YSK that a lot of common questions/complaints about Lemmy are presently answered by kbin
This is not an attempt to convert Lemmy users, nor is it a slight on Lemmy. I'm sure there are plenty of reasons why Lemmy works better for some, and I love the fact that we not only have multiple choices, but multiple choices that allow us to interact with each other regardless! It's amazing. Lemmy is great, no shade.
With that said...
Why YSK: I see a lot of users posting frequent questions about Lemmy that are currently answered by kbin.
For example:
The ability to block a whole domain, or subscribe to one
The ability to subscribe to individual users
A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
Mitigation for the "tracking pixel" issue
I find that almost every day, I see Lemmy users asking about features and I think, "well, kbin does that." I think it would be worthwhile for more users to check into both platforms and decide which might be best for them.
You are correct about all of those things, but KBin doesn't have any currently released mobile apps and I like to have a mobile app. Ultimately KBin will probably have mobile apps soon and some of those features above will probably eventually be added to Lemmy, so it's just a case of what's the most important to us now.
It's obviously not a competition, but this kind of reminds me of back in the day when you had to choose between Betamax or VHS. One seemed superior (kBin)--but "everyone" was adopting VHS (Lemmy).
Lemmy.world was my first choice, and I'm glad I stuck through it. I'm 4 weeks in and I've seen this community grow and iron out the kinks. The hell if I'm ever going back to reddit.
Are those features client or protocol specific? My Lemmy client, connect, let's me block instances and has search for posts, communities, users, comments, etc.
What I've been curious about is the relative performance of kbin (PHP) vs. lemmy (Rust) server code. Rust is supposed to be many times more efficient performance-wise than PHP as far as I know, but has anyone compared this in practice? The presumed ease and speed of adding features to kbin because of PHP may come at a high performance cost (read: carbon emissions too). Does anyone have any further insight into this?
What do you mean by the built in search tool to find communities all over Fedi? From what I can tell the search bar only searches communities that are already federated with kbin, so you'd still need to use something like lemmyverse.net/communities for small communities anyways.
And also if you want to have access to a community that hasn't been federated already, I think you need to use a different search bar. On Lemmy you can use the same for both.
For me Lemmy is better. The web UI is simpler and easier to understand for me, and I have no use for the microblogging features. And more importantly there are Lemmy apps but no kbin ones. I'm glad there are options for everyone, and hopefully they both get the features that they're missing but the other has!
I saw in the comments here there are no apps yet for Kbin. So are Kbin users just using the website on their devices for now?
I'm enjoying Connect for Lemmy and awaiting Sync for Lemmy to be released. Can or will those work for me if I made a Kbin account and will I gain these Kbin perks you speak of?
kbin is attractive to me...except an email address is required to register. I know that's a common thing on a lot of sites, but it's not info I want to provide, and setting up a burner email is kind of a nuisance.
Maybe it's a grass is always greener thing but I've been having issues with kbin that apparently other instances don't have. Furigana is supported on some Lemmy instances, I've had issues embedding links from Twitter/TikTok/Instagram/etc, I frequently interact with threads (preview content or upvote) and get redirected to an error page, goes on.
I did sign up with kbin for a reason though and I'm overall mostly satisfied. Having a good FAQ with how all the features of kbin work, what's on the roadmap, etc would be my biggest change.
I tried Kbin, I just don't like their UI as much, plus no good Android clients that I know of, and I find things like upvotes vs. boosts really strange and confusing, its just completely unnecessary imo.
I have accounts on both, and I like the look of kbin better, so I've tried to use it more. However, the functionality you mention has been undiscoverable to me: I have no idea how to get a list of non-local magazines, and I've looked around for that quite a bit. On lemmy, it's as easy as clicking "All" when searching communities.
Is there any document that would help me find those features on kbin? Or, for that matter, a similar sort of documentation for lemmy?
I've been using kbin mostly on my computer, and its interesting to see the lemmy.world feeds pop in. still learning all the function of kbin. on my phone I just use wefwef.app as there seems to be a lot more of the low brow content I am looking for when pooping like funny memes.
It's good that there's multiple ways for people to enjoy the fediverse. I'd also point out that there's a heap of people actively looking into improving kbin (you can follow the PRs coming here)
I'm super keen to get in some of the usability ones, tweaks for mobile and other features to make the mobile experience more exciting.
Eventually I'd like to tackle the core search functionally so we can search for users, magazines, posts and other content with more filters and options. Right now it's good enough, but having more granular control would be handy for finding just that right community or post
A built-in search tool to find communities all over fedi (kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon groups, etc.) with an indication of how active they are
I didn't realise this was something only Kbin did. It is extremely handy.
I like Kbin a lot - there's no OS app but the PWA does me alright. It was the UI that win me over but I couldn't do without having a good search tool now I've got used to it I have to say