What are your thoughts on Kbin now that it's 2024?
It's a new year — about 6 months since that Reddit migration occurred — and Kbin progressed a ton in 2023. What are your thoughts on it? How much value have you gotten out of it, and what would you like to see in the future?
I've been on lemmy mostly since it's a bit more mature particularly in mobile usage, however I think kbin overall has more potential once it matures a bit more since it has more interesting functionality (Microblogs, Magazine CSS, etc.). This functionality could lead to some interesting UI/UX paradigms, which IMO would be a bit of a breath of fresh air in the mobile space over the good amount of "apollo-inspired" lemmy apps. The apollo approach is good for lemmy apps, but I see kbin as being something more diverse and as such would necessitate a different approach. Though I think the most important thing long-term for kbin is for it to improve its federation, without that it becomes a jack-of-all-trades master-of-none platform.
I think it's been fine so far. I was finally digging on Artemis, but that quit. I hop between Kbin and Lemmy when I'm on my desktop. I usually go on Lemmy when I'm on my phone.
Is there a proper Kbin app or one that is recommended?
I just use KBin on Firefox on my phone. You can css style it if you like but it’s effectively the same as browser on PC for me.
That said, if the API gets released and support for Kbin is added to Boost for Lemmy I’ll definitely be using that, but it needs to get fleshed out first.
i hope that the project itself will become more stable, and that ernest will find someone to admin kbin.social, so that ernest can focus on software development
It scratches my scrolling itch. I haven't really been back to Reddit other than when Google lists Reddit as the best choice for some info I need. But I've really enjoyed KBin and the communities that are popping up here. I hope it continues to grow.
Anybody have any best practices / search-fu for searching for Threads on either Kbin or a search engine (eg. DuckDuckGo)? Or is that a challenge with federation?
I was able to find a lemmy thread on Open Source Text-To-Speech, but I’d love to be able to zone in even quicker.
I like it, functionality wise. But, there's barely any content beyond gaming and linux. Also, as time goes on, I'm seeing more of the stupid attitudes that were all over reddit. I'm using it less and less. I actually find myself on 4chan more, at least there the arguments are funny.
I’m on Lemmy so my opinion is slightly irrelevant, but kbin folk across the board are pretty friendly and level-headed. Only complaint I have are some quirks about how kbin and Lemmy interface (the hash tags and user replies stick out in a weird way), but that’s also not kbin’s fault.
I like Kbin a lot, it's a good platform and I look forward to seeing it work out the last handful of kinks and becoming a rock solid social media system
I've been really enjoying it. I dabble into using microblogging but so far its just based on clicking on Active People to see what kind of things people post over there. So I can't say much about that aspect but I am glad that its available when I want to.
Its interesting for the forum sides hearing all of the Lemmy complaints that Kbin solves already like blocking or subscribing to entire instances. Same with the repeated early complaints about the default sorting of Lemmy. I am really starting to enjoy the different communities the entire federation system sets up with the exception of the million different politics subs. Everything else is starting to sorted into some large defaults for certain subjects. I am also a huge fan of large dedicated NSFW instance which allows people to either block or view. There are still some communities I miss (NativePlant gardening, Fantasy Football, etc.) that I don't feel strong enough to post about but like to view.
The only major complaints are quality of life which I assume are in the pipeline such as hiding things I have voted on or viewed. But overall I am happy especially since its not overly tailored to my interests. It lets me see other things I might be interested in since they are here. I have really gotten back into Star Trek thanks to its popularity here
im enjoying the 'bins. the dev channels seems steady, and active.
my nonsense aggregation project (moist.catsweat.com) has reached a stability milestone thanks to recent dev activity. ill be reaching for high availability and redundancy next.
It's nice to see more Kbin and Mbin instances popping up. I'd love to get to the point where the majority of Kbin users aren't on one instance, though that's probably a long while away.
I see where you're coming from, though having the instance be related to the underlying software helps a lot with clarity. I still have trouble remembering whether programming.dev is a Lemmy or Mastodon instance, whereas lemmy.ca causes no such issues.
Also, with Kbin and Mbin, I don't think it's much of an issue. Kbin.run uses Mbin, and I've never seen that as odd. The differences between the two aren't very significant anyway (i.e., it's clear that they're both versions of the same general thing). I could see it being a problem if you wanted to switch your instance from Kbin to Lemmy, but that seems like an unlikely scenario that isn't worth the sacrifice in clarity.
I've been enjoying Kbin a lot, and it's been awesome seeing the progress that's been made over the past few months. We have magazine collections, an aggregate view for threads and microblog posts, awesome crosspost functionality, a marker for new comments, options for the homepage, and plenty more. I've gotten a ton of use out of all of these new features, and I've enjoyed working on my CSS userstyle (something that Kbin introduced me to) to further improve the UI to my tastes.
Because of the issues during the holidays and the previous focus on API and ActivityPub tweaks (as opposed to visible frontend features), a lot of people think that development has slowed down a lot, but I'm personally excited to see further improvements over the coming year. The things at the top of my wishlist are probably improved federation, better features for moderators, and some sort of subscriptions / favorited collections dropdown in the header please ernest I beg you. But of course, development takes time, and I'm happy with Kbin so far.
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