A writeup in PCMag!

  • Bucky
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    1861 year ago

    I can’t get into calling subs “magazines”. Communities is much better.

  • BarqsHasBite
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    1531 year ago

    I think these long explainations of instances and federation are really not necessary. It should just say “pick a server and start browsing. You’ll be able to see everything*.”

    “*If you really want to get into the weeds, blah blah blah.”

    • @[email protected]
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      361 year ago

      Yes. Anytime someone starts trying to explain the Fediverse to someone signing up I want to put my hand on their face and tell the newbie right this way.

    • @[email protected]
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      351 year ago

      For real. Wanna try Mastodon? Make an account on mastodon.social. Wanna try Lemmy? Make an account on Lemmy.world. Once people buy into the platforms they can migrate to smaller/niche instances if they’d like. Simply things at first, active users will then slowly figure out the rest.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        It sucks migrating between instances right now. I’ve found no way to port my subscriptions from one instance to another. All of your subscriptions are saved on your current instance as websites, but to subscribe on you new instance they need to be formatted ![name]@instance Lots of work needs to be done

        • SkaveRat
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          21 year ago

          And on Mastodon, you can’t migrate posts, which also really sucks

    • @[email protected]
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      211 year ago

      It’s like how there aren’t articles comparing email options. We all just kinda picked an email site and stuck with it until something goes wrong and then pick the next one. No one’s really investing time in debating ones over the others or trying to convert others to Team Hotmail or somethin.

      • Dablin
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        51 year ago

        Unless you’re crazy like me and host your own email server :)

        I like the direction Lemmy and Kbin has provided in terms of providing a messaging environment on the internet where it is more decentralized much like the internet of old.

        Email on the other hand has taken a serious step in the other direction with email monopolies from the big names such as Google and Microsoft etc that have made self-operated email servers quite a bit more difficult to operate then it really should be, at-least from the perspective of actually sending email to other people using their servers and getting it in their inbox.

        I find it ironic that Google/Microsoft etc use the excuse of spam/malware as the excuse to block self-hosted email servers with little to no email history/reputation yet most of the worlds spam comes from their servers.

    • @[email protected]
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      171 year ago

      Agree completely. It just makes it all sound much more complicated than it is in practice. I’m used to the fediverse now and my eyes glazed over reading all that.

      Another issue I have with the article is that he doesn’t even touch on third-party apps, which are abundant and pretty damn robust considering how new they are. The fact that much of Reddit’s self immolation was directly due to their treatment of third-party apps. At least worth a paragraph in my opinion.

      Otherwise, nice write up.

    • RBG
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      81 year ago

      I am not sure I agree. It does not need paragraphs of explanations but something that says the server you sign up for decides what you can see, should still be mentioned.

      I have signed up for multiple servers in the beginning and found quite big differences in what I could see because of what was already blocked. Or servers that have not federated with each other yet. Then I stuck with lemmy.fmhy.ml and well, I guess you know the story.

      So I think it definitely should mention server choice may influence content and one should try out several in the beginning to see whats best for yourself.

      • BarqsHasBite
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        01 year ago

        I saw this claim and signed up for a different instance just to see if it’s different. Nope, it’s the same. Unless you really go off and find an instance that curates, it’s really the same.

        They can have an explaination below, but for 99% of people it really doesn’t matter.

        • RBG
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          1 year ago

          Unless you say what two instances you signed up for we can agree to disagree.

          I signed up on feddit.de, startrek.website and lemmy.fmhy.ml. I saw many communities only via fmhy, which we obviously now cannot test anymore. After that I signed up for ttrpg.network and was missing quite a few communities, and yes, of course I can search/connect to them to get them to federate, but the point is a new user does not know that and will not attempt it.

          This might be different now, a month in after the big move from reddit where there is more extensive federation, so your experience is potentially more valid than mine now, I admit to that.

    • DMmeYourNudes
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      61 year ago

      So long as the federation of servers is based on the whim of the few people who own the instances, the server you choose is most currently relevant. The people running these communities need to realize that cutting of groups just because you don’t agree with them or have personal issues with them is going to cause an extremely fragmented experience, alienating new users who don’t understand the landscape this ensuring nothing but monolithic servers and communities exist and no small communities will ever be populated.

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      There are also some quirks in how Kbin handles things that differs from Lemmy. Linking to Lemmy instances works fine when viewed from Kbin, but it doesn’t seem to work when linking Kbin communities. All fairly minor though!

  • hitagi
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    421 year ago

    Surprisingly a good writeup that details most of the features of both platforms while being forgiving of their flaws.

  • @[email protected]
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    231 year ago

    I especially enjoy the x-eyed frowny snoos all over the orange background: perfect touch, and exquisitely appropriate.

    -chef’s kiss-

  • dinckel
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    221 year ago

    At the moment, I login on kbin.social and lemmy.world interchangeably, since both are growing, and both are kind of unstable, but thankfully I can read the exact same posts on both. Will probably settle on one of these, or a different one eventually

  • RheingoldRiver
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    211 year ago

    A little harsh on /kbin given that it’s been released for less than two months and the author doesn’t even mention this. Otherwise seems reasonable.

  • @[email protected]
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    181 year ago

    I personally don’t like KBin’s UI. It’s an immediate turn-off for me. Text too small, vote buttons look weird. Also I just loaded the homepage and the top posts are “🤔🤔🤔”, “ich🚗iel”, “Every time I leave or enter the house”, and a generic meme. No thanks, there’s enough trash like that already on the Reddit homepage.

    I’m building my own Reddit alternative zsync.xyz. I’ll open source it in a week. Hoping to federate it one day and make it into a pcmag article. I def respect the Lemmy dev(s). To an outsider a Reddit clone might look trivial to build but it’s actually a ton of work, and of course an enormous chicken & egg problem to overcome to actually get any users.

    • @[email protected]
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      101 year ago

      What’s unique or special about yours, as opposed to lemmy or kbin or any of the others? Especially if your issue with kbin is just the ui, it seems like making an app for an already established user base might be a better use of your time. If you’re just doing it for kicks that’s fine I’m not trying to bash that, I’m just curious. If you’re planning to federate eventually does it do anything differently to lemmy? What’s the use case?

    • trimmerfrost
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      71 year ago

      I agree with low effort posts here on lemmy and kbin. But it’s mostly a end-user problem, not the software

  • Sir_Osis_of_Liver
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    161 year ago

    I rather like kbin and feel no need to go back to the other place.
    At least not until it starts randomly logging me off.

  • @[email protected]
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    81 year ago

    I have not used kbin yet. Is there any feature that really makes it worth using over Lemmy ? I’m curious as I want to try it out sometime.

    P.S - I use Lemmy through wefwef

    • M-Reimer
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      101 year ago

      I have a few kbin communities subscribed from Lemmy and interaction works fine.

      If you don’t use the webinterface a lot, it probably doesn’t matter which one of the two you are using.

      • Jack.
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        31 year ago

        Lemmy had a better backend when I tried kbin the last time. And lemmy has just gotten better since then.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      I think the main thing that makes its nice is it federates with both Lemmy and Mastodon under one interface. While Lemmy can post to Mastodon instances and vice versa, it’s not a part of the Interface really, you have to manually copy URLs

      • @[email protected]
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        61 year ago

        It’s buggy though and doesn’t seem to work properly. People have reported not seeing posts from Kbin on Lemmy at all sometimes.

    • Brkdncr
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      1 year ago

      Does lemmy use google or Facebook as an idp yet? That makes things pretty easy on kbin.social.

  • Hyphlosion
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    1 year ago

    I chose Mastodon to be my Reddit alternative. For one, I love the change of pace and how different it is. And secondly, I can post on Lemmy through Mastodon, which is the coolest thing ever.

  • HidingCat
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    41 year ago

    At least one mistake in there though, since you can definitely block instances in Kbin too. It’s not the most obvious though.

    • rideranton
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      51 year ago

      At least one mistake in there though, since you can definitely block instances in Kbin too. It’s not the most obvious though.

      Also:

      • kbin does have an instance wide moderation log in the footer: https://kbin.social/modlog
      • kbin supports markdown, though it does not have a preview feature yet
      • kbin allows you to block users just like you can block magazines and domains, though there is no way to filter specific words (yet)
      • (probably a few more, but those were the ones that I noticed)

      @maxeddy