Title
Heard of Lemmy first.
Kbin, while really polished, tries to do too many things and not really well either. I found kbin’s calling sub-reddits magazines to be awkward. I also found that their microblogging feature distracted from the primary goal of replacing reddit. I more ascribe to the traditional Unix philosophy of one tool for one job. I like having a separate tool for micro-blogging, one for link aggregation, and another for photos or friends better. The less married we are to one platform and one way of doing things, the better. Choice is always good.
Rust > php
Rust is not necessarily better than php. I think certain things lend themselves more to rust and others to php though. Again, the more choices we with which to implement solutions, the better. Rust is better suited to decentralized services because of the additional demands placed on speed. Rust, being a compiled language, will naturally excel at that. PHP on the other hand does really well for centralized services and it is very easy to maintain and implement new features in. One of my favorite ERP platforms, ERPnext, makes use of php and does it well. Also, it depends on the skill of the coder. You can have a perfectly excellent language like go or rust and still have a poor piece of software.
It definitely uses a lot less resources with rust. The idea of using PHP for a decentralized piece of software gives me a cold chill
App support
exactly. lemmy has an app. kbin not (still like the wild west yet)
Lemmy existed for longer so it had a bigger (dev) community, is more mature and had more and wider 3rd party app support.
I use both and while I prefer Kbin’s interface slightly, I will say that my experience with Lemmy is definitely better, the Kbin instance I’m on often has 500 errors on various parts of the site, along with lots of duplicate posts. Overall, I think it’s a toss up, neither one is particularly better than the other, though Lemmy is bigger.
App support is the biggest reason. The interface isn’t smooth or intuitive. It’s harder to navigate.
The site (kbin) never had any content. Maybe it was federation issues or other bugs but often there were zero posts that interested me in a day. Quite a step down from Reddit.
It’s an interesting question. First thing I’ll say is that platform diversity, even for the same core functionality, is generally a good thing on the fediverse, as you can’t make everyone happy with one platform/design, but the fediverse can do better with federation between multiple platforms, which together increase the chances that everyone will be happy with at least one of the available platforms. So I hope both (and others?) do well.
Otherwise, my thoughts/reasons:
- I have a mastodon account on an instance I like and which does cool things IMO. So I’m not super keen to move my “microblogging” account to somewhere new, and so kbin’s microblogging features aren’t particularly attractive to me for that reason.
- From what I’ve gathered, kbin doesn’t have a true microblogging interface, though it does integrate better with microblogging platforms. So, having a lemmy account already (and since before kbin arrived), there isn’t really anything there for me in terms of microblogging.
- I rather like the general design of lemmy
- The kbin interface is a tad complex for my use case (browsing communities/magazines).
- I’m not sure I’m fond of the way kbin scoops up posts from microblogs into magazines by hashtag … seems a bit noisy maybe? I haven’t really given it a shot though … maybe it works really well? I generally don’t like hashtags that much either.
- Kinda minor, but also kinda not … I don’t like karma and I don’t like that kbin calculates and reports it … I don’t want to see my karma or want to care about it (I posted about whether establishing norms about this might be a good idea here).
When I first heard of kbin I thought it’s just another lemmy instancewith a weird name for communities (magazines)
… but with microblogging features which sounds like a post on my own profile page like you can post on reddit. It was strange to discover that you can’t do that on lemmy. I don’t use that feature.
… so far there’s no reason to switch to kbin. It would need to provide a signifcant difference in order for me to switch to it. I don’t like “magazines” and I don’t like the name “kbin” either but that’ll probably change over time as I get used to it
App support. Also I feel like the mods on some popular kbin magazines are nonexistent.
The Lemmy experience has improved immeasurably since the pre-population-boom days, where I saw Kbin as a slightly more attractive option as the UI was more polished at the time. After Lemmy 0.18.2 hit and fixed the issues with the annoying auto-updating timelines, improved the sorting algorithms, and improved database performance I’ve used it exclusively.
The Lemmy software seems to have more people working on the code and things are being addressed and improved rapidly. This extends to more 3rd party app support too. It feels like the better supported platform and that seems like it’ll be the case moving into the future as well.
As a personal note I also don’t like some of the terminology used on the Kbin platform. “Magazine” is a confusing term that seems to have been chosen purely to be different. Sometimes it’s just best to stick to common terms to reduce the complexity and learning curve of a platform.
I don’t, I switched to kbin. kbin automatically filters nsfw from the auto dash feed, and it’s not named after a man who owned the largest private collection of nazi memorabilia in the world, so, there’s that
Both?
Both.
Went all in on it first and had started my own instance. I do like kbin’s UI better, but it doesn’t really matter because of all of the awesome 3rd party applications being developed. Also, calling communities magazines is weird.
