I want to start by saying that I really like kbin so far. The process of searching for new communities to follow feels way better then reddit. The barrier of entry compared to other federated sites was much easier to overcome, which is the main thing I think is holding the Fediverse back from mainstream adoption. The fact that Lemmy posts are supported by kbin also removes any FOMO that I’ve backed the wrong horse, so to speak.
Most of my complaints are mostly UI nitpicks. For example., I want a way to quickly access a list of magazines I’ve subscribed to. As of now, the only way I’ve found to do that is to go to my profile and click the option there to display a list. I feel there should be a drop-down menu on the top bar where I can view my subscriptions. Alternatively, adding a tab in the ‘Magazines’ menu to display subscriptions. Having the list be in my profile is unintuitive.
It also feels weird that the ‘+’ menu has options to add new posts to the magazine and also create a new magazine. I feel like the options to post content to the current magazine should be moved to the magazine sidebar, such as under the unsubscribe button. Putting them in the top header made it actually take me a bit to find the option. Especially since I didn’t know that self posts were called ‘articles’ on kbin, so I was scrolling up and down looking for a button called ‘Post’. You don’t necessarily need to remove the options from the ‘+’ menu, just they should also be in the sidebar.
Another feature I’d like to see would be the ability to group multiple magazines together in one feed. This is similar to the multireddit feature on Reddit where visiting r/foo+bar would give you a page with content from both r/foo and r/bar. The problem with multireddits is that you can’t individually subscribe to them short of making a bookmark. So despite how useful I felt they could be, they never grew beyond a simple novelty. To stick with the magazine theme, you could call them ‘shelves’ or ‘racks’. As an example, I could create a new ‘shelf’ that was m/linux, m/programming, and m/tech to curate a custom feed of tech-related magazines. While you could just copy Reddit’s ability to concatenate communities in the URL, what I really want is a way to save that group within kbin to look at later.
But I really like kbin so far and I feel there’s a lot of potential here. Keep up the good work.
I put in a feature request to do like you said with “racks”. Being able to assign a group of magazine/community subscriptions to a category and have a drop-down to select it so that your feed is just subscriptions in that category would make browsing more cohesive, instead of having to visit each subscription separately.
