That caught my interest the other day. It seems to have some more features than Lemmy, no? What would be a downside of using Kbin?
Lemmy
Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.
For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to [email protected].
Downside is that it's new and has some rough edges.
Upside is that it's a nice design. It's trying to fuse microblogging and link-aggregation/threaded conversations into one platform, and so far has done well. I really hope it does well in the future.
It's not lemmy.
kbin began as a fork of Lemmy a while ago, but it's been overhauled into it's totally own thing.
It's interoperable with Lemmy, though. Like lemmy, it's a content aggregator, and kbin users can subscribe to lemmy communities (and Lemmy users can subscribe to kbin communities), but kbin communities (called "magazines") have some extra bells and whistles, most notably the ability to also bring in microblog posts that contain mod defined keywords or hashtags. This means you can also see what people are saying on Mastodon (or Calckey, or Misskey, or Akkoma, or...) about the topics the magazine focuses on.
There are a lot of interoperable website engines out here in the fediverse. Aside from kbin interoperability:
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Mastodon users can follow lemmy communities and comment on lemmy posts.
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Lemmy users can subscribe to PeerTube channels (check out, a random example I dug up, [email protected] or enter 'https://neat.tube/c/techlore/videos' into your instance's search bar to fetch it, if it's not available on your instance yet; that's a PeerTube channel, not a Lemmy community).
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Lemmy users can also view and interact with Frierndica groups (and vice versa; check out [email protected], which is a Friendica group).
Edit: See below.
I like the idea of both places existing and thriving. As people come over, I think people are struggling to see both lemmy and kbin as being two things that can work together rather than competitors.
I'm currently trying to figure out how exactly to subscribe to kbin magazines from lemmy though. It seems like I shoud just be able to search the url and it would show up, but that's not happening.
Is there something else I should be doing?
edit: I think it might be because kbin went down when I wanted to try figuring this out 😂 edit2: kbin back up and searching the url still isn't working.
edit3: success! I changed nothing and it suddenly worked 🎉