicked with me. I kind of like the barebones lemmy UI.

Also, the instance I'm on has an "old.reddit" style page that is really nice when I'm on PC.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Pretty much the same, captain.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Carry on, Ensign.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren't being merged in and deployed.

Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.

The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.

TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors' proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.

Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin's main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn't exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.

Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I used to follow ernest and kbinMeta to keep up with the updates, so I'm fully aware of the current situation. The thing is, I don't want to stay there and hope that things will get better one day. I'm here to read the latest happenings on my favorite topics, and engage with people. And, unfortunately, kbin just doesn't give me that experience.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I personally recommend https://a.lemmy.world if you're going to use an alternative frontend.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Right? Alexandrite is the best UI to me too. Its best feature is you don't have to change page while opening posts. It just opens in one side of the page.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Alexandrite is what the reddit redesign should have been. It's just a shame that the company didn't give one single shit about actually making a user friendly desktop experience.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

wow alexandrite looks beautiful

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Old habits die hard for me and I'm glad they've got mlmym on https://old.lemmy.world, it's my default on the desktop now

If anyone is doing the same and misses the community bar customisation from RES, I cobbled together a little userscript to do this

Hopefully someone else finds it useful too

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I started on kbin myself. It was mostly a population consideration, though I did like the downvote accounting. Community moderation is one thing Tildes does right, and that was a step in that direction.

I ultimately bailed when even the big magazines weren't being moderated anymore (spam everywhere).

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I preferred the kbin ui on pc originally but the phone apps and the release of β€œold reddit” style ui for lemmy got me to switch

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Loved Kbin, but yeah the slow development made me come back to lemmy as well.

[–] can 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Didn't know about this project, thanks for the tip!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I started in Kbin. I think that the activity level was smaller in there, which made me swap. Another reason was that Lemmy feels nicer to use (I like its looks more and I found a neat app on the phone to use it. Didn't find an app for Kbin).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I also use lemmy (voyager app is awesome) but kbin also has an awesome app called Artemis, which got inspired by apollo for reddit.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Love to see Photon love! (https://p.lemmy.world is using the Photon UI)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Welcome back!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes. The constant logouts were bad - a little on desktop but constantly on mobile, and needing to refresh/login spam 4x to get in sometimes. After awhile growth and activity also looked to be stalling out. I realized a bunch more communities I was missing out on were from Lemmy and I needed to make an account to fully interact.

When I found old.lemmy.world it was game over. I don't think I'll go back to my kbin account much anymore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Very familiar UI over there. Creating an acct now

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Wow. Photon UI looks really nice. It's a lot like Sync

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Wrt fediverse, you can keep using all of them at the same time. How cool is that!

[–] can 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you're not ready to leave yet mbin fork that integrates community fixes faster. Fedia switched to it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've heard about mbin, but as a developer myself I don't think PHP is the suited language for those kinds of things, where performance and resource usage are just crucial. According to ernests recent post somewhere, they're still struggling with infrastructure issues. And I'm afraid mbin will face the same issues sooner than later.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Isn't modern php supposed to be pretty good and fast? And I thought the issues were on a database / federation level anyway, not related to php performance.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

No matter how modern PHP becomes every year... it just beats its previous version in performance, but the underlying architecture is still the same and cannot compete with other languages, especially when using frameworks like symfony, etc.

For example.

If you run a node/go/rust server and you hit the endpoint /hello which returns a simple "hello world", they will just return that. PHP (symfony) however, has to initialize and execute the whole framework stuff, before returning a simple "hello world"

Edit: Introducing something like Redis for caching, etc... can help in reducing the overload, but imho, it's just a bandaid

[–] Hanabie 4 points 1 year ago

Kbin kept logging me out. At some point, it got so annoying, I deleted my bookmark.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I'm actually the opposite. I've tried using Lemmy and I still do to an extent but I dunno. I love the feel of kbin

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Im on kbin and have a lemmy account but i dont really know what the difference is? Except the interface. Ive still not fully grasped the fediverse stuff since im a reddit refuge. But ive been enjoying my time on kbin. Maybe theres just something im fundamentally missing by not using lemmy but i have no idea.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Considering they're both linked to the fediverse you arent missing anything if youre browsing on Lemmy or Kbin. Biggest difference is the interface.

Your lemmy site might have some ones blocked that kbin don't but thats the only difference.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm still here but I also have a bunch of accounts for other instances. Between the bugs, domain blocks and defederation, this fediverse seems like a bad example of how to use activity pub in practice tbh. Either the protocol is not defined enough or not enforced well enough by the sites using it, but it seems like a mess.