They’re both built on ActivityPub and look very similar, but Kbin is talked about like an alternative to Lemmy instead of an instance of it. Is it a fork? Why is it better or worse?
Lemmy very much tries to be “federated Reddit”. It’s Reddit as it was in 2010ish, and that’s all it tries to be. And that’s fine, but it limits the development of what the Fediverse is. You can use a Mastodon account to browse Lemmy, but you can’t use a Lemmy account to browse Mastodon (and the devs aren’t planning on adding it - I asked).
Kbin, however, looks at things from a different perspective. On Kbin, you have both threads and microblogs. This replicates modern Reddit’s ability to post to your own profile, except instead of going to some user subreddit that nobody reads - it’s treated like a post on Twitter or Tumblr and shared more widely. You can follow people on Mastodon from Kbin, and vice versa. There are plans in the future to support more things that make the Fediverse great - you can read the roadmap here.
Note Kbin as a project is less than a year old, and this “main” server only came online a month ago. Until very recently it was just ernest talking to himself… this amount of growth wasn’t planned for!
Long-term, Kbin will be somewhere that connects the Fediverse platforms - you won’t need a Mastodon account and a Pixelfed account and a PeerTube account. I really like that approach. Rather than trying to do one thing to the detriment of everything else, it goes beyond just a Reddit clone and is also its own thing. That’s why I joined; it’s a completely different approach to how the Fediverse should be interacted with.
The Lemmy developer is a bit of a “Tankie”, which put me off joining.
I’m not sure that should really matter much though. Lemmy is federated, open-source, and makes zero revenue. It’s not like the developer has much control over instances other than his own or even the code it runs on, ultimately.
It’s not super surprising that communists would be drawn to the fediverse’s design philosophy and while I might think he’s misguided politically the software isn’t really his at the end of the day, even if he is the lead maintainer.
It’s not the same issue as closed platforms have like Facebook+Zuckerberg or Reddit+Spez. If he starts messing with the project the community can take it and leave.
Not only that but the design encourages that the majority of the community not be on the instance he controls from the outset.
You’re 100% right and I completely agree with you.
But to play devil’s advocate: people are saying that drawing attention to Lemmy will mean more donations to Lemmy’s dev team, which in turn supports them.
I personally don’t care what the politics are behind a good piece of software. I don’t know Linus Torvalds’ politics; I don’t know the politics of the folks behind Mastodon; I don’t know the politics of Jimmy Wales. I can guess, of course, but regardless of their politics they’ve made a good product and that’s found success.
One big feature Kbin has over Lemmy is that it also supports Mastodon-style microblogs, effectively making it a 2-in-1.
you have to take into account that kbin.social is not yet totally federated with other instances, because the website is under a Cloudflare protection. this is to let the main dev focus on more important thing that dealing with a direct attack on the website servers. it will be re-federated gradually.
other instances like https://fedia.io are federated if I’m correct.
I much prefer the Kbin UI myself.
kbin does feel like a more polished user experience than Lemmy, although the frequent cloudflare challenges are annoying
I kind of like them. Adds a dash of jank my teen-during-the-2000’s sensibility enjoys.
Kbin and lemmy are two different sites. Lemmy is a reddit-style site. Kbin has lemmy-style threads but also mastodon-style microblogs.
They both can interact with each other since they’re both a part of the fediverse. Personally, I like kbin.
It’s kinda silly and holds no real merit, but I like the name Kbin more than Lemmy. Lemmy reminds me of Lemmings and the idea of creatures running off a cliff. Kbin is shorter, doesn’t really mean anything, and feels cooler/more technical. Just my 2c though.
I think Kbin is a shortened version of ‘karabin’ (polish for carbine/rifle) - the name of the polish instance
