I found the same, tbh.

I've been on the thrediverse using lotide until now, which is different then lemmy or kbin. There were some federation issues so lotide wasn't federating just as the place was blowing up with more users, so I decided it was time to install one of the new pieces of software.

I spent 3 days trying to get kbin working and federating, and just wasn't having luck with it. Even now, kbin.social is pretty dodgy about federating, and doesn't federate with a lot of other stuff at all.

My instances require good federation. That's non-negotiable because otherwise it's just me sitting here talking to myself.

Ultimately I went with lemmy, which I managed to get up and running quite a bit quicker.

To be fair to kbin, it's a super new project. lemmy and lotide have been going for years, I hadn't even really heard about kbin 2 months ago. I think it'll get a lot better, but it's going to take time and effort.

I sucked it up with respect to the lemmy devs politics stuff... Instead of bitching that they're not exactly like me, I'm going to just be thankful to them for creating a platform we can share.

I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesn’t work well enough to be usable.

I started on kbin for my first 2 weeks of the fediverse but I've since migrated mostly to lemmy and I think I'm happier here tbh.

Excited to see where kbin goes, and really excited to see all of the apps being made for both technologies.

I’ve been coming to terms with the politics behind the Lemmy devs myself and I have to say I agree with the sentiment here.

It’s going to be a long road ahead if we cancel everyone with an opposing viewpoint.

Ultimately Lemmy remains free and open source. If new, more incriminating allegations show up about the devs, I hope that kbin would’ve made more progress by then. In the mean time, Lemmy works.

The best thing to do is start opening pull requests or issues and helping out, where you can :)

I really like some of what Kbin is doing, but from a purely user standpoint, the federation stuff doesn’t work well enough to be usable.

I’ve got a long history in the FOSS community and if I banned everybody I disagreed with it’d just be me, a scratch kernel, and nano.

This 100%

From what I've read about lemmy it's not in much better shape, the backend is not optimized for scaling up and is held together by wishes and prayers.

On one hand, I feel like there are software devs that would say that about literally any piece of software in production just to feel superior or because of their lack of experience. On the other... they are probably right. These are passion projects done in free time, jury-rigged in any way they could do it just to handle the absurd influx of new users.

We all knew that this is young tech being developed "live in prod", of course it won't work as flawlessly as something made by a corporation with 2000 employees over the last 10 years. Or you know, be as stable and reliable as Twitter, the biggest social network that even governments use, owned by a multibillionare geniu.... ok that's it, can't do it more😁

I'm sure these issues will be ironed out eventually. Mastodon is in a pretty stable spot right now and hopefully kbin/lemmy get to a similar state in 6-12 months.

Apollo town? Does that have anything to do with the former Apollo app?

Interesting to say the least, I signed up for lemmy and it has its issues (they may have finally fixed sort by hot). I looked at kbin and saw a much cleaner and at the time active community and wondered if I should move over. Lemmy got pretty active today.

I've been trying for over a week to delete my account at kbin, and it always says success, but my account is still there. Glad to know I'm not crazy and it's an actual issue.

As a user, I plan to continue sticking with kbin.social for now because it's working well enough. Not perfectly, I can see Federation issues, but I'm comfortable with an imperfect experience in exchange for giving it support.

I don't actually have a big issue with the Tankie devs behind Lemmy. It's open source, they have no control over it, if they try any funny business they'll be forked away lickety-split. But I think it's vital for an open standard to have more than one independent implementation. That keeps the implementers honest, nobody can just slip in a convenient little "extension" because theirs is the only client using the standard anyway.

Kbin has only existed publicly for a little over two months.

Lemmy has been around for four years.

It’s rather significant imo that Kbin is on par functionally with Lemmy, and Kbin.social has higher active user counts then all but a few Lemmy instances. Kbin seems to solve issues faster as well in the several weeks I’ve been here anyway.

In addition to the backend, I'm not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.

Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?

Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.

Kbin wasn’t that old and @ernest has been pretty open about everything. Like, they had this set up for a few friends and their friends. Kbin went from a couple hundred to thousands of people in zero time. Kbin gets a bit of space to make something.

Personally I prefer Kbin to lemmy; as other have said, we must put into account that kbin is much younger that lemmy, but @ernest has been amazing in managing to keep it all running when the users went basically from 0 to 1000 in a matter of hours!

I'm surprised you're having trouble federating with kbin.social- that's always been working for me from my personal instance. I have trouble federating with a few lemmy instances though. Lemmy.ml is still blocking the kbin useragent. And the communities of infosec.pub, sh.itjust.works, sopuli.xyz, among others- cannot be discovered from kbin.

Definitely it’s bad when there are many alternatives with many instances. Community will become fragmented