I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the identity (or purpose) of Kbin.
I tried out #Lemmy and #Kbin for a little more than a week each and found Lemmy a lot easier to onboard. You create posts that you post in communities. And you have threads of posts within communities that are centered around a common topic. Very similar to a forum. The terminology used is relatable since “community” also has meaning in other parts of life.
The curiosity in me always keeps going back to Kbin and really wanting to understand it more. Partially because Kbin’s UI/UX was more engaging. But the terminology was a bit confusing at first until I did some research and read the FAQ posts. Magazines = communities. Articles = posts that goes within the magazines. But the one part that still confused me was the “post” option that goes to a completely different microblog section. For the life of me, I couldn’t grasp what or why there was a microblog section for a link aggregator software. And when do I create an article versus a post.
It finally all clicked when I came across this thread in Kbin’s code repo: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/406. I finally understood the reasoning behind the Microblog section and that it interacts with other parts of the Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon). And that if setup properly, Magazines can pull in Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) posts based on tags and it goes to the Microblog section for that Magazine.
My question to the community is this. What is Kbin trying to be? What is its purpose? It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software, but I could be wrong. Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
Kbin identifies as ‘Not Reddit’ and that’s good enough for me.
Reddit but not run by donkeys, is how I’ve been explaining it.
If I remember correctly @ernest once described kbin as a “gateway for the fediverse” (but at the moment I don’t have a source for that).
This would allow kbin to gather and integrate even more services from the fediverse - maybeThat’s what I’m hoping for.
Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
There were so many times I was browsing reddit and thought to myself, “this didn’t deserve a post of its own.” Was it content related to the subreddit? Absolutely. But it was simple, trite, repetitive - for example, just someone having a halfway neat experience in a game, but with an incident for which the novelty had worn thin for long-term players long ago. (oh so your taming inspiration lined up with a thrumbo passing, wao sugoi moving on…)
On the flip side, I’d often want to share my inane thoughts about a topic with others interested in that topic, but I knew my inane thoughts didn’t really warrant a whole post. Sometimes I just wanted to say “I thought this event story was neat” without adding a “what did you think?” and massaging whatever discussion thread followed.
So, in short, I had a higher standard for what counted as discussion-worthy and was dissatisfied when both consuming and producing content because of it.
The kbin magazine blend of discussion threads and microblogs is perfect for this sort of problem, in my opinion, which is why kbin is my ideal setup. You clearly define when you want to make a discussion space for everyone vs. when you want to just bounce a thought into other like-minded people simply by whether you create a thread or a microblog, and you don’t need two different sites (reddit/twitter, or lemmy/mastodon) to do it.
Some subreddits already had a daily/weekly discussion thread pinned to the top to serve exactly this purpose. Kbin’s just taken that idea and made it a default part of the software.
I was never a big fan of twitter/mastodon random personal ramblings that would fill my feed so I was naturally very skeptical of the microblogging feature in kbin, but honestly… it kinda makes sense here!
If I’m on a magazine for some game like elden ring, for example, it makes sense to keep threads for big threaded conversations while using the microblog for just small thoughts, tips, screenshots, for sharing personal accomplishments or smaller things like that which don’t usually create big discussions. If I need to ask a quick question I can just make a microblog post and maybe get answers even from people using mastodon that aren’t on kbin or lemmy!
I’m mostly repeating what you said, I know, but just wanted to gush about it a bit, it’s a pretty cool idea.
Kbin seems to be pretty ambitious in that it’s aiming at being a hub for (almost) all of the fediverse. So Lemmy’s reddit-like forums, mastodon’s quick posts a la Twitter, and peertube’s youtube - style services - it’s looking to bring all of those fediverse platforms so they’re all accessible in one place rather than having to sign up for each. That way it’s an easy place to go to for your decentralized social media content. So really it’s just looking to make the fediverse more easily accessible and improve the user’s experience.
It’s a pretty big idea and it’s pretty damn impressive what Ernest accomplished before this big fediverse boom. I’m excited to see where it goes.
At the most barebones level, I think kbin was meant to be “Lemmy and mastodon with a cohesive UI on one account.” So far it has ended up being, “Lemmy but for people who were eeshy about tankies when they were trying to figure all this out to get away from Reddit.”
It’s a decentralized link aggregator in the design of Reddit with federation support for Lemmy & Mastodon content.
I use kbin because it’s simply easier to use and more familiar for me as a Reddit user. Lemmy’s layout is just confusing to me and I don’t like the extremistic ideology of the admins.For consistency,
Threads should be renamed to “Articles”
Microblog should be renamed to “Posts”.As for Kbin identity - well… I guess it’s a “user interface to fediverse”.
Fediverse, in turn, is a sprawling network that publishes and makes different types of ActivityPub objects available to users.
Kbin has tools to work and interact with some of those object types.
You’ve got a good point, someone should make a userscript to rename the buttons lol
Aren’t threads and articles separate concepts on Kbin though? I agree that it’s confusing however, and perhaps should be simplified.
My understanding that an article is closer to a reddit text post, while the others (link, photo, video) are all what reddit considers “links”.
So articles are threads, but so are links, photos and videos. To be clear, that’s my understanding, not fact.
That would confuse me even more to be honest. A submission that people discuss and reply to is not what I would think of as an article - to me, that would be more like a standalone publication.
I do feel like using different terminology could help in understanding how this all fits together though.
kbin just seems so much easier to me
I think post need to be renamed and to keep with the magazines motif we should call them “Inserts”.
Inserts are those junk ads that always fall out everywhere when you pick a magazine up, right? How about Editorial, since posts/microblogs tend heavily towards being longish personal commentary?
Although Ernest said a few days ago he was thinking of changing the terminology. I don’t remember if he said to what, just that he should. Kinda mixed about that. It makes talking about them more confusing both for cross-platform and for new users, but I got used to it now and I fear change
I’ve already started calling magazines “mags” in my head. I think it’s fine the way it is, though if they were renamed to “zines” that would be fine too.
I agree the terminology, etc, is confusing. I do hope it gets revamped a bit.
I agree that the naming scheme is a bit weird and confusing. In most people’s terminology, when you leave any kind of a comment on the internet it’s considered a “post”. You “post” a comment. I’m kinda hoping this gets changed, but I suppose I might just get used to it. It’s all still quite new after all.
I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I’ve come to.
“It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software”
I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.
It’s almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren’t connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.
Whether we need what it’s trying to be, I don’t know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven’t used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.
I don’t think it’s too confusing to combine Mastodon natively. Reddit was filled with screenshot and links of Twitter, so if Mastodon is the Twitter replacement and kbin is the Reddit replacement, I’d much rather have the posts natively federated than reposted with the author having no idea.
If implemented correctly, comments on kbin would appear to mastodon as replies to the post, right?
If set up properly, Mastodon can pull in Lemmy and Kbin posts and comments. What is Mastodon trying to be?
The answer in both cases: it depends on how you set them up.
It’s trying to be one-stop shopping for decentralized social media. There are future plans for integration with Pixelfed and other federated services.
