Fediverse

I personally prefer Lemmy over Kbin for many reasons:

1. None of the Kbin names make sense. Why are communities called magazines? Threads are posts? It just doesn't map to existing mental concepts very well.

2. Kbin makes you go through settings just to access your subscribed magazines.

3. Kbin exposes votes front and center in the UI. You can see who voted for what post / comment and personally I think voting should be private. Obviously, anyone can host their own instance and see the votes due to federation, but there's a big difference between that and outright showing it in the interface.

4. Kbin's UI looks a bit outdated and early 2000s to me. It looks like a mix of the old Facebook style and Digg.

5. Lemmy's UI feels more performant, especially on mobile.

6. Microblogging feels like an afterthought. Makes the site feel like it's shoving two different sites together.

Content wise, both Kbin and Lemmy federate with each other, so ideally you should be seeing the same amount of content, but there's federation and load issues on both sides that's preventing that from working correctly. I have faith it will be solved eventually as these are just early growing pains.

I will say that, personally, I've found more of the communities I want to join on Lemmy, but I am sure another person with different interests might say otherwise. Try both and make your own decision!

Being a total n00b, they seem about the same. The kbin instance I'm on seems a little more functional on the desktop, but I've had a better mobile experience with lemmy, solely because I've found actual mobile clients for it.

I seem to have been able to subscribe to kbin feeds on lemmy, if the URLs are any indication (and I honestly don't know enough to know).

I'm not sure on the privacy side cause I didn't really look into it, but for content in theory you should be able to pretty much see the same content on either site. In practice kbin is still very new and has some issues / is slow with federation. This means you currently will see more posts on lemmy than on kbin.

Personally, I like kbin's design better and use it more (if you're on mobile its mobile browser site looks great and can be used just fine until we get an app for it). If I run out of new stuff that interests me on kbin I switch to lemmy to catch all the stuff that didn't show up on kbin.

I see content from both at the same time so... I don't know what the difference is other than a web interface and maybe differences in what's been defederated.

Since I use an app, the web interface differences mean shit to me.

They both have the same content, you can subscribe to the same communities using either. Theoretically. In practice we are currently experiencing intermittent problems sharing content between Lemmy and Kbin, especially with lemmy.ml, one of the largest Lemmy instances. These are temporary growing pains and will be resolved soon.

Try a kbin instance, and a lemmy instance. See what clicks. You'll know within a few minutes.

Also curious!

Can’t you subscribe to kbin pages from Lemmy? Why choose? Best of both worlds.