this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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It's a simple UI. Was looking up several alternatives to Reddit and so far kbin stands out the best, featuring functionalities from Reddit and in general intuitive to use - which is key to success
Boosting vs upvoting / downvoting is needlessly confusing and very different from Reddit. Maybe there's a good reason I haven't heard of as to why they did it like that but... Most people haven't even seen the "you should know" post explaining how it's even a thing. That's my only Kbin complaint
It's easier to understand with a bit of background about ActivityPub I think - there a mechanisms that are being repurposed.
So on Mastodon (twitterish equivalent) you have Boosts and you have Favourites. It's fairly simple. A Favourite is a message to the posetr that "I like this", it doesn't really do anything other than give the poster a nice pat on the head. A Boost is a signal to all your followers that "Hey look at this" - they get notifications about boosts in their feeds - a bit like a retweet.
Roll-on Lemmy and Kbin - the Favourite gets translated into an 'upvote' - but does it have any algorithmic importance? That was something that needed to be sorted out. The Boost is left as it is more or less - except 'followers' is less important on Kbin/Lemmy - so what's it for, exactly? Downvotes - ooh, they are new - ummmm.
Yeah I see a lot of good things about Kbin but the terminology is not one. I don't even think calling communities Magazines and threads Articles makes a whole lot of sense. Does anyone know where that comes from?
Right now though the two most pressing issues are the poor notification alerts (very slow, sometimes doesn't work and defaults to off) as well as the super slow federation sync with Lemmy instances. Those two problems combined makes participating in conversations very hard, and almost impossible if trying to cross the border to Lemmy. I've also had issues where posting on a Kbin magazine from a Lemmy account, the comments don't show when viewing it from the Kbin side.
I believe Ernest is Polish which may explain the terminology like magazine. But remember that you are using software that is early release and 4 weeks ago it was basically Ernest and about 3 other people posting at each other as they tested out some ideas.
You’re using someone’s hobby website and it is extraordinary that the server is still running at all, funded by people’s donations to buy him a coffee. Federation was entirely turned off for a few days the week before last and he had to turn on Cloudflare protection to keep the instance up at all
Meanwhile Lemmy is also faced with a massive influx of new users and the federation logic is faltering in some of the largest instances. Again, it’s amazing they are still up at all.
So yes, a group of volunteers running experimental software on self-funded servers may be providing a UX which is a bit rough around the edges