2y ago

The Kbin Experience. The Best Worst Way to Interact with the Fediverse.

roundcatsblog.wordpress.com

A blog post I made about my experience on Kbin, what I like about it, and some of the challenges I still face in using it. Any feedback would be appreciated as someone who is still new to blogging. Thanks.

/kbin @kbin.social

Roundcat @lemmy.ca

2y ago

The Kbin Experience. The Best Worst Way to Interact with the Fediverse.

roundcatsblog.wordpress.com /2023/08/17/the-kbin-experience-the-best-worst-way-to-interact-with-the-fediverse/

23 comments

I think it is a testament to the site’s design that despite constantly testing my patients, I still want to use it
It's cool that you're a doctor and all, but you shouldn't be forcing your patients to use a social media platform.
- The finest of the dad jokes!
The lack of apps due to the lack of APIs is a major drawback compared to Lemmy.
I know Artemis exists, but it's one app compared to the dozens of Lemmy clients
- And even Artemis only works if you have your kbin account on the artemis.camp instance until they come out with an official kbin API.
  
  That is running the official API - it just hasn't been approved/merged yet, so other instances don't have it.
I, too, preferred KBin to lemmy. I created my communities there and ultimately spun up my own instance. With all the problems, I finally gave up on it and ended up spinning up a lemmy instance. With the Advent of Sync for lemmy, it was the right decision.
Now, using sync, and lemmy tools on the desktop, the lemmy experience is excellent.
I do think KBin has a better user interface and the extra Mastodon integration is awesome, but it's just too rough to be used as a daily driver unfortunately.
- Hopefully it'll get better one day, because I prefer Kbin too. I was having way too many federation issues though.
- If you haven't already, check out alexandrite and photon. Both are outstanding alternative UIs to Lemmy and dramatically improve the UI/UX in my opinion.
  
  I'm not seeing how to use a difference instance with photon? I don't use lemmy.ml
All of your issues were instance related I think
- They were, but it kinda feels like every new instance I try is a kinder egg of new errors and issues. I would also like to return to my old instance if I can.
  
  Yeah - I sympathize with that.
I prefer other options but it's great that we have a bunch of decent ways to interact with the Fediverse. The more the better!
I think kbin is still quite new. It's being updated daily and really your choices are larger instances that probably stage updates to make sure they don't break everything and smaller instances that are more likely to be up to date with the latest version.
In my case I'm running an instance that is generally on the latest version but also with some of my latest submissions (pull requests) applied too.
It's a double edged sword. I'm generally running with the latest changes. But sometimes the latest changes break things. I had around 30 minutes downtime today for example.
The fediverse isn't established tech yet, lemmy and kbin are still effectively alpha versions. The whole thing is likely to be rough around the edges for a while. But it's still usually working well I think.
- Its* interface
Smaller instances won't have a lot of the issues that the main instance has. I run one at https://dmv.pub. DMV being the DC/Maryland/Virginia region but anyone is welcome to join.
The native interface is bafflingly unintuitive, in my experience. Not being able to click through to the referenced article directly from the front page, and no way to view images in a larger format right on the page, is annoying.
kbin.social works fine for me. I use it in addition to old.lemmy.world.
- Holy crap, I didn't know about old.lemmy it's so much more responsive!
  
  The a.lemmy.world (Alexandrite) is really snappy, snappier than old.lemmy it seems.
- Unless you want to delete your account.
  I think I’ve given up on that, since it’s been weeks since I’ve requested it ¯(ツ)/¯
Yes it's a buggy thing but it works mostly.
I ran into the unusual situation this week where I couldn't put a new article into a kbin magazine (community / subreddit) from my kbin account, but could get it to stick if I did it via Lemmy.

23 comments