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!
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.