I’m a bit confused as to what platform I should look to for my exodus from Reddit. First we have Lemmy which is a direct Reddit alternative. Then we have kbin which is ALSO is own Reddit alternative AND portal to Lemmy/Mastodon. Finally we have Mastodon which is the well established Twitter alternative that doesn’t really portal to Lemmy or Kbin.
I’m ok with Mastodon being it’s own thing, but what about Lemmy and Kbin? Kbin seems more secure and flexible but Lemmy is longer running with apps available on iOS and Android.
Which do you think you’ll be gravitating towards?
Lemmy is more of a Reddit alternative, where you have the focus on communities/categories (similar to “subreddits”) to which you can subscribe to, while Mastodon is more a Twitter alternative, focusing on users to follow.
Kbin is actually slightly special.
It is also running on the Fediverse network, but can communicate with multiple other services. Meaning, it can show you content from all Lemmy instances (called Threads) and content from Mastodon (called Microblog). You can see this thread there as well.
By using Kbin, you have access to both worlds, Lemmy and Mastodon. In addition, it supports even more of the so-called “ActivityPub” services, like Pleroma or Peertube.
While I love the implementation of Kbin, it still has small hiccups here and there - it feels less reliable/stable. Some content isn’t fully updated, like this post missing most of the comments at the time I posted this. They even warn you about it: “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.”
I had the best experience so far by using a Lemmy instance for Lemmy and a Mastodon instance for Mastodon. Waiting for Kbin to be more mature.
FYI, Lemmy uses ActivityPub too. It is fully compatible with other fediverse services. Just not executed as cleanly as kbin.