Fediverse
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
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 tried Kbin, but I don't know why it just never clicked with me. I kind of like the barebones lemmy UI.
Also, the instance I'm on has an "old.reddit" style page that is really nice when I'm on PC.
Pretty much the same, captain.
Carry on, Ensign.
Relevant post: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/451896/Is-Kbin-dying-I-wanted-to-address-the-deleted-thread, attempting to explain why contributions weren't being merged in and deployed.
Posts by Ernst since mention lots of bots and ads, and some outright DDOS.
The latest word: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/544021/So-what-s-the-status-on-the-update-edit-ernest-responded.
TLDR: Ernst has had a lot of unexpected personal issues to deal with, had to take on a temporary job, and has not been able to give full dedication to this project. What efforts were originally planned - e.g. an official API - seemed to instead have gotten redirected against maintenance vs. outside attacks rather than improvements to the underlying codebase. Back when he was not keeping up with contributors' proffered changes, he even planned to step down if he could not catch up, for which he gave himself a 1-month deadline, but he seems to have decided that he has met the basic minimum to not do that.
Looking forward, several months from now Kbin may be significantly better. Or barely better. Or not at all, who knows. But right now it is what it is, which is far behind Lemmy in terms of pure software features at least. I think Kbin's main selling point was that it was not built off of the original Lemmy contributors, and it does have a very nice interface (sort of, on desktop at least). Not that it matters: account migration doesn't exist on the Fediverse - even on Lemmy, right? - so those of us who migrated and asked all of our friends to do likewise are kinda stuck with our initial choices, good or bad, unless we make a clean break from our entire history.
Note I have nothing to do with Kbin, I just wanted to offer those helpful resources if you want to read them. I am glad that you found something that works well for you. I halfway wonder if I should make an alt somewhere even if just to more readily read posts from a mobile, b/c the mobile browser experience for Kbin is horrible (reading is mostly fine, but commenting is absolutely horrendous).
I used to follow ernest and kbinMeta to keep up with the updates, so I'm fully aware of the current situation. The thing is, I don't want to stay there and hope that things will get better one day. I'm here to read the latest happenings on my favorite topics, and engage with people. And, unfortunately, kbin just doesn't give me that experience.
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.
wow alexandrite looks beautiful
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
I preferred the kbin ui on pc originally but the phone apps and the release of βold redditβ style ui for lemmy got me to switch
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).
Loved Kbin, but yeah the slow development made me come back to lemmy as well.
I started in Kbin. I think that the activity level was smaller in there, which made me swap. Another reason was that Lemmy feels nicer to use (I like its looks more and I found a neat app on the phone to use it. Didn't find an app for Kbin).
I also use lemmy (voyager app is awesome) but kbin also has an awesome app called Artemis, which got inspired by apollo for reddit.
Welcome back!
Yes. The constant logouts were bad - a little on desktop but constantly on mobile, and needing to refresh/login spam 4x to get in sometimes. After awhile growth and activity also looked to be stalling out. I realized a bunch more communities I was missing out on were from Lemmy and I needed to make an account to fully interact.
When I found old.lemmy.world it was game over. I don't think I'll go back to my kbin account much anymore.
Very familiar UI over there. Creating an acct now
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
Wrt fediverse, you can keep using all of them at the same time. How cool is that!
Wow. Photon UI looks really nice. It's a lot like Sync
Kbin kept logging me out. At some point, it got so annoying, I deleted my bookmark.
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
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 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.