kbin is newer and less polished. But yeah I personally recommend kbin over lemmy for exactly the reasons you posted.
Reddit Migration
### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I would argue we also don't want to be in a place where we rely on any one individual. Thankfully @ernest seems to understand that as well.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Assuming we coalesce around Kbin, 5-6 years down the road when Kbin is a lot more polished and has a significant user-base,h ow do we prevent a repeat of Reddit?
It’s inherent in human nature to coalesce, to form a community, which ultimately creates a centralized hub that is ripe for control by a few people.
Less polished, but the browsing experience is better and more customizable than any Lemmy instance I've been on so far.
The thing that worries me about kbin is that everything is located on one single instance. You guys are building a lot of centralization over there which might lead to a Reddit 2.0 scandal at some point
- posted from Lemmy
Reddit:- You Google Reddit and your first result is Reddit.com. You click the link and are presented with the front page. You from scroll from a few hours and end up signing up and staying.
I don't think this is the path most people take to becoming new Reddit users.
I think most people end up using new social media sites because they get linked to content already on a given site that they like. This could be from friends sharing links, or through Google results from the site.
Fediverse really needs onboarding pages that hides some of the wires.
Join Lemmy for example should highlight the content and UI, and a big "Join the Lemmy Fediverse" button. Click the button and it asks 3 questions and send you directly to account creation for an active instance matching your answers.
Frankly instance choice should be something people think about after they've been involved for a while, at least until we have a few multi-million active user instances to choose from
You're absolutely right that we have a bit of a terminology issue here, but one slightly advanced and techy thing to understand about the fediverse is that the fediverse itself is the "platform":
Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Calckey, etc., are software projects or processes that are running on some server somewhere, and ActivityPub is the protocol (kind of like a language) that all these processes use (to varying degrees) to speak with each other. As users, we interact with a specific server or service (like beehaw.org or kbin.social) that is running that software and sharing info with other servers through a protocol.
This is totally different to Reddit or Twitter, which are both the names of the service AND (probably, but we don't now) the software that the service is running behind the scenes. Naturally that makes it a bit easier to talk about, because we don't have any access to or knowledge about the software or protocols that they use, and we can just talk about the services.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that Kbin and Lemmy are replacements for Reddit (the software) while servers like kbin.social or beehaw.org are replacements for Reddit.com (the service), except they also talk to each other somewhat seamlessly. I'm logged into the server "kbin.social", which runs a software called "Kbin", which communicates over a protocol called "ActivityPub" to a bunch of users who are on other servers running other software.
In other words, Google searching for "Lemmy" isn't exactly a good metric, not only because Reddit is one of the biggest websites around and Google knows this, but also because "Lemmy" isn't the actual name of the service that we are using right now, just the software. If you tell someone to go over to a specific server (like beehaw.org, kbin.social, etc.) then they'll have a much easier time finding something that they can actually use.
Most of us are guilty of kind of glossing over all this stuff to keep things simple and easy to understand, but there are some layers of nuance to the fediverse here that make this a little bit more complicated than you're making it out to be imo.
Me, reading this through lemmy (feddit): hmmm yes
But for real, I see what you mean with the first impression at join-lemmy.
I recommend kbin just because some of the people behind Lemmy are vocal far left wing. I want to support more moderates in the world.
Turns out people who work on open source in their free time to make the internet a better place for all are usually left wing, while the righties try to make money and fail.
It worries me that you get a bunch of downvotes for this. People are way too accepting of political biases if they're in the direction they prefer.
Because it implies that basic, milquetoast progressive values are "far left".
No, no there are literally tankies. Lemmy.ml the ml means marxist-leninist and lemmygrad.ml is just straight up tankie CCP apologists
What's left wing about simping for dictators? Just because they called their countries "communist" to keep people from realizing, they were both effectively totalitarian dictatorships, and that's about as right as it gets.
@Crankpork they're left wing dictators? The wings are about economic policies. Communism is an ultra far left economic system like pure laissez-faire capitalism is an ultra far right economic system. You can be authoritarian or libertarian in either group. Or you can have more moderate economic views and still also have more authoritarian enforcement or extreme libertarian/anarchic lack of enforcement
I mean, that's exactly my point though. People seem to be knee jerk assuming that the "leftist" accusations against the .ml instances are standard issue right wing hyperbole against progressive liberals and that's not the case. It's just as much that progressives are complaining because we have no interest in associating with tankies.
In my experience, lemmy.ml and feddit.de (for example) are in more left wing then milquetoast progressives. It's faszinating and refreshing, and I don't mind people speaking their minds. But I prefer moderate, too.
I would rather say that the average Redditor is milquetoast progressive. Heck, I start to really enjoy this phrase 😉.
As my feed is populated by a lot of German threads it is worth to note that moderate depends a lot on the country you are from. Bernie Sanders would probably be considered part of the moderate left in most of Europe while he is considered to be far left in the USA.
I think part of it is that leftists (myself included) don't like being lumped in with tankies. I didn't downvote though.
The lead devs of lemmy are tankies, basically meaning authoritarian communists of the genocide-apologist variety. They also run the lemmy.ml and lemmygrad.ml instances.
This is also why I signed up on kbin instead of on lemmy. The other lemmy instances are fine, but I don't want to contribute to the influence of the lemmy devs any more than necessary. Hopefully they try to pull something stupid and get forked off the project.
Why would anyone downvote for that reason though? That reason is why I upvoted. I'm firmly left-wing but absolutely not far enough that I can support their BS views.