Here (kbin), Lemmy, Tildes… I hear Mastodon had a user spike. Is there something obvious I’m missing?
I ask because I haven’t felt the same mass of users that Reddit had. Obviously users have spread out, servers have been hammered, UIs have a learning curve and so on… But there might be other alternatives I haven’t looked at that are worth that look.
I tested the waters at several sites:
- Mastodon felt too much like Twitter my taste, too many angry people and too much politics; the UI is slick, though
- Squabbles UI felt weird
- Lemmy had some problematic stuff around the person who runs it, and it felt more confusing on which instance to pick
- kbin has been my favorite; familiar UI, and people seem mostly friendly and chill
Nice thing about Lemmy instances is you can pick and choose the communities across any random server and sub to them from kbin, without directly interacting with that server. Once an app comes along that lets you browse and discover across lemmy/kbin/tildes the same way you could just search subreddits I think it could take off.
Yeah right now there’s https://browse.feddit.de/ to browse communities, but putting that in an app (and adding some sorting/filtering options) would be a killer feature
edit: that site only shows Lemmy communities, not kbin ones
Lemmy had some problematic stuff around the person who runs it
What problematic stuff, exactly? I remember reading about some tankie stuff, but with the amount of information I had to digest the last couple of days, I’m not sure if that was about Lemmy or some other site.
I am new to the fediverse concept. Is Squabbles part of the fediverse?
There’s also Tildes.net, although it’s invite-only which limits things a lot right now, but I really liked the UI there.
Getting an invite for tildes is relatively easy, but if kbin can keep up with massive number of users, it will likely become much more popular.
Know any good ways to get a Tildes invite? I’ve been lurking there for a while but I’m keen to join properly
I got one about a week ago by replying to their sticky post on their subreddit r/tildes
That got shut down pretty rapidly once the reddit blackout happened. I emailed asking for one. I read somewhere that they have a queue of something like 2,000 invite requests to work through, so it might be a while.
Same here, not sure how to get an invite.
What makes Tildes.net different? Does it do anything differently than Reddit, or is it mostly just a clone?
I haven’t browsed it for more than a few minutes nor do I have an invite so it would be nice to hear if there’s anything that makes it stand out from other alternatives.
The usage of the ‘~’ itself annoys me more than it should with that site, haha. Both from a viewing perspective and a typing perspective.
What you said about Mastodon would surely differ from instance to instance, unless you’re referring to the global feed where everything is federated.
What I personally like most about Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin is that they don’t use an algorithm to decide on my behalf what I should or shouldn’t see. If I subscribe to another user, I will see their posts, and I will see them in the correct chronological order. Not this hidden secret “personalization” algorithm that randomly decides to hide something from me because it wouldn’t draw engagement, and decides to show me something I didn’t ask for because it would.
Yessss, I didn’t even think about that once I started using kbin/mastodon, but you are totally right. There’s a reason why the for-profit social media things absolutely don’t want to just give you a chronological feed.
So far I’m between Kbin, Tildes, Squabbles, Fark and Something Awful forums.
I’d like an invite to Tildes as they’re pretty cool over there, plus that UI is so calming.(Thank you for the invite!)
After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:
- Completely open source
- Moderators can be recalled by the communities they mod.
- Not for profit (ads are not the primary source of funding)
The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.
I second your list and I’d add my personal preference: the public square shouldn’t be ginormous.
Reddit feels like trying to have a conversation at the she time with all the people that could fit in St. Peter’s Square.
After these few days on Kbin I realised I’d rather be in a small town’s square where maybe I recognise some people and my voice isn’t drowned.
A st Peter’s square of everyone trying to be the funniest person in the room. It was impossible trying to have any level of conversation because everyone just jumped in with a dumb joke constantly
I’m using kbin.social mostly, I will just follow Lemmy communities from kbin once federation is re-enabled. It doesn’t make sense to me to have an account for Lemmy AND an account for kbin if they’re both part of the Fediverse.
I am also using Mastodon, even though it’s part of the Fediverse. I’m doing this because it’s more like Twitter, and the tweet equivalent on Mastodon is the same as a “Microblog” on kbin.
Ditto on the last point. I understand other Fediverse platforms like Mastodon and such should just work with others like Kbin/Lemmy, but the UI’s are so massively different. So I’ve went with the idea of having separate accounts. One for my existing Mastodon instance and one here on Kbin. To me it feels like the best way to manage it.
As a bonus to all of this, I should be able to easily follow my Kbin account and boost posts over on Mastodon if needed once federation is all sorted.
One additional plus to using kbin over Lemmy is there’s no “Microblog” feature on Lemmy. So if you follow Mastodon accounts on Lemmy, you won’t see anything. Whereas if you follow Mastodon accounts on kbin, their posts will come in as Microblogs!
and everything is still being developed. the fediverse experience is going to be better and better.
