Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.
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
Honestly, I’d say because I’ve never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
- Lemmy
- Kbin
- Squabbles
- Tildes
- Raddle
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Without an API, all clients would need to rely on scraping, which is slower and more resource intense - almost orders of magnitude. Until Kbin develops an API, it will always be less used.
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. 😉
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.
Thank you for explaining. I grew up on php-based forums and websites. So Rust is pretty new to me. TBH, I haven’t heard of it until Lemmy. :)
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.
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.
That just sounds like Metafiler with extra steps.
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.
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.
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…
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
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
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.
I’m really put off by the “warning warning this content isn’t from this instance” attitude of Kbin. I’ve also had a heck of a time getting some content to federate. I’m having a much better experience on Lemmy, so I’ll put up with the UI quirks - I use the memmy app most of the time anyway.
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
Lemmy’s Web interface relies on some JavaScript that does not load properly, similar to some websites.
Trying to load Lemmy results in the site being loaded with neither CSS nor JavaScript working, rendering the site entirely unusable, since it’s a bunch of loose website bits, with no formatting or functions attached to them.
Kbin appears to not have this problem.
Other sites would also be broken, although since iOS 12 didn’t have an accessible Web console, there’s no way to tell how or why exactly. Wefwef would load as an entirely blank page, with nothing showing at all, Reddit’s redesigned website would just be a blank frame of a website, with no text at all, and Tumblr posts would disappear as soon as it tried to load the notes a post got.
