some guy sharing his thoughts

kbin userstyles
kbin userscripts

pretty cool places that I moderate:

  • 19 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • 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 prefer Kbin. It has the latest features (magazine collections, an aggregate view that combines threads and microblog posts, more options, etc.) , and I really like the developer @ernest. Aside from just being cool, he posts frequent updates over on @kbinDevlog.

    Something worth noting is that Kbin doesn’t have many instances. Kbin.social is the main one, and the only other decently up-to-date one I know of is kbin.earth, run by the creator of the Interstellar app for Kbin. On the other hand, Mbin has more instances, as most established Kbin instances switched to it at the time it was created (during which Kbin development had been inactive for about a month). Also, Mbin has a more community-oriented development system tbh, whereas Kbin development is closely managed by Ernest.



  • 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.




  • Essentially all of the ones that I used. r/Minecraft, r/minecraftsuggestions, r/conlangs, r/vexillology, r/pixelart, etc.

    The thing is that all of these have communities and magazines on the fediverse — it’s just that there’s little, if any, activity on them. I don’t think you can really say that these communities are here if they have one person posting on them regularly.

    The only communities that actually have a solid amount of activity here are ones about memes and news. If that’s all that you used Reddit for, then the fediverse is doing great, and such people will act baffled at how anyone could stay on or miss Reddit. But for everyone else, the content just isn’t there.



  • I’d say it’s three different things:

    1. Many of the people who came from the initial Reddit migration left pretty quickly. This was always going to happen. Reddit alternatives are relatively undeveloped and lack the sheer amount of activity that Reddit has, so people were inevitably going to lose interest and leave after the initial rush of wanting to stick it to Spez.

    2. Kbin development stopped for about a month. This was due to the developer, Ernest, having real-life stuff to deal with and thus very little time to work on Kbin. Development has since started back up since then, and you can take a look at the progress over on @kbinDevlog, but that long period of silence led a lot more people to lealve.

    3. The people who are here aren’t posting a ton. There are a lot of magazines where threads will get tens or hundreds of votes and comments… when someone decides to actually make a thread. Any social media site is going to have more lurking and commenting than posting, but if all the people who want to see content were to post a bit of their own, many of these magazines would be a lot more alive.