I am torn. Lemmy feels slimmer and easier to use with a wider variety of apps. Kbin has an advantage of being an “all-in-one” solution for the Fediverse with a better UI.
That said I use Mastodon for microblogging, so Kbin having that built in only clutters the site in my particular use case. While Kbin has a better UI it’s also more drab in color and harder to navigate. Kbin also has this karma/points system which feels odd. It skews into the negative VERY easily and is displayed on your profile. I prefer Lemmy’s upvote/downvote system but doesn’t have a permanent karma/points system.
I’ve been reading Lemmy is growing much faster than Kbin, but then I hear that “it’s all bots” and not real growth.
Where do you stand on this? Where do you think you’ll find yourself when this all shakes out?
Prefer kbin. Only downside is the “hamburger” menu and logo are linked. My muscle memory wants to treat the logo as a link to a front page, not a dropdown (on mobile). But that’s just me.
Used lemmy. Just not that into it, even though I follow a lot of their communities. Kbin feels nicer.
The “home button” being hidden behind the hamburger menu and the fact that I can’t collapse comment threads are my only 2 QoL issues, otherwise it all works great for a product that’s only like 6 weeks old lol
There’s just a polish to this site that Lemmy instances don’t have
I’m on iOS and have the site added to my homepage as an app. There’s no way to refresh so I’m constantly falling into this trap 😩
I show the top bar and just tap “subscribed” or whatever to refresh.
That’s the solution I’ve ended up going with too. Hoping to get my hands on the iOS Beta of Artemis soon, though.
It would also be nice to have a “context” button on comments in your profile so you can quickly see your comment surrounded by the comments you were interacting with, like Reddit did. Right now I’m having to go back to the original thread and find my comment to see the sub-thread it was part of and remember what it was we were talking about.
Also having trouble seeing comment reply notifications from instances outside of kbin. They don’t show up at all and I am unable to see if people are replying to them. Have to go back to the original thread again.
This is really the only fair I’m struggling with, wick access to the thread content before replying is important. I’m trying to avoid commenting on similar threads atm so I don’t accidentally include something from a different thread
There’s multiple things to consider, both are great options, but right now I’m liking kbin more for these reasons:
- Better algorithm, when I go to my homepage I feel that the site is full of new, active content, where people are having discussions.
- Integration with Mastodon, I like to take a peek from time to time on the Microblog tab.
- No feed bug. Lemmy has a problem where it would show every single new post on top of the feed (I know this is being fixed)
Overall both Lemmy and kbin are in their infancy and I expect both to get better to a point where choosing between them won’t come down to which one of the two have less bugs, and more focused in the features and appearance you want, this ofc will change with the many apps being developed, since they will be vastly different.
I might end up in Lemmy or I might stay on kbin, it depends which one feels more “active” to me.
For sure Kbin. I keep trying Lemmy from time to time but between the UI and the inconsistent sorting algorithms over there I have chosen to stay here!
Agreed. Luckily the algorithm bug is being fixed in the next release.
Oh cool! The more improvements the better!
I prefer kbin myself, though it is imperfect. Comment box should be at the top of the thread, and our subscriptions we subscribe to should be more easily discoverable, under profile name/settings seems non obvious from what i’ve seen of questions asked by others.
Comment at the bottom makes me bonkers
I wish I could get that but I primarily browse on my iPhone.
You still can with the Userscripts extension.
Thanks for sharing this!
Finding the subscriptions definitely a pain, what does help is going to settings >gear wheel and turning on some of the navigation bars.
I think Kbin, but the lack of an easy to navigate list of subscribed magazines has made me rethink a few times. On Lemmy, it’s easier to get to a list of what communities you’re subscribed to and the ‘local’ feed option can be quite useful too (e.g. on feddit.uk I can more easily use this to browse the UK content).
This. I miss the list of things I’m subscribed to that reminds me to check in on some of those communities from time to time.
You can find that in your profile.
Open your profile, and at least in mobile, there’s a menu showing you your active posts, threads….and subscriptions is towards the end.
I use it for the same reason you describe here.
Hope it helps.
You can, but it takes several clicks and a bit of scrolling, and that only gets you to a non-alphabetical list that is inexplicably cut over multiple pages. It’s making it unnecessarily difficult.
On Lemmy, they have a button at the top of the screen titled ‘Subscribed’, and if you click it you get a drop-down with all your subscribed communities alphabetically organised right there.
You can go to https://kbin.social/u/YOUR_USERNAME/subscriptions to see your subscriptions. Replace with your own username and bookmark the URL and you can easily get to your subscriptions.
If you’re using a browser, try this userscript. It adds a wonderful list on the side bar.
I use that on my laptop browser. Awesome script.
Wow, thanks for the link. The default interface is why I’ve tended to use kbin since getting an account for both, but finding user scripts like this for kbin to fine tune things is why I’m staying unless Lemmy changes a lot.
I like and use both. There’s no reason to just pick one and stick with it.
Kbin is my preference but it’s not perfect yet. I have a few nitpicks but it’s still the best I’ve used so far.
I tried lemmy, I’ve been lectured about “orientalism”, Zelensky was constantly trashed talked about. Enough is enough…I left lemmy for kbin.
It’s not about the technology, it’s about the community. I prefer to restart from scratch on kbin.
Christ, what instance did you sign up on? Lemmygrad?
So what? Are your beliefs so fragile that you can’t risk them being challenged?
I prefer a community where everyone is free to say what they want without risk of being censored. Apparently I’m in the minority on that one.
So what? Are your beliefs so fragile that you can’t risk them being challenged?
I debate all the time, but I won’t do it under their moderation.
I prefer a community where everyone is free to say what they want without risk of being censored.
Nonono…See what you wrote on lemmyworld:
If you are so fragile that you need to be protected from a troll then maybe the internet is not the right place for you.
It’s a different ballpark than what you are presenting here. Here you are all polished, in favor of freedom of speech, but on lemmy you are in defense of trolling. It’s “lemmyworld”, ladies and gentlemen, it’s not lemmy.ml level yet.
I prefer a community where everyone is free to say what they want without risk of being censored.
Do you, actually? If you joined a book club in the real world, for instance, and everyone around you was constantly going on about the Jewish problem and why slavery really wasn’t that bad and why women are useless for anything but housework, would that be a place where you want to spend your time? Would you be a coward with fragile beliefs if you decided to go somewhere else? Would it be horrendous censorship if you wanted rules for basic respect and decorum as generally exist in normal society? If someone followed you around all day constantly challenging every thing you ever said, would you really not find that at least mildly annoying?
Just because one might not want it to be illegal to state opinions, that doesn’t mean that people can’t appreciate at least some common understanding of a space’s purpose and rules for discourse. Real wold communities almost never allow unlimited speech, because that can get extremely disruptive very quickly. I don’t understand why people think that online spaces must be so radically different.
You can see all of those same users on kbin, too, though. You can access those same communities from here on kbin.social.
It’s really only Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad.ml that have aggressive Chinese apologists on them. There’s a whole pile of Lemmy instances out there that care way, way more about Beehaw than China.
I blocked lemmygrad, as I did see those extreme posts, but I haven’t seen any of what is described here in Lemmy.ml.
Ultimately Kbin, but I’d love for there to be a “collapse child comments” button like reddit and lemmy
There are some user scripts that add it!
Yea. I’ve been hoping between both. Once all of these apps come out, I will likely settle on one over the other.
Same here. Im primarily a mobile user, so at this point my preferences are based on who has the better mobile UI. Looking forward to see these apps get more stable and steady!
I used sync for reddit a long time, then switched to Boost. I’ll likely use Sync once it’s developed here unless something blows me away before then. I’ll also donate or pay for good apps to support them.
Going to have to say Kbin, considering that every attempt to log in to one of the big Lemmy servers just results in an endlessly spinning circle.
There’s no way for it to tell you if the username is already taken at the moment so that could be an issue. Could also be you need to click an email?
Have you ever been able to login? I had the same issue with Lemmy World and it was because I forgot to verify my email address, it doesn’t tell you the issue you just get an endless spinning circle.
Kbin all day. Reminds me of old forums so it’s got the nostalgia appeal.
Lemmy needs just one click on an image and it enlarges the image just below the post. Kbin requires 3 clicks to see an enlarged image. Maybe this is a settings issue, and I am all ears on how to make kbin work like lemmy. But, for me, as of now, lemmy wins with this feature.
I agree that is annoying, but that’s got to be an easy change for the devs.
Yeah, seems like an easy fix. I guess I have to figure out how to do a feature request.
There is a button to preview/expand media, it’s the image/film icon just to the left of the “N comments” button.
Sadly that button does not seem to exist in the mobile webpage view
True. I just decided to always show/preview media and let the thumbnails go. It’s been good so far.
THANK YOU. I didn’t even see it. I was expecting the same behaviour as Reddit and didn’t even think to look for that icon.
Click the little image icon and it’ll enlarge it for you.
It may indeed be a settings thing, but if I click on the icon to the left of the number of posts, it enlarges the image for me.
Lemmy needs just one click on an image and it enlarges the image just below the post. Kbin requires 3 clicks to see an enlarged image.
If you are on desktop, just click this icon. May work the same on mobile, I haven’t used it on mobile yet.
I really dig kbin’s interface, so much that I haven’t really explored Lemmy too much. My main issue with Lemmy is that the threaded indenting is so minuscule that it might as well not even be there.
Kbin just feels more intuitive to me.
it is almost the same thing with Lemmy.
The Lemmy hot trending is bugged and New posts floods the top and instantly pushes everything down, can’t even click on the link post you want
Yeah, I think it just comes down to personal preference.
Kbin. I think it has a more interesting feature set. Plus, the main Lemmy devs are apparently ‘free speech absolutists’ similar to Elon. They refuse to take down reported posts on their main instance, stuff like North Korea not being oppressive, pro-Putin propaganda, etc.
I prefer Lemmy’s UI but the Lemmy devs are just awful people in general…
