extratoneLemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
Love Reddit but tired of what's happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast. #fediverse
Stopkilling0Every article or thread I read comparing kbin vs lemmy, kbin always comes out on top and yet lemmy has way more users and I just can't figure out why.
Baron Von JWhen the explosion of new users happened, kbin.social was the only instance and it wasn’t ready for the growth. It was completely offline or disfuncional frequently and Ernest had to both disable federation and put up a CloudFlare captcha to slow down traffic to the site. So after all that lemmy.ml had to also temporarily block kbin.social because bei g unresponsive to lemmy.ml trying to federate was slowing down lemmy.ml. so people who were looking at both went to Lemmy.
sabCloudflare protection also completely messed up federation, so in those days kbin was more or less completely cut off from Lemmy. And in those days there weren't really alternative kbin instances to choose from.
Kbin is still much more bleeding edge - kbin had just recently reached a level of basic usability at the time of the first wave of Reddit migrants, whereas Lemmy has been around for years with a development team of twice the size (two people).
Where kbin is lagging behind the most is probably in how easy it is to set up an instance, and administer it once it's out there. This means that niche sites are more likely to use Lemmy at the moment. Then there's also, of course, still no API/apps (could change any moment now).
That said, I am incredibly happy with kbin myself, and I also don't mind at all most of the people out there being on Lemmy. As far as I'm concerned having two strong platforms from the beginning makes the Threadiverse stronger.
RheingoldRivercould change any moment now
Indeed, Artemis public beta is now live as of 4 minutes ago!
I don't think it's been announced outside of the discord yet even haha but the links are:
- iOS: https://testflight.apple.com/join/DmJTH3he
- Andr: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=camp.artemis.app
(public beta requires you to sign up for https://artemis.camp and access the app via this instance, as soon as the kbin API is fully released as opposed to dev branch only, all instances will be supported!)
EggyheadHead start, probably. Kbin was still in relative early development when the migration hit and couldn’t perform well in those first few days.
livusYeah, the reddit refugees who ended up on kbin are the select few who could withstand 404s and barages of Cloudflare.
I say this with affection. It was worth it, and I love it here.
NepentheAnd those who were stubborn enough to keep looking at all options despite what could easily feel overwhelming to a non-tech user.
I am not very tech-inclined, so trying to understand the fediverse as a whole felt like deep water and lemmy really didn't do any job at all at explaining what it was I was committing to by choosing an instance, when I didn't even know what instances were and had trouble finding out.
Since Lemmy was and is by far the most mentioned alternative and I found it too anxiety-inducing, it's mostly stubborn desperation that brought me to kbin. Which says nothing to how much I'm genuinely enjoying it here, to be clear, I was just relieved to have a simple option at that point.
Being made anxious by a new platform isn't great and I would guess that most people who didn't like the experience they had with Lemmy didn't bother clicking other links that would take them to the same fediverse. They're likely to assume they won't enjoy that one either, and resign themselves elsewhere.
So kbin naturally got fewer users just by word of mouth, and then the necessary brief isolation didn't help either when people were still getting comfortable here. I don't particularly mind it other than those rare times I'm accidentally excluded, either by a question addressed only to Lemmy or their recent version of r/place disappointingly being incompatible with kbin.
Good point. When I made my account here I was also looking at lemmy, tildes, and squabble. But kbin felt more intuitive to me.