this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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KBin is weird. The few times I've looked it's been all lemmy content for the first several pages of the front page of kbin.social
Like it just seems like a weird Lemmy front end at this point, in practical terms.
And with its total user base much smaller than Lemmy's, it's understandable devs are focusing on Lemmy.
Kbin federates with Lemmy and mastodon. Lemmy has more users so more people voting up things there, but a lot of that front page is posted from kbin. Devs are not focusing on lemmy unless theyβre Lemmy people. There are devs focusing on kbin too. We now have an active kbin enhancement suite going, just like RES used to be for reddit. So customizing how you interact with fedi is more in your control. Artemis app is being done by @hariette, and beta users are super happy with it.
I'm not saying ALL devs are focusing on Lemmy.
But Lemmy has like 15 mobile apps, 3 web frontends, a Mac App or two, etc.
KBin has a handful.
It's not a contest though, just how it is
That's because there was no API available until now, so development relied on scraping. Development should pick up a bit now that one is almost released.
That's because kbin lacks an official API, which this PR should fix.
I know personally I was looking into modding an old Reddit client to use kbin but found that it didn't have an API so held off. I'm sure there are many other devs that are doing the same.
Kbin was just a year old when everyone went there. It went from a few hundred to a couple thousand and then to 50k users in a couple weeks. It was literally one person, @ernest, until a few weeks ago. Lemmy has had a few years of people working on it, an active subreddit for a few years. The Lemmy creators were active on several subs for years. Itβs not a surprise that kbin just now has more than one person working on developing.
The difference is. All those Lemmy Apps are buggy as heck. I just use kbin Website as an app with Vanadium. Works perfectly fine and no issues.
The active userbase isn't too far off from Lemmy's, roughly 40k compared to Lemmy's 70k. As for the content, it doesn't really mater what service is hosting the community since it's all federated. There are large kbin magazines as well.
In absolute numbers perhaps, but that's almost double the active user base. What's more interesting to me, however, is the respective growth. Kbin soared to 50k+ users extremely quickly, but has since then experienced a very flat curve. Wasn't Kbin's user base larger than Lemmy's a month ago? Or at least equal? It will be interesting if Kbin grows more rapidly with API and 3rd-party app support or if it will become more niche in the future, provided Lemmy's growth continues.
This is definitely true, and thank god for it or this split of the Reddit refugees would have been catastrophic. It still was a problem for a while when Kbin had bugged federation, but it seems better now.
I still don't understand the point of calling communities Magazines. Who would refer to this as an "Article" in a "Magazine"?
Kbin had a tiny lead for a while in active users, but that changed when lemmy.world hit the scene and we got the first Lemmy instance ready to accept a huge number of users without the controversy surrounding lemmy.ml. At the same time, Kbin was getting hit very hard by those 50k users and had to disable federation for a few days, which drove people to sign up for lemmy.world instead. I think this is also when Lemmy-hosted communities became the go-to "default" as opposed to those on Kbin.
What's also interesting though is if we break it down a little further, kbin.social still has the most active users in a single instance. Lemmy.world has more accounts, but most of those don't post or comment.
Either way though, whichever has more users doesn't really matter because they don't directly compete.
Yeah, Kbin really wasn't ready for mass adoption, I heard about Ernest needing to activate Cloudflare protection to save the server, though I wasn't around for that incident.
Funny enough lemmy.world was created June 1st, what I think triggered the mass adoption of Lemmy over Kbin is actually Sync and Boost announcing they'd be making Lemmy apps. Two major apps moving over signalled that this was a serious alternative to Reddit, and most users wouldn't realise Kbin is federated and would just go with the name cited by those apps (Lemmy).
What I find interesting about it is that every Lemmy instance sits at about 10-25% of the total user base being "active users", while every single Kbin instance apart from Karab.in reports over 50% if its users as "active", with some being at or close to 100%.
Either Kbin attracts a vastly different, more active userbase, or the software behaves slightly differently, and with "boosts" being based off of retweets it wouldn't surprise me at all if they get counted when determining "active users".
The latter would also be in line with the amount of activity I've seen on and from Kbin.social versus lemmy.world, though that is of course merely anecdotal.
and kbin seems to federate REAAAALLLY slowly in my experience. A lemmy post will have 100+ comments on any lemmy instance, but then you view it in kbin and there's like 5 comments. My profile when viewed in kbin is days/weeks behind.
It feels so empty and like you're in the past lol.
I assume you've onky checked the massively overloaded kbin.social instance? Or is it a general issue with kbin itself?
We're actually doing fine now after 2 infrastructure upgrades, no longer overloaded. Earnest gave an update saying there isn't anything backed up in the federation queue anymore.
If it helps, I can see all your most recent comments.
Where are you seeing the kbin userbase size?
FediDB is a good source and made by the Pixelfed dev.