Measuring "success" in a Federated system is somewhat complicated. I'm logged in through a site that's running kbin, and if this instance turned out to be the only kbin instance in existence it wouldn't really affect me; the Lemmy stuff is just as accessible to me regardless.
Comment on Discuit just went open source, could federation be next?
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Doesn’t really matter if they open sourced, since many reddit alternative over the years have been open source: Voat, Ruqqus, Raddle, doesn’t really make.a difference since they all failed one way or another. They either never hit that critical self sustaining mass of users, or they attracted the exact wrong type of users who drove out any reasonable users there.
Federation seems to be the only way to create that critical mass of users, and Lemmy is the only alternative that really succeeded (kbin is kinda…hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation) precisely because it is not a website, but a platform inside of a greater ecosystem.
All Discuit really have is a pretty UI, as it is nowhere even near feature parity with a current defederated Lemmy instance, and Lemmy also has like a dozen different desktop and mobile UIs already.
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
kbin is kinda…hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation
Mbin is promising, development is ver active: github.com/MbinOrg/mbin
aroom@kbin.social 9 months ago
Kbin development is still active as well
Skavau@kbin.social 9 months ago
Federation has its downsides though, there's less cohesion across the board. A lemmy/kbin platform may have 20,000 users (an example) but most of them might end up with interacting on instances outside of the one they signed up on. Whereas everyone on Discuit, for instance, will be only interacting on Discuit. There's something to be said for how a userbase is spread, not just the amount of users.
Although in Discuits case, yes, it is really, really basic - and that more than anything likely stopped it growing before anything else.
kpw@kbin.social 10 months ago
I'm on kbin. What's wrong with it?
ernest@kbin.social 10 months ago
In the latest thing with Reddit's /kbin, it was still in the early prototype phase (and remains so to this day). Prior to this, practically only I and a few friends were using it. It wasn't ready to handle the sudden creation of dozens of instances or accommodate thousands of users. Additionally, real-world issues emerged that demanded my immediate attention. I made the decision to take a step back instead of getting caught up in a race, opting to build solid foundations, which is exactly what I'm doing now. In my opinion, this will be better for the project and potential contributors, ensuring that their work will be utilized to the best possible extent.
ernest@kbin.social 10 months ago
Actually a lot is changing in /kbin, and this recent period has brought the most changes in months. Slowly we are coming back to life, and this time I will be better prepared.
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog
MargotRobbie@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I would say take a moment to think through the site design philosophy and focus on clarity instead of rushing to add features, since I feel that kbin is trying to do more, but it is still rather confusing to navigate.
Also, don’t burn yourself out.
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 9 months ago
I don't understand how you find kbin confusing to navigate while also browsing on Lemmy, which has such an obtuse layout. If you've used Reddit before, surely you should understand to navigate kbin as well?
DarkThoughts@kbin.social 9 months ago
I for one like the added features. Collapsible comments and new comment markers especially (although not the best visual representation maybe). There's lots of little quality of life things that are still missing. Foe example I would love to see a better handling of comment pages. Having to navigate through the pages is annoying, especially if you get a comment reply notification and it just sends you to the first page, without any indication on which page your comment and the reply is sitting at.