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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Kbin is barely a prototype, so I wouldn’t say it has a real approach to the UI. It’s about to go through a lot of change as contributors begin working on a more thoughtfully designed UI. Many basics are not even implemented in its current state, so expect it to change a lot. Also third-party apps will start showing up once an API is added.

    That is, check on it again in a few weeks.




  • I don’t think the problem is limited to “morons.” I understand this system and have operated federated services in the past, but it is a lot more work just to navigate this when compared to something like Reddit. I don’t have a ton of free time, and I’d rather spend that time engaging with the community vs wrestling with the service or trying to find which instance has the most activity. I know this will get better as it grows, but a lot of people will just get fed up and go somewhere they can just socialize.


  • There are many instances (“servers”) of the service running, and each one can have its own, local equivalent of a subreddit. We can see and interact with all of them. I just went through 15 pages of “magazines” and subscribed to communities with the same name on 2+ instances at least a dozen times.

    Suppose I am interested in photography, so I subscribe to the photography community on instance “foo.” Another user has the same interest, but they find the community on instance “bar” and subscribe to that. If I post on photography@foo, they won’t see it. The community is effectively split — often into more than two parts.

    This makes it really difficult to build an engaging community at a scale similar to Reddit’s. Ideally, users will eventually congregate around just a few, but this is going to make early growth quite painful. And it isn’t intuitive to newcomers.