Like seriously how the hell do you navigate it? Out of curiosity I made an account on a small instance and had no idea how to even find even my subscribed magazines. It might look might look nice but it’s confusing to use.
I used it and understood how it works but I think it’s trying to be too much at once and in turn failing at all of it. I’ll try to break it down in case anyone else was confused:
Basically the idea of kbin is to join Twitter and Reddit but also make it federated. You have communities like in reddit (called magazines) where you can post threads/links like you’d expect. And then you have a microblogging section that’s literally just for people to post like on Twitter, but that section is also federated with other Activity Pub software so you can see posts from people on mastodon and stuff (and they can see your posts too) and you can also follow these people to have your own social timeline. Oh and I forgot to mention but each magazine gets its own microblogging tab so there’s no one unified one.
All in all, I understood it and I liked the UI quite a bit but it’s just too much at once. I don’t understand why you’d want to replace both Twitter and Reddit with just one site. When I go onto Lemmy I immediately get what it’s trying to be and how it works. With kbin, even after I understood it I never “clicked” with it because I just couldn’t wrap my head around having these 2 very different services in one. I much prefer having Lemmy for my reddit-like browsing and my misskey for my Twitter-like browsing.
I appreciate this breakdown, it makes a little bit more sense. Still it really is trying to do too much when it should try to do one thing and one thing well.
Same opinion as both you and Disa. That and the fact that it used PHP turned us off from using it. Oh and their docs also said federation is still a WIP too… To us it felt like even lesser of a complete product than Lemmy at the time when we were getting our instance setup.
While I don’t have a problem with PHP per se, the fact that it puts form over function is what gets me. I want to like it but nah, I rather take Lemmy’s ugliness but usefulness anyday.
I tried to look at it once but, much like you, I found it far too confusing and convoluted to do anything of value. I thought it was trying too much to be a cross between reddit and like a twitter/mastodon like blogging platform? I didn’t spend much time on there at all.
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But why is it trying to be both microblogging and blogging? That’s like trying to be Tumblr and Twitter. It doesn’t work.
Technically, Tumblr is also a microblogging service.
I agree that kbin is a little clunky right now, but I appreciate what it’s trying to do. Reddit and Twitter often have this obnoxious antipattern of posting screenshots from each other, rather than crosslinking to posts on the other site – that kind of posting method makes it hard to find and follow a community or user that you see interesting content from, and can remove important context. Combining Mastodon-style and Lemmy-style posts and federation on a single platform is one way to potentially be eliminate that issue, by reducing the friction of crosslinking and allowing you to interact across both kinds of communities without leaving the site/app. For someone who heavily uses both Reddit and Twitter, it might make sense to be able to switch to a single alternative platform.
Unfortunately I think that Kbin is missing the mark on both functionality and (especially) interface right now, but the platform is still young and that could change in the future.
It’s more complicated than Lemmy, but much lighter on my phone. I just treat it like any other Lemmy instance. I only check the frontpage for some news and ignore everything else.