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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I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for “Hot” posts, etc.
Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like “communities” instead what KBin terms them (“magazines”), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.
The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It’s good for the Fediverse that choices exist.
lack of action led to a recent forking into mbin
Ernest, the main developer of Kbin, has given an explanation of what has happened: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded#entry-comment-3006120
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.
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.
Pretty much the same, captain.
Carry on, Ensign.
deleted by creator
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).
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.
Yes, come to Lemmy and bring your kbin friends…we have chocolate chip cookies and a lack of being able to see who downvoted you…hehehehe
There’s even an option to hide the fantasy Internet points entirely. I love that option because I find fantasy Internet point chasing completely risible.
‘point chasing’ e.g. karma farmers on reddit is fucking stupid, but I find the metric useful on an individual post. I think of them like an online extension of a facial expression: if I read a post attempting to explain something, and it’s got way more downvotes than up, the kinda tells me the poster is full of shit, which is especially useful in threads where I don’t know enough about the topic to actually identify the bullshit myself. Like a flat-earther trying to give a lecture to an auditorium of booing geological scientists - my clueless medic ass is going to be gauging the audience as much as the speaker.
Or, say I post some joke: if it gets a lot more upvotes than down, that tells me other folks folks got a kick out of it.
It’s just another tool to communicate - and communication is hamstrung right out the gate in a predominately typed medium, so I’ll take the crutch.
That is a valid viewpoint.
It’s not mine.
So I turn off the votes view. I have no idea if my votes are up or down. And I don’t care. I love having that choice too!
totaly agree. Additionally if I see a post/comment with racist/fascist/sexist views I want to know what the general consensus is. It makes a difference knowing that people disagree or support.
as a former karma-whore from reddit… I love the fake-internet-points system… It makes me feel special :-D
I personally recommend https://a.lemmy.world if you’re going to use an alternative frontend.
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.
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.
That’s a really nice alternative interface for desktop! I wonder if other instances implement it other than lemmy.world? It’s cool that that that instance admin has, though. It looks superb.
Its default purple theme matches my overall browser theme completely by accident, lol.
You can use Alexandrite regardless of instance by using the official webpage for it: https://alexandrite.app/ . That’s what I’m using right now.
You’d add your instance link after the /, so in your case it’s https://alexandrite.app/feddit.uk . You’ll automatically be redirected if you log in anyways though, which is nice.
Awesome. Thanks so much for the tips! ❤️
We run them! Cole set them up and I try to keep them updated ASAP based on GitHub alerts.
- Photon - p.lemdro.id
- Alexandrite - a.lemdro.id
- Voyager - m.lemdro.id
- Mlmym - old.lemdro.id
wow alexandrite looks beautiful
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
I preferred the kbin ui on pc originally but the phone apps and the release of “old reddit” style ui for lemmy got me to switch
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).
I did enjoy kbin more, but most the apps are for Lemmy specifically, so I moved specifically to use those on mobile
Loved Kbin, but yeah the slow development made me come back to lemmy as well.
Try mbin!
Didn’t know about this project, thanks for the tip!
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).
I also use lemmy (voyager app is awesome) but kbin also has an awesome app called Artemis, which got inspired by apollo for reddit.
Welcome back!
Love to see Photon love! (https://p.lemmy.world is using the Photon UI)
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.
Very familiar UI over there. Creating an acct now
If you’re not ready to leave yet mbin fork that integrates community fixes faster. Fedia switched to it.
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.
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.
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
/hellowhich 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
