What do you think is responsible for lemmy’s growth over other alternatives like KBin and Tildes?
Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.
For me personally, it was the farewell message on RIF specifically mentioned Lemmy.
Don't know if some of the others apps also did this but it would certainly have helped.
Sync also did this
I used Boost for Reddit and they're creating a Lemmy app. So here I am.
Nice, I'm coming from the same place.
I love learning all about what being federated means and can't wait to see the exponential growth along with boostforlemmy 🙂
Lemmy: Oldest federated link aggregator, better documentation compared to Kbin, easy to self-deploy, less resource consumption, provides the most similar experience to Reddit
Kbin: Poorer documentation, no API access yet, harder to self-deploy, terminology and UI differences from Reddit can turn people off (I really don't like "magazine" for a community)
Tildes: Centralized, invite-only and elitist. Not comparable to Lemmy and Kbin
For me it's straight up the fact that the guy who made Sync is porting it to Lemmy.
It's a great client, and if he picked this I guess he thinks he can keep that quality on this platform, so here I am.
This is exactly my reason too. For me, Sync was easily the best user experience for browsing reddit. No sync for reddit? Well then no reddit for me I guess
Same here. Just waiting for the release and I am buying it.
I found out back when Chapo got blocked on Reddit years ago. I am so amazed it's popular now. IDK even know what synce is but I'm glad it brought you here
For me I heard more about lemmy on Reddit and Apollo was in its final days. So I gave it a try
Yep, same here. A couple of subs I followed mentioned Lemmy explicitly so I gave it a look. Lemmy.world seemed the most active at the time so I joined here.
Same. The fact that Lemmy has several iOS apps also sealed the deal, as I do almost all my browsing on mobile. I made an account on KBin at the same time, and an eagerly watching both to see how they develop, but Lemmy just has more to offer right now.
To answer the question about Tildes specifically, Tildes has been around for years and remained effectively dead. Its moderation is extremely controlling and screen all people before letting them in. It's a club of people the owner approves of that only post "quality" content (I.e. the in-group's definition of quality). This results in an extremely inorganic experience where content is removed for little reason beyond mods thinking it's too "low quality" (the definition of which is very flexible). Your presence on Tildes is considered a privilege that can be taken away at any time for any reason (no alts, no second chances), so there is a perpetual sense that you're under the lense, and can't disagree with the rest of club. It's a custom built wind tunnel, ostensibly to screen out hate, but in effect created a gated community of the same people celebrating their own exclusivity and very concerned with strangers walking down the sidewalk.
In essence, it doesn't want to be reddit, because it views itself as "better" than the riffraff. It's an elitist clubhouse, not a true social network.
I vaguely recall a discussion on Tildes with that sentiment on tildes. So thank you for the reminder of their blatant elitism.
This one I think. And scrolling through it now renewed that bitter taste in my mouth.
That first comment isn't wrong though. It was definitely an issue of growing pains that Tildes wouldn't have to deal with, since they have a centralised model, rather than the Federated one Beehaw and Lemmy had to deal with.
The issue Beehaw had was with people firing up an account on an open instance, and then going over to cause trouble, bypassing their account creation policy. Lemmy grew too quickly for their moderation to deal with, and lacks the relevant tooling, so they just disconnected from the biggest trouble instances, until Lemmy comes out with a better mod toolkit.
I suspect that if Tildes connected to open instances, they would have the same issue.
Just read their docs on people:
That just sounds like Metafiler with extra steps.
The main thing for me would be the plethora of high-quality apps already available for Lemmy, not even a month out from the start of the Reddit APIcalypse.
That being said, I think kbin looks infinitely better in either mobile or desktop browsers, making the need for an app less urgent. I don't even think there's an app available for kbin right now, at least for Android.
Agreed. I think one of the main deciding factors starting out here was the availability of mobile apps. Seems Lemmy already has a handful while kbin only has the mobile web for now and an application is only in a closed beta at the moment.
It's in beta testing atm. I'm really interested to see what the dev has in store, but I have to say the PWA for kbin is pretty flawless as it is. What UI complaints I have, I'm sure will come and I'm happy to be patient.
Lemmy was far more confusing for me, and every time I go over there to check unfederated content or grab a community address, the colors hurt my eyes. I only check out my leftover Jerboa app rarely, whenever kbin's updating and I'm too lazy to do something else. At any rate, we all get the same content
More mature, you can’t even collapse comment on kbin.
Although Kbin does have the advantage of being compatible with older devices, as a result of it using an established platform. If you have an older iDevice, for example, neither Lemmy nor most of its apps/interfaces work at all.
Kbin works fine.
Lemmy has a web interface just like kbin. Are you saying that regular websites don’t work on older iDevices? The web interface for your instance is at https://lemmy.world
kbin
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
tildes
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
That is it?
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
Honestly, I'd say because I've never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
Take my answer as snark, but: it has a catchy name that sounds like a thing. And it’s not invite only.
I heard a lot about both Kbin and Lemmy over on Reddit, and at the time, Kbin seemed to be getting more positive mentions, at least where I was looking.
I tried out Kbin first, and it felt confusing and there were a lot of little annoyances. Then a few days later, I signed up on Lemmy, and I liked the experience a lot better. Then a bunch of 3rd party apps started coming out for Lemmy. There was just no reason for me to log on through Kbin anymore, especially since the small handful of communities that I liked on there could also be accessed from Lemmy.
Out of curiosity, I made an account on kbin and it feels more feature rich, albeit a bit sluggish. Might give it another try soon. It feels like it could be a fediverse alternative for Facebook more so rather than reddit.
Same. Signed up with both and Lemmy clicked, kbin didn't. So here I am
I avoided Lemmy because tankies developers. But lemmy.world is run by different people, and the interface is honestly so much better than kbin... so I'm staying here now
Lemmy seems to be more established than KBin with more instances, also additional features of KBin don't really appeal to me - but as a Lemmy user I interact with KBin quite a lot, so in that respect I feel like more of a citizen of the fidiverse than of just Lemmy.
I've never heard of Tildes in my life.
Kbin is written in php and lemmy is written in rust which may scale better in long run.
I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).
The other poster failed to mention the biggest advantage of Rust - it's inherently a lot more secure and a lot less vulnerable to bugs compared to other languages. For starters, Rust is designed to eliminate common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races, which can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.
Also, variables in Rust are immutable by default, which means they cannot be changed once they're set. It's also strongly typed, which is strictly enforced and there are no implicit conversions. PHP, however, is loosely typed and does perform implicit type conversion, which can lead to unexpected results and potential security vulnerabilities.
I could go on, but then we'd be getting a bit too technical for this space.
In terms of raw performance, compiled languages like C, C++, and Rust are much faster than interpreted languages like PHP, Python, and Ruby.
The difference between compilation and interpretation is the difference between you reading the translation of a foreign book versus an interpreter reading each line in the original book and telling you its meaning in your language every time you want to read the book.
Java, Kotlin and Scala are somewhat in between in terms of speed. Code that gets called a lot gets compiled just in time.
The name, it's the best of all of them.
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn't mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren't the right fit)
Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It's a bit better on mobile but it's basically the card interface on steroids and it's not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison
Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren't interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it's just not that engaging.
Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.
Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It's still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven't regretted it.
I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It's very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there's some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they've invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can't really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.
Kbin doesn't have a easy way to enter into your subscribed 'magazines'. The two options involve link hunting. see..https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/32492/Seeing-Subscribed-Magazines
That's all that it took to get me to migrate to Lemmy.
Lemmy has been around for a while. I was lemming back in early 2022. Lemmy had time to iron out their technical challenges and have a solid product before the Reddit drama began.
It’s down to the apps available from my point of view. Using wefwef and enjoying the fresh content through a very Apollo-like interface.
I am also a complete noob when it comes to the fediverse and Lemmy just seemed more accessible.
This seems to highlight a common misconception, kbin isn't really any smaller than Lemmy when we look at active users, in fact it seems it has only just (three days ago) caught up:
https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Somehow Lemmy seems to have stronger brand recognition, and people often seem say Lemmy to mean things which include Lemmy and kbin users/platforms.
The active users graph doesn't match the users or posts graph. How can it show matching active users when the users and posts are both increasing dramatically compared to kbin? Something seems off with the active users metric.
I think it's we'll known Lemmy has a problem with bots signing up (in their millions), hence the warning on that measure in my link above.
If we look at another site:
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats
https://kbin.fediverse.observer/dailystats
Basically the same stats.
These seem to suggest 120 posts per day per Lemmy user - I'd agree something is off.
But then try looking at a few users in this thread (which lets note is on a Lemmy instance). From my spot checks about half the comments are from kbin users?
I checked my own server on there, 3 active users, but it only reports 1. It's better than nothing, but they're doing something to make it show less than lemmy. None of my users are bots.
Tildes is just too small. The obvious explanation for growth is all of the Fledditors (Rexit? I like Lemmygrants, but that really only covers people who came to Lemmy) looking for an alternative. People wanted a drop-in replacement for what they already had. Tildes didn't even have enough of a seed in their biggest subs, let alone their (very few) niche groups. Same for Raddle, Squabbles, etc. The only subs that made a significant migration to those are the ones that packed up, locked the doors, and left a forwarding address to anyone left - Similar to what r/piracy did, except that went to Lemmy (complete with instructions to ignore the federation questions)
As for Kbin, I think the bigger factor is coverage. As soon as anyone started mentioning people leaving for greener pastures, Lemmy was always the first thing mentioned. Kbin was always a second-place alternative, along with a few others. Since Kbin has the same confusion about federation as Lemmy, it didn't pick up a lot of people that bailed on the first choice.
Not that it matters much anymore, since Kbin is well-federated with Lemmy
Tildes also doesn't allow memes and only accepts "quality content", meaning they can delete your comments and threads if someone (idk who) thinks they aren't good enough. This will cause everyone on tildes to sound like the same person.
Thank you for the explanation. :) that does gives a clearer picture.
So it seems that lemmy just happens to be the most ready when the mass migration happened.
We are united in the fediverse 💪
I really feel like it doesn't matter what you use as long as it's part of the Fediverse. If whatever you've chosen is federated we all benefit. I feel that ever since Kbin federated there's way more content even on Lemmy. I'm just glad that we can all see and interact with one another.
That’s true. Though the fear of defederation (and in turn isolation) is always there. I wish they make it so that the users, not the admin chooses which instance to defederate. But maybe this is too tedious to implement.
If your instance defederates from an instance, or you are defederated from an instance you enjoy, you can always move to a new account. Unlike Reddit, you don't have Karma to link you to your account so you can just move over to a different instance (although subscribing to all of your favorite communities again is a pain in the ass)
The fact it was recommended more, and doesn't require an invite like Tildes. I only heard of any of these because of the migration, and only heard of Kbin here on Lemmy.
I wanted to try Tildes after seeing the page, but I have no friends there to invite me to try it.
Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.
Usability
Probably luck, really.
A bunch of subs moved to Lemmy, first and foremost, which spread its popularity more than other apps, as more subs went and joined up with Lemmy.
Alternatives like Kbin followed behind, but since Lemmy had already taken first spot, that was more or less that.
You also had a few that were also closed, that hampered their growth, for better and worse.
I joined because it was mentioned on /r/piracy. Seems everyone I hear says something similar.
I’d say it has better growth because it got better advertising. I have no idea if it’s the ‘best’ instance.
Most things like this don’t happen because the thing growing is the best, it becomes the best because people come to it and it gets resourced.
Tildes, for what it's worth, is not intended to be a replacement for Reddit. Its creator/admin is trying to purposefully cultivate a very different culture than what you might find on Reddit or Reddit replacements like lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/etc. From their Philosophy page:
High-quality content and discussions
Tildes prioritizes quality content and discussion through its mechanics, design, and organization. Fixation on growth and related metrics results in other sites having a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. The priority on Tildes is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don't have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.Limited tolerance, especially for assholes
Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to "if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault".This is a difficult topic, so I want to try to be clear about where on the spectrum Tildes is trying to land. I'm never going to refer to the site as a "safe space" or ban anyone just for occasionally acting like a jerk in an argument—I'd probably have to ban myself fairly quickly. However, it will also never be described as anything like "an absolute free speech site".
Personally as an old, I love it. The whole vibe promotes longer, better thought out replies, as opposed to the modern internet where people are more often looking to do quick hit n' run posts with popular sentiments for easy internet points. I also love the proactive removal of problem posters. Some people are just looking to stir up trouble wherever they go, but don't fall under a specific rule that might get their account axed. Tildes isn't afraid to uninvite problematic assholes.
If its culture is something that resonates with you, feel free to hit me up for an invite while I have some.
By requiring invites, they are already punishing people not the abusers as their philosophy states
Trust people, but punish abusers
By gatekeeping. And making it difficult for people to join, it assumes that everyone is a criminal/troublemaker until proven by a some sort of vetting process.
Reminds me of when malls used to check your pockets for stolen goods before your exit. The assumption of guilt sours the whole experience.
Their "vetting" process sucked too. I just asked for an invite and they gave one with no questions asked. I could easily just start spamming troll stuff and they would ban me but still. Quality moderation and an approval process can accomplish everything tildes wants to do without stifling its ability to add users and variety of discussion.
I'm weirdly nostalgic to the era of hanging out on a random phpBB forum with 40 or so active users, so a part of me feels like maybe they're right. :)
I tried kbin and lemmy, and although initially it was harder to find communities as new instances were popping up and growing, ye overall feel of lemmy was more compatible to how I felt using reddit. Being a Sync user, Jerboa and wefwef (and the other developing apps) were just a bonus. Once I learned how to use lemmy, I felt it was more intuitive than the kbin interface.
The fact that multiple people came together to work on the code, provide instances for users, and commitment to continuous improvement keeps me in the lemmy game. While I know ernest@kbin is doing a great job, I feel the nature of multiple instances in the fediverse gives lemmy an advantage.
But that's just my experience and opinion. Just happy the fediverse exists despite whichever platform users choose as their primary access to it and thankful for all who have contributed to its growth and development.
Lemmy was mainly ready for it.
Kbin's cloudflare on top of the stability issues made it unusable for the first few weeks. Tildes wasn't an option.
It got mentioned a lot on /r/RedditAlternatiives and since its API is already up and running, there are a whole bunch of apps for it. With mobile apps being the thing that started the whole Reddit disaster, it makes sense that Lemmy would grow quicker than kbin which doesn't have mobile apps yet.
I go back and forth between Kbin and Tildes, with a toe still left in reddit for a few niche communities. I like the idea of the fediverse, but there are definitely a lot of growing pains that it seems to be going through, and kbin just seemed like the most modern, polished, choice. (plus the devs are much less sus than Lemmy)
Tildes on the otherhand feels a lot more close knit, and more about discussion specific topics rather than being a collection of different communities. I kinda like the smaller size, plus the overall tone there is very respectful, so it's great for more nuanced conversations. This is where I come for my memes and my random conversations though.
For me, it was the top google result for "Reddit Alternative". There was a github post explaining the basics of Lemmy and essentially said if I wasn't sure where to sign up, just head over to lemmy.world.
Now that I'm here I can safely say the interface feels like an improved old.reddit.com and am quite pleased.
I'd say the main difference is Lemmy has been around for 4 years and Kbin is only a few weeks old.
I’m on both (repeatedly, multiple servers and accounts) but even with Memmy I find myself gravitating towards Kbin and once Artemis is out I’ll probably stay there. Beehaw has the best interaction on its local communities, but Kbin is just a better feed for me mostly. No brand or server loyalty for me, I will continue using all until one seems to address all my wants.
I haven't heard about Artemis - is that an app in development for Kbin? That would be pretty cool if so (although the PWA has done a pretty solid job so far)
Yeah, Artemis is an app for Kbin that is in a very limited beta right now (I'm not in it) - edit got the link wrong the first time and the second time. Artemis
Hmmm I guess this is the beauty if the fediverse, we can always jump to another ship within the federation. I just wish they’d find ways to connect one username for everything.
Yeah... it is a little overwhelming when just dipping your toes. In the initial push to get off of reddit I ended up with a lot of accounts... Beehaw, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, readit.buzz, infosec.exchange, infosec.town, defcon.social, tildes, squabbles, etc. At some point you just have to use something.
If I had to guess what I'll be doing in the future, I'd say it will resemble reddit where I had multiple accounts for different purposes but not different platforms, just different content filters and topics. Eventually there will be at least one app that works with both Lemmy and Kbin accounts and make it all more or less seemless and arbitrary.
Right now I'm primarily using Kbin and Beehaw, I don't know which account will eventually be more important to me. I'm also using Ice Cubes for Mastodon with a couple different Mastodon accounts. What would push me all-in on a kbin instance would be if I federation between Lemmy instances and mastodon instances reached a level of functioning that didn't feel like I was missing anything. I'd rather not have a million different apps and accounts just to see different versions of the same shit.
Lack of awareness of Kbin I think. Also the monthly average users are the same, but lots of communities were created on lemmy instances.
Lemmy is older and I think when people thought a million people had signed up they thought that was the place to be. But it was all bits and the two are similar in terms of users, although most Kbin users are on Kbin.social at the moment.
I've tried both and I prefer Kbin. I like the interface, I like the mobile PWA app, it just feels more modern and polished compared to lemmy. But it's just a preference thing they're largely the same.
The future of Tildes seemed obvious given the experience with reddit so why bother? Kbin pretty much is Lemmy with a different UI. The structure of Lemmy makes sense, basically it is like reddit except the instances add a new dimension which makes much more sense to me. I know lots of people who would enjoy features of reddit, but don't use it because they don't identify with the brand of reddit.
For me it was that it was privacyguides making their own lemmy instance that led to me opting for it as my first introduction to the fediverse. Other than that other subs like piracy set up their own instances and now Android. So I wonder if getting a Lemmy instance set up is easier than Kbin?
When I was browsing options, Tildes didn't even allow sign-ups. I tried multiple days and eventually said fuck it and checked other options, settling on kbin.
I just messaged you an invite in case you’re still interested. :)
Thanks! I appreciate it. I signed up and will give it another go.
Tildes was always invite only. Granted it is (or was at the time, maybe they slowed down with the influx) really easy to get your hands on one by just asking on r/tildes (or email).
Hell, the site being readable by the general public is a relatively recent introduction compared to it's history.
I went to lemmy first, noticed federation wasnt working, then went to kbin, and federation still isnt working. So far I havent seen any entrance to the fediverse that can actually see the fediverse.
Really? I’m on kbin right now reading this post from Lemmy.world
sure, you can see all the most popular posts and communities. But say you wanted to check out a smaller community, say, the splatoon one here on lemmy.world. You wont see all of the posts there from kbin. How about animemes from lemmy.ml? The latest post you can see from kbin is a week old, yet it's getting posts everyday. Personally I wanna see some posts from rule34 on lemmynsfw, but again no.
And this is a problem not unique to kbin, I have not found any entrance to the fediverse that doesnt have this problem.
I am on kbin and a significant amount of posts I see are from lemmy instances.
yeah, you can see some amount of posts from other instances on the fediverse. But not all of them, especially not smaller communities that really need the visibility.
And yet I'm reading and replying to your message.
kbin federation works just fine
Well, user experience is going to depend. Kbin.social recently cut federation temporarily with some instances as a way to work through our backlog. I kind of thought that was up and running again, especially since lemmy.world was listed and I can definitely see that, but I question if this is why beehaw refuses to load and I haven't seen anything from them in a week.
Sh.itjust.works is also listed there, but I have this hunch that they may also fall prey to the same bug in lemmy's default reference nginx config that initially stopped kbin users from accessing the android community when they moved. This and Sopuli.xyz (not listed) are both inaccessible, and it's upsetting watching it wear on because I'm interested in communities in both that either won't federate anything I do or that I can't even find in order to sub. This bug is what bothers me the most, that it's in lemmy's default settings is unacceptable, and it makes kbin appear to have much larger issues with federation than it actually does.
Lemmy.ml apparently removed the block only to put it back, which I was not aware of, increasing the likelihood of bullshittery to 90%. I have to actively filter which communities I can actually participate in instead of only appearing to, and they can just defederate out loud if they're that bothered. It's not like they haven't taken criticism before, I'm sure they'll live.
FWIW I went KBin before Lenny. Since it’s federated I didn’t see a reason to change. I’m also still new to all of this and haven’t had the time to really dig in and understand the difference.
I’m also on Tildes- the whole invite process probably stymied their growth as people couldn’t sign up while the iron was hot, but it appears that was intended over there.
Also trying Squabbles. I like the default layout the best but like the content on the others better.
I'm reading this from Kbin.social. I subscribe to Kbin magazines and Lemmy communities, so I don't really see a difference between the two.
I'm also on Tildes and really enjoy it for longer, nuanced, contemplative posts and comments. And I'm on Squabbles when I feel like memes and quips.
Un short, I think ex Redditors are trying out more than one platform. We're sampling all over the place.
kbin's doing pretty well isn't it? I thought it was sort of comparable to lemmy in active users. I don't know anything about tildes though.
I know for my part, I probably contributed to overloading kbin.social by opening an account there. I guess I read that it's best in lemmy to choose something other than the really big instances to spread the load a bit and did so, but somehow in my mind I thought kbin = kbin.social?
Just FYI, only recently did Lemmy pass Kbin on active users: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Being federated helps both platforms to grow together, as the content is the same for both of them. So just choose the interface you prefer!
Only great advantage of Lemmy for now, is the API that helps with having apps..
And yet most times that I check Kbin, the first several pages are entirely Lemmy content
Do we know if Kbin counts active users the same way that Lemmy does? Lemmy only counts users have made comments or posts recently as being active, people who only vote are ignored.
Personally, it's the availability of surprisingly high quality Android apps for lemmy. I made my Kbin account first but the UX of many of the Lemmy apps are much better than kbin at the moment. My big pet peeve is how many actions it takes to access a list of my subscriptions (profile>hit the little sideways arrow to expose subscriptions>subscriptions>select magazine). I love the potential of the microblogs though so I'm excited to see where kbin goes as apps become available.
My experience from the "early days" right when the Reddit blackouts were planned and people were looking for a new home, Lemmy was the main name being dropped. Plus when you went to the general Fediverse hub, Lemmy showed up at the top, while I just happened to read someone mention Kbin being a better interface and I had to search around for it.
If you decide to make Kbin a home (you don't have to have just one), stop by the KbinStyles magazine. I think this is where Kbin is showing its true power, customizing. I haven't really seen much of the same possibilities mentioned for Lemmy (yet). Both softwares are very early on, so there's lot of potential for either.
For me it'd be word of mouth and a more memorable name. It was people making posts about Lemmy over on the sinking ship that caught my attention first and kbin second. Call it lizard brain or whatever but "Lemmy" is close to "Lemmings" which is a game I loved as a child while "kbin" makes the mistake of not being a single, simple word. One sounds personalable and a finished product, the other sounds like the backend of bigger software.
Has Lemmy passed kbin? Last I heard they were growing pretty evenly if you compare the biggest individual instances at least. Maybe creating your own instances is simpler with Lemmy?
Not sure as to the actual statistics. But for me, lemmy feels more active than kbin. Though that in itself is subjective. I do like the interface of kbin for sure. But lemmy feels more active so I’m conflicted. Will explore more communities to see if this view holds true though.
Tildes felt like an unpolished pre-alpha to me.
As someone who first switched to lemmy, and then quickly switched to kbin due to rampant de-federation in the lemmy world, I say I just first heard about lemmy.
But, Kbin is much more modern, and spectating the changes done in the last days alone, it moves fast and attracts many developers while all lemmy 0.18 did was breaking federation with kbin. I can fully recommend the switch to Kbin, its that good.
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
Thanks will give kbin a second look. Already made an account there just to “reserve” my username :)
Although to be fair, initial impressions are quite good already. :)
Your name is pretty badass
attracts many developers
I feel like lemmy is significantly more active on that front? In addition to the base code, it seems to have attracted several dozen third party apps and interfaces. Mostly Lemmy exclusive.
My only gripe with kbin is that it’s made with PHP and lemmy is Rust. But it’s only a childish gripe, I know hahahaha
You should always use the language you are most comfortable with, and for ernest that simply is PHP. Its not what I would have chosen either, but things like the facebook and telegram backends are in PHP and they certainly work very well.
I have an account on both. But I timed myself for about 5 minutes on both Kbin and Lemmy (yes I am that kind of person) to see which I found more intuitive, fun etc and just felt like Kbin worked better for me. Just feels more natural somehow
But it's also good that there's different options for different people and everyone's not just having to use one centralised website like the one most of us have just come from...
I have also signed up to Squabbles which is another centralised service, kind of a cross between Twitter and Reddit. It's so-so, but a lot more interesting than tildes
I've been using both kbin and a lemmy instance since the blackout. Both have been fine overall, but kbin has a slight edge in usability.
Seconding the kbin love. It’s closest to the Reddit experience for me and I don’t mind using my browser for it on my phone.
A API is in the works, and once that happened apps should pop up like they do for Lemmy.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
It may resemble digg 1.0, but it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit. It's a project by the guy who originally built Automod and is very much like Reddit was just prior to the launch of the subreddit system - two years before digg 4.0 launched and the refugees started arriving.
Intended to be more of a wide-open commons than a platform for subdivided or niche communities.
Tildes has very limited adoption during the reddit protests because it's on an invite system and doesn't want a huge influx of new people all at once, for all that it is accepting and even seeking growth over time.
It looks dead.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Reddit thinks they don't need mods. Tildes seems to think they don't need users.
it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
I wouldn't say defederation is rampant, but there were a few very high profile examples that hit right when people were new. Specifically, Beehaw/LW and Exploding Heads/everyone. Plus the whole thing about NSFW content and types.
While it's true that many of the original devs have problematic views, it's not really meaningful. The software is open source, there are tons of new developers (with varying views), and the code has nothing to perpetuate their ideas. In fact, they are pretty isolated on their own instance (Lemmygrad) since everyone defederates them almost immediately.
Worth noting that lemmy.ml is also run by the developers as their general instance (while Lemmygrad is the tankie one). It's easily forgotten at least for kbin users though, as federation with it has been somewhat broken for a while now.
Besides lemmygrad and explodingheads which are truly legitimate cases, defederation just hurts everyone. New users just expect to sub to the communities they like on reddit. That includes NSFW because that simply is something people want, and it never was an issue on reddit. The whole discussion on larger lemmy is childish and prude.
And about the developers, lemmygrad is largely isolated, but lemmy.ml is not and those same tankies run that. In fact its also the only lemmy instance that blocks all kbin instances via blocking the kbin user-agent. The development is also still largely steered by those tankies.
Yeah i heard of Lemmy first, but when I found out about the developers being tankies I switched to Kbin. I actually prefer Kbin a lot now! It's obviously still earlier in development but I think it shows more promise.
It's for all these reasons I'm fascinated Kbin hasn't received a larger influx of new users. It seems truly the easiest to easily switch from Reddit, you just need a browser.
Well, there's the thing, you need a browser. You'd be surprised how many newer Reddit users access the site primarily or even exclusively on their phones, and who tend to use apps rather than their mobile browser.
Kbin already is, it was very much a side project by Ernest that was no where near as mature as Lemmy. As it stands it is growing extremely fast, proportionally it is way more active and grows faster than Lemmy itself. Kbin.social iirc is neck and neck with Lemmy World.
Kbin.social was not really ready to accept a large user amount until a few days ago when they did a large update to the infrastructure, also a little more then a week ago the site still had stability issues and would error out a lot. That just changed and now it is ready to grow faster. But, so far 51k users on kbin.social already.
A fantastic answer, though I'll add that OP is likely unaware that the vast majority of the "growth" on Lemmy is actually due to bot accounts. Which is somewhat irrelevant as it is still an enormous platform even after accounting for that.
Also I saw that r/ModCoord leaned more towards Lemmy, seemed somewhat biased against Kbin, and was reportedly enormously biased against Squabbles even to the point of deleting posts trying to talk about it (which not being able to check deleted posts anymore, I did not try to verify). That would make sense then that that could be why people heard about Lemmy before hearing about Kbin.
Plus the mobile app too - although I'm mostly happy with the browser view of kbin (for reading, though writing comments in it is a huge pain).
I personally also went with Lemmy first but switched to Kbin after 2 days because I preferred it's interface (as well as the full transparency on up/downvotes).
I heard about Tildes way before all the API stuff went down (like 2021-ish) but a text only platform just never was my cup of tea, personally.
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
That’s probably the one thing that will catch up to them. I think there will inevitably be a hard-fork of the codebase in order to get away from the original devs.
kbin as about the same amount of active users as Lemmy
I'm not sure if that's true. Lemmy only calculates active users as people who have posted or commented a time frame. The graphs that I'm seeing for kbin's active user count matches their total user count.
i thought lemmy had like 250k+ (?) in total and then kbin.social has like 40-45k
Lemmy has a shit ton of inactive bot accounts, actually active users is about even: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
Kbin is pretty new, no apps, and faced a lot of issues during the wave of incoming redditors. Some lemmy instances did, too, but there were more of them so there were alternatives when one crashed. If we compare kbin.social to a big instance like lemmy.world, it's not doing too bad.
Tildes is invite-only so I don't think they wanted to grow that quickly in the first place.
I guess you’re right. Even some lemmy instances had to close registration. Ahhh so kbin is newer. I guess that explains a lot too.
Also took a quick look at tildes and it’s text only, as far as I know. So if they change their mind about registrations, not a lot of people will join anyway.
Don't quote me on this, but I've read lemmy is a few years old already while kbin is just a few months old (3-4 mos?). Add the number of instances (i only know of 3 kbin instances) and you can see why it didn't take off the way lemmy did.
I agree. Purely text-based sites need a certain kind of audience/users. I love a good discussion/debate, but I need my memes, too. Lol.
There's also the issue that during the first big influx, Kbin turned off federation while the dev tried to fix things up. It was off for days, so any fledgling magazines there couldn't take advantage of Lemmy traffic, we couldn't sub to them and made our own communities instead, and by the time they turned federation back on a lot of Lemmy communities were already pretty established as "the main one".
You are correct about Tildes. They are very intentionally cultivating a different atmosphere and don't want Reddit's huddled masses. There is a subset of reddit users who fit there but it's not the shitposting crowd.
It's a gated community, basically, not a social network. And a very snobbish one at that.