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Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?

www.pcmag.com Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?

Love Reddit but tired of what's happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.

Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
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15 comments

  • Nice, that's a pretty favorable article. I actually learned a few things from it, mostly about kbin. He really gets into a bunch of the features that Lemmy and Kbin have that reddit does not.

    • The only correction I would make is that Kbin does let you follow communities from other instances (even Lemmy instances).

      Until a couple weeks ago, it would show local magazines first... but if you dug deep enough, after all the local magazines were listed it would start listing remote communities across Lemmy/Kbin.

      It's changed very recently to always sort everything by subscriber count, with an option to toggle between local magazines and everything on the threadiverse.

      As far as "I tried to go to posts I knew existed but weren't showing up" - like everywhere else on the fediverse, someone needs to follow that content first. So the reason why they saw their Mastodon content is because someone followed their Mastodon account from Kbin. When they searched for things that didn't appear, it's because nobody on Kbin was following those accounts.

      If they searched the full @[email protected] and hit "follow", then future posts would appear in the microblog tag and be searchable.

  • Alternatives that dont even take off, sadly.

    There was a spike, but the curve has flattened and now might be bleeding.

    • That's how growth works on social media, it comes in waves. We are basically in the first wave, because there were only a few thousand people here before June. Its going to take a while before we build up enough organic momentum to cause a second wave, unless reddit makes another oopsie; they could trigger another wave at any moment.

      The curve is fine, what you're seeing is the bleeding of alternate accounts. Many of us made 2 or more accounts on different instances early on, and many of those initial alts are now becoming inactive as people settle on their preferred servers. The rate of active user growth is slower than the rate of attrition right now, but that's only because the rate of attrition is so high. That should stabilize in the coming weeks.

      Look at threads, their activity declined like 70% after a week or two. Lemmy is actually retaining users at a much higher percentage than the average social media site, it's just that we haven't gotten enough people to give it a try yet.

      • There's been multiple waves to Lemmy.

        Since the start of July, it's largely petered back. A lot of the folks who are diehard anti-Reddit are here, but until Reddit fucks up again it'll probably quiet down.

        Reddit will fuck up again, mind. Digg didn't die instantly, either - it was a slow, drawn-out death.

      • I think you're the fourth or fifth wave actually, there were a lot of smaller waves before the current reddit migration. The reddit migration also probably had two waves

        1. when the api changes first went viral
        2. when third party apps actually shut down

        though #2 may not have increased accounts by much.

        Lemmy is actually retaining users at a much higher percentage than the average social media site, it’s just that we haven’t gotten enough people to give it a try yet.

        The slight difficulty in joining probably helps with this. You have to actually commit a little to join

      • Lemmy has had a lot of bugs fixed and performance improvements since the big wave, I think next one will go more smoothly and it probably won't be so intimidating

    • I think it is a similar situation like mastodon vs X.com right?

  • Anything is better than Reddit, IMO. Place is impossible to deal with and the bans are handed out arbitrarily…. But only if you don’t tow the decidedly left-leaning line. Users there are also more likely to be sissies as in running to the mods if you dare question them or cause them to need their crayons and safe space. You get the idea. I’m hoping this place is a little more balanced .

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