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.
The Kbin creator had initially joined to help Lemmy, but decided to create his own thing when he couldn’t take their political alignments anymore. The Lemmy devs used to be vocal Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea, and would answer questions on Reddit’s r/AskATankie (a tankie is someone who supports communist dictatorships), but now that Lemmy is successful, they’ve kind of grown hush-hush on it, without really addressing it.
So, he went to create Kbin, but since he’s not a software engineer, he chose foundations that won’t really scale too well. Kbin is written in PHP, which is an interpreted and mono-threaded technology, it’s great at some stuff, but not high-scale services (source: that’s what I do for a living). Lemmy was written in Rust, which is compiled and multi-threaded. It doesn’t mean Lemmy won’t meet tricky scale bottlenecks, but it will give it a much larger toolset to get through whole classes of them.
And of course, Kbin being much younger, it doesn’t currently have a bunch of critical stuff that Lemmy already has. For instance: an API, which has been allowing other people to build great native clients for it.
Wow, I didn't know that about the Lemmy devs, that really sucks...
Yeah… I had heard of it as a rumor, so I doubted it for a little while, until I was shown the receipts. https://lemmy.world/comment/562635
It really is disappointing.
This is interesting. Thank you for the info. Quick question, though: does this mean kbin will inevitably face scaling issues when it gets too big? And there's no way to prevent that?
My best answer is: if they get to sufficient scale, both Lemmy and Kbin will face scaling issues to get through, but Lemmy is based on something that will make it much easier for humans to get through a lot of those bottlenecks.
I hope what this answer conveys is that the technology choice is a major factor, but not the only factor. If the Lemmy dev team doesn’t know how to scale a service, and don’t enlist the help of people who do, the underlying technology won’t make much of a difference. But it does give them a very strong upside.
Another Lemmy user was saying that the Kbin move to use PHP was like someone saying: “oh, I like the airplane you just built by yourself with the intention to fly above the clouds, I’m going to do the same thing, let me prepare my cardboard”, and there’s a lot of truth to it. 😉
That analogy really drives the point home. Basically, lemmy already has a built-in advantage due to the tech they went with. But like any program/machine, it's only as good as the people behind it. Thank you for the answer.
In fairness, despite its age, kbin feels like it has more features. I guess the simplicity of lemmy has its draws too, plus its already growing community.
Lol as a visual person, I couldn’t agree more. Images make everything pop. I came from the dial up era and the boom of forums and chat rooms. But even I appreciate good memes and images sprinkled here and there.
I do like the microblog feature of kbin for when you have some random question, but don't want to make a full on thread about it.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Take my answer as snark, but: it has a catchy name that sounds like a thing. And it’s not invite only.
Honestly, I'd say because I've never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
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.
Kbin is written in php and lemmy is written in rust which may scale better in long run.
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 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.
The name, it's the best of all of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I liked tildes a while ago, but I don't think the signup process helped them. I think it was invite only iirc.
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