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 🍷
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’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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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! ❤️
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as a former karma-whore from reddit… I love the fake-internet-points system… It makes me feel special :-D
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.
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.
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!
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
Kbin kept logging me out. At some point, it got so annoying, I deleted my bookmark.
I did enjoy kbin more, but most the apps are for Lemmy specifically, so I moved specifically to use those on mobile
Try mbin first 😉
I’ve heard about it, but I’m good on lemmy. Thx.
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).
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
/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
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!
Wow. Photon UI looks really nice. It’s a lot like Sync
Love to see Photon love! (https://p.lemmy.world is using the Photon UI)