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
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 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.
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.
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. 😉
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.
Honestly, I’d say because I’ve never heard of the other two whereas Lemmy is pretty much plastered over Reddit as an alternative
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.
I went to lemmy first, noticed federation wasnt working, then went to kbin, and federation still isnt working. So far I havent seen any entrance to the fediverse that can actually see the fediverse.
kbin federation works just fine
Tildes felt like an unpolished pre-alpha to me.
Has Lemmy passed kbin? Last I heard they were growing pretty evenly if you compare the biggest individual instances at least. Maybe creating your own instances is simpler with Lemmy?
Removed by mod
kbin as about the same amount of active users as Lemmy
i thought lemmy had like 250k+ (?) in total and then kbin.social has like 40-45k
Lemmy has a shit ton of inactive bot accounts, actually active users is about even: https://fedidb.org/current-events/threadiverse
