Looks like the admin for kbin.lol has some pretty valid gripes with the current status of Kbin. I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.
Kbin looks visually great but the backend just isnāt there. Check out his statement, itās worth the read.
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I found the same, tbh.
Iāve been on the thrediverse using lotide until now, which is different then lemmy or kbin. There were some federation issues so lotide wasnāt federating just as the place was blowing up with more users, so I decided it was time to install one of the new pieces of software.
I spent 3 days trying to get kbin working and federating, and just wasnāt having luck with it. Even now, kbin.social is pretty dodgy about federating, and doesnāt federate with a lot of other stuff at all.
My instances require good federation. Thatās non-negotiable because otherwise itās just me sitting here talking to myself.
Ultimately I went with lemmy, which I managed to get up and running quite a bit quicker.
To be fair to kbin, itās a super new project. lemmy and lotide have been going for years, I hadnāt even really heard about kbin 2 months ago. I think itāll get a lot better, but itās going to take time and effort.
I sucked it up with respect to the lemmy devs politics stuffā¦ Instead of bitching that theyāre not exactly like me, Iām going to just be thankful to them for creating a platform we can share.
Yes, definitely problems federating, kbin.social is under quite some load and I made a new kbin instance (Iād previously only been testing). Itās been up over 2 days and not received a single thread or comment from kbin.social. In the meantime itās filling with content from lemmy instances, like this thread for example.
But, Iām sticking with kbin for a few reasons. First as you say itās a younger project and things will only get better, and as a software developer maybe I can help with that some. But, also because I like how it looks and prefer it over others.
I think thereās a lot of functionality missing, but itās going to come over time. For people not prepared for this kind of bleeding edge operation Iād certainly not blame them for wanting to use a more established project.
Iām surprised youāre having trouble federating with kbin.social- thatās always been working for me from my personal instance. I have trouble federating with a few lemmy instances though. Lemmy.ml is still blocking the kbin useragent. And the communities of infosec.pub, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, among others- cannot be discovered from kbin.
As long as youāre happy with it, itās best if thereās a diversity of projects each trying to do a different thing. Thatās one reason why I stuck with lotide as long as I did (and I didnāt stop hosting it)
Actually- scratch that. updates from kbin.social are definitely slowed to a crawl right now.
Just a note,
It was shown a lot of the recent threadiverse federation issues were/are being caused by Lemmy. Major Lemmy instances were/are intentionally or unintentionally (due to a bug in their platform), blocking inbound federation traffic from Kbin and Lotide. While allowing their own outbound to go through.
The jury is still out on if it was an oversight/issue with their latest release, or something more nefarious on the part of the devs with regards to competition.
Yes, this seems reasonably accurate. I think it was the 17.3 release where federation with lotide went silent
I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesnāt work well enough to be usable.
I started on kbin for my first 2 weeks of the fediverse but Iāve since migrated mostly to lemmy and I think Iām happier here tbh.
Excited to see where kbin goes, and really excited to see all of the apps being made for both technologies.
Iāve got a long history in the FOSS community and if I banned everybody I disagreed with itād just be me, a scratch kernel, and nano.
This 100%
Iāve been coming to terms with the politics behind the Lemmy devs myself and I have to say I agree with the sentiment here.
Itās going to be a long road ahead if we cancel everyone with an opposing viewpoint.
Ultimately Lemmy remains free and open source. If new, more incriminating allegations show up about the devs, I hope that kbin wouldāve made more progress by then. In the mean time, Lemmy works.
Really what matters is how/if their personal politics affects the platform. Like spez trying to cash in like a capitalist.
I donāt care as long as I donāt have to listen to the drivel. The dev doesnāt really have control over any of this do they?
From what Iāve read about lemmy itās not in much better shape, the backend is not optimized for scaling up and is held together by wishes and prayers.
On one hand, I feel like there are software devs that would say that about literally any piece of software in production just to feel superior or because of their lack of experience. On the otherā¦ they are probably right. These are passion projects done in free time, jury-rigged in any way they could do it just to handle the absurd influx of new users.
We all knew that this is young tech being developed ālive in prodā, of course it wonāt work as flawlessly as something made by a corporation with 2000 employees over the last 10 years. Or you know, be as stable and reliable as Twitter, the biggest social network that even governments use, owned by a multibillionare geniuā¦ ok thatās it, canāt do it moreš
Iām sure these issues will be ironed out eventually. Mastodon is in a pretty stable spot right now and hopefully kbin/lemmy get to a similar state in 6-12 months.
+1!
Newer uses of the fediverse also donāt realise yet that Lemmy is older then Kbin, years older. Kbin has only really publically existed for a couple months.
I was here before any surge when there were about 200 users and Ernest followed everyone MySpace Tom style. Itās damn impressive how the site held up even when he had to introduce cloudflare protection temporarily. It was slow, but never crashed completely.
Some Lemmy instances did go down for a bit, even the bigger ones that didnāt had more synchronising issues then Kbin. Iām not trying to knock Lemmy by any means, but I think this goes to show that Kbin is alright if at a few months old, it can keep up with software thatās been around for several years at this point.
The best thing to do is start opening pull requests or issues and helping out, where you can :)
I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesnāt work well enough to be usable.
Important to note thatās not necessarily Kbin. Some of the major instances of Lemmy had an issue where they were blocking inbound Kbin traffic but allowing their traffic out.
It was unclear if it was somehow intentional or the result of a bug in their most recent upgrade.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.
I donāt thinks thatās accurate, Kbin has only co-existed for a few Lemmy versions. Iāve been on Kbin before the initial wave of new users, when the site had about 200 users, federation was fine. You may be thinking of when federation was deliberately broken by Ernest with the entire fediverse for about a week when he had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the first surge of signups.
The specific issue here was highlighted by a Kbin user several days ago. They monitored the traffic back and forth and saw that inbound Kbin-bot requests were denied by Lemmy.ml after the latest upgrade. At the time of that post, Lemmy.world did not have the issues and it had not upgraded yet. Iām not sure if that issue has since been fixed in the code or not.
Federation with Kbin has been broken since before the upgrade. Reading OP, it sounds like Kbin Lemmy compatibility is going to be problematic until Lemmy stabilizes. User bases is going to dictate that Kbin follow Lemmy rather than the opposite, unless they find a solution that is fundamentally better than how Lemmy does it.
In addition to the backend, Iām not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.
Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?
Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.
Yeah, I know. Some of those terms come from Mastodon (the Twitter alt). In Mastodon, you can boost posts (tweets) which is akin to a retweet (without quoting). And a Favorite is similar to liking a tweet, although Mastodon makes it so that you can see all your favorites in a list, which is nice.
How those operations function on a Lemmy instance, I have no idea. From what I remember Kbin was supposed to blend these together so you could use your one Kbin account to check out Lemmy communities and Mastodon posts in one spot?
The whole magazine thing, yeah, just not needed in my opinion - call it communities.
The idea of combining the two isnāt necessarily bad, Kbin has some good ideas and I guess thatās why itās gotten popular, there are just some baffling stuff too.
The leftover terminology from Mastodon makes some sense (havenāt used that one myself), maybe the founder thought the majority of users would join from there, but the magazine thing just confuses me since they are clearly just communities filled with threads. When I browse single picture meme posts or questions on AskKbin my first thought isnāt āah yes, Articles in a Magazineā.
Apollo town? Does that have anything to do with the former Apollo app?
Interesting to say the least, I signed up for lemmy and it has its issues (they may have finally fixed sort by hot). I looked at kbin and saw a much cleaner and at the time active community and wondered if I should move over. Lemmy got pretty active today.
No affiliation to Christian Selig or the Apollo app that Iāve read. Iāve been on a couple of Lemmy instances and Kbin.social for about four weeks now (a couple of days after Christian posted about the API charges) and always found content and activity was much greater on Lemmy. All my Lemmy instances have about the same Active/Top listings (I didnāt use Hot sorting in Reddit and not using it with Lemmy, itās not how I like to view).
I was drawn to the interface of Kbin like everyone else, but I quickly realized that the interface was buggy and clunky and not ready for prime time. It very well may perfect everything it is aiming to achieve. It appears theyāre trying to make it easy for users to interact with Mastodon style servers and Lemmy style servers, and joining the features of both worlds. That sounds pretty cool if it can be done right. But I want my votes to count, I want it to be easy to cross post or boost (these are different) and yes Iād love to interact with Mastodon also but only if those other things work correctly, thatās just how I like to get into my threads and conversations while consuming posts.
Personally I like Kbin better but Iām enjoying both and the fact that I can view posts from both on either platform! Itās nice not having to choose in that sense
Kbin has only existed publicly for a little over two months.
Lemmy has been around for four years.
Itās rather significant imo that Kbin is on par functionally with Lemmy, and Kbin.social has higher active user counts then all but a few Lemmy instances. Kbin seems to solve issues faster as well in the several weeks Iāve been here anyway.
Personally I prefer Kbin to lemmy; as other have said, we must put into account that kbin is much younger that lemmy, but @ernest has been amazing in managing to keep it all running when the users went basically from 0 to 1000 in a matter of hours!
Iāve been trying for over a week to delete my account at kbin, and it always says success, but my account is still there. Glad to know Iām not crazy and itās an actual issue.
If youād still like to delete you can dm Ernest and heāll sort it out. Thereās a known processing backlog.
Will do that, thanks
Will do that, thanks
As a user, I plan to continue sticking with kbin.social for now because itās working well enough. Not perfectly, I can see Federation issues, but Iām comfortable with an imperfect experience in exchange for giving it support.
I donāt actually have a big issue with the Tankie devs behind Lemmy. Itās open source, they have no control over it, if they try any funny business theyāll be forked away lickety-split. But I think itās vital for an open standard to have more than one independent implementation. That keeps the implementers honest, nobody can just slip in a convenient little āextensionā because theirs is the only client using the standard anyway.
