I’m a Reddit refugee trying out all the alternatives I can find to see which sticks. I guess Kbin is part of the same Fediverse as we’re in here, but it seems more isolated and people on Reddit are pushing it hard. As a result I’ve been seeing significantly higher engagement levels there than here, despite it not having a mobile app and a confusing interface.
Today, it will barely load and I can’t log in without getting an error. It’s so painfully slow, maybe because it has ddos protection enabled, but it’s with every page load. I’m finding it too frustrating to use, but somehow more active than what I’m seeing here where the front page of All often has posts with zero comments and only a handful of votes.
How are other refugees managing the Reddit alternatives?
kbin is much less polished at this point, but has much more potential to be great as it combines mastodon with lemmy.
The issues you’re referring to are very likely tied to the main instance, kbin.social (I think it was?). If you find another instance it might go better. Alternatively, just join lemmy for now and get back to kbin once it’s more refined, that’s at least what I’m planning to do for now.
I looked at kbin but didn’t like the UI. lemmy = much better
kbin is down for me. Interesting that people are touting it as a better alternative than Lemmy instances when there really aren’t very many Kbin instances. It seems kbin.social is overloaded.
I looked at kbin too and wasn’t fond of the interface personally, then I read that when things are running correctly they federate here and since I liked how Lemmy looks and works a lot more I came here. Course come to find out there are issues federating here but that’s okay, everything’s getting hugged hard right now. Hopefully things shake out soon so we can all play together if we choose to.
I made an account yesterday… but it got slower and slower during the day. It seems to be offline right now. Some people on reddit promoted kbin quite heavily so maybe the influx was much more (and more centralized).
kbin.social currently uses cloudflare protection, which is causing issues with federation not working correctly. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/101
Just curious, why you prefer Kbin over Lemmy? I also witnessed the upsurge of that r/KbinMigration but finally chose Lemmy because of two main reasons:
- 1 I knew Lemmy beforehand
- 2 The “don’t go join Lemmy” was just plain stupid to me and a baseless fearmongering on vague political beef. There is no “risk” on whatever political ideology the devs have, unless you’re feeding onto some strong unleashed cancel culture. It has nothing to do with trusting the devs, it is an open source project recently getting lots of contributions that can get a fork any time if the devs screw it.
edit: sorry if this is post hijacking, didn’t intend doing that. Answering your post, maybe you need to change sort options? If you put it as Hot or Top you’ll see posts with lots of interaction. But I think it’s set on “Active” as default, so any recent interaction will pop up, also new posts.
I actually prefer the interface here, and I’m using the gerboa mobile app so everything is snappy. I’m just trying to assess where the consensus platform will be, because I think the most important thing about a platform like this is the user base.
Today I’ve been enjoying squabbles.io which is not part of the fediverse but has a much cleaner and simpler design that seems to be drawing people in. Right now it doesn’t have downvoting, but it still seems more like Reddit and the energy there is very excited and positive. I recommend checking it out.
But I’m also enjoying Lemmy and I have a hard time imagining the community is going to embrace an alternative that isn’t open source and decentralized so my money is on the fediverse.
I loads for me, but I constantly get prompted to “verify I am human” on Cloudflare and it logs out after a few minutes of inactivity.
I imagine kbin is getting absolutely mobbed today. It’s also being developed and supported by a single person AFAIK. The site is going to have a rough couple days (weeks?) but I think in the long term it has a lot of potential. I think it has an easier learning curve for new users than diving directly into Lemmy.
That said, I have gravitated toward using Lemmy directly since I don’t need kbin’s Mastodon integration. I generally like it. The admin for sh.itjust.works has a good attitude and reasonable rules. I’m looking forward to seeing how the communities grow and evolve as the user base surges (about 100,000 users and growing fast).
I was having the same slow issue with kbin this morning. I think they’re just overloaded. The blackout is leading to people looking for alternatives so I assume the servers are creaking a little.
Kbin.social is the flagship instance of kbin and as a result it’s getting hammered with new users. You might consider using a different kbin instance if you just want to try it. I think Jerry from infosec exchange runs one at fedia.io
