I found out about it because of a hacker news comment discussing the Reddit drama. I'm pretty upset that I didn't discover it on Reddit. I assume any mention of Lemmy was marked as spam or was I just not browsing the right communities?
Interesting. Up until a few days ago, there was a subreddit devoted to Reddit alternatives. It's how I learned about kbin and other options.
Some of the posts were, let's say, suspiciously negative. Lemmy/kbin were supposedly impossible to sign up for unless you had at least 2 degrees in CS. (I managed, somehow) Oh, and lemmy is run by tankies. (Wouldn't care if it were). And it looks like hot garbage. (I like it well enough. It's easier on the eyes than new or old reddit imo)
It seemed like there were too many alternatives to make a rational choice, but ALSO "they all suck so don't bother." It sounded overwhelming, but I just said fuckit and picked one.
I wasn't expecting a fully formed set of communities and content or a perfectly polished interface. And I wasn't expecting the interface to be filled with tons of features or to have no learning curve. This is actually a lot nicer that what I expected, which was a very new/basic site that will need to do a lot of growing.
I wouldn't sign up on an instance ran by nazis, I wouldn't sign up on instance ran by tankies. I don't think I'm being unreasonable connecting those two.
I saw it on hacker news and wanted to check it out as I intended to delete my Reddit account but wanted a new home where I could get my info fix. I came, I saw, I deleted my Reddit account and here I am :)
After I saw the AMA with spez, I didn't have any hope for reddit being useable anymore. So I googled for something else to do my doom scrolling. I ran across a 4 year old YouTube video explaining the fediverse. Then I googled fediverse reddit alternative, and here I am. I wish I would have found out about all of this a long time ago.
Honestly, when I first came here, I entirely expected that Reddit would eventually cave and I'd return to it. I expected the Fediverse to fail. But instead Reddit has doubled down and the Fediverse has rapidly gotten considerably better. I'm intending to stay here.
Though admittedly I do worry about some smaller subs. Eg, my local city sub was fairly active on Reddit and was a great place to get local recommendations, learn about stuff going on, etc. I ended up making the community myself (@[email protected]), but there's yet to be any other subscribers (though this does remind me to go post about it in subs for the province).
My local sub has been one of the harder ones to lose.. I might make one here eventually. I'm just not convinced there's enough local users here yet.
I've recreated [email protected] here. I was a big community member there under a different username on r/vans. I'm determined to get this community to grow on Lemmy. r/vans is in the top 5% population size-wize on reddit. There's bound to be dozens of us here!
Found out about Lemmy a while ago the through an app that existed for it (Lemmur) due to weird search of Fdroid, when the shit hit the fan I just followed the crowd.
Came across a reference to it on Reddit. I didn't do anything at the time, but when I came across two or three more references to it just before the blackout I thought I'd give it a try.
I happened upon one comment in r/TrackMania so it was totally coincidental. But I'm happy I found it. Otherwise I'd probably still be there or had searched for alternatives which might've lead to me ending up here anyway.
Reddit. Someone mentioned Lemmy in r/apolloapp. Some were upset knowing the news that Apollo would be shutting down by the end of the month so folks started mentioning alternatives. I welcome the change ☺️.
I went to see Motörhead at Rockfabrik Ludwigsburg around 1986 and there he was, center stage.
Oh. I learned about lemmy a while back after searching something like "fediverse like reddit". I didn't join until this year. I didn't know about the API wars until afterward.
I assume any mention of Lemmy was marked as spam or was I just not browsing the right communities?
The RedditAlternatives sub is about 10 years old. Fediverse sub 5 years. The Lemmy sub is newish, only 1 year.
I definitely found out about Lemmy and Kbin through Reddit. I was familiar with Mastodon before all of this stuff started going on but Lemmy came onto my radar this month. I think someone in r/apolloapp asked Christian if he was going to port Apollo to be a Lemmy client was when it came into my radar, but it may have been shortly before that.
Found it after a random comment on reddit mentioned it. Been doing the same at least once a day, trying to slip under the radar and have gotten replies on it too, so at least I'm not shadowbanned (yet) it seems.
I can't really recall when I first learned about it existing. But I was looking into options for messaging, and saw it mentioned alongside matrix in an article. I'm fairly sure it was lemmygrad that I tried out at the time, because everything there was politically oriented, and with a heavily socialist/communist slant. That was back a while though
But it was pretty empty, so I didn't go back until the reddit shit with Apollo happened. It was obvious to me that reddit was changing beyond what I was willing to put up with, so I looked into alternatives and discovered that lemmy was actually much netter developed than when I originally saw it. Kbin came along with that.
I'll chime in and add Reddit. Once I saw the direction things were going in, I went ahead and created accounts on tildes, lemmy, and kbin (which was the order I learned of them in). Right now, I think I'm most fond of kbin, but I wanted to keep my options open.
I had heard about it on reddit and hacker news here and there, but I never made an account until I was downloading some modded/cracked apps off of mobilism and saw the 'Jerboa for Lemmy' listed on there.
Installed it, made an account, been morbin' ever since
I can't remember how exactly, but a couple of weeks ago, I was on the Snoosite when I read something about Lemmy's developers being communist. I looked it up, read some relevant posts about it, and thought it's a pretty good place to set-up an account for the (back then) impending blackout and its aftermath.
When considering how my posts were being used as source of revenue resulted in my looking for an alternative. I found a page that directed me to several lemmy servers and I joined basically the first one - lemmy.world. I have since begun a monthly donation (since I do not have the ability to run my own instance) and haven't looked back.
Using my kbin.social user, although I have a lemmy account too (sopuli.xyz).
I find out about Lemmy after I joined Mastodon last year, on April. I don't remember if I was told about Lemmy by another user, or it was me who was digging on other fediverse projects. I liked the idea of a federated Reddit-like, but I didn't get very engaged because it had few users, and I was still learning about federation and instances. Now it's different and more awesome.
I was slowly migrating to mastodon, and that's where I clicked on some guy's profile, and he had a link to kbin.social in his profile. After I visited the link, the site interface felt instantly familiar to me, so decided that kbin would be my new home.
I saw a post from earnest and he started following me on mastodon. Then joined kbin during the reddit migration, and kept up with @stux when he started up Geddit.social
Old account here. I was directed to Hexbear after r/cth was banned from Reddit. Later on, I learned about other instances. Federation wasn't a thing back then; I made an account here to check federation out once it finally released.
It feels like a lot of people new to the fediverse think it revolves around lemmy. It always feels a bit divisive to come across posts like this that single out lemmy. It would be nice if people asked about the fediverse or threadiverse or something. Don't forget that us kbin users (among others) are browsing the same threads and partaking in the same discussions.
I dont think that day will ever come. Hosting text is one thing, hosting 4k video is something else entirely. Kbin and lemmy have both had server problems and neither host lots of video like YouTube does. Its questionable weather YouTube is even profitable.
I still don't understand if I'm on Kbin or Lemmy. I have a Kbin login so this is Kbin right? But I can view subs/magazines/federations on lemmy? But not all of the content? And I can comment/interact with those Lemmyubs/magazines/federations if i'm on Kbin, but not with the same account if I go to Lemmy? WTF is going on.
you're on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don't think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you've left the website and thus won't be logged in.
Nah, this shit is confusing initially. Think of it like email. You're using gmail, but you can still see and participate in email threads sent by Outlook users. It's just that instead of emails, it's a threaded forum somewhat in the style of reddit.
In kbin's UI, on every thread you can click "more", then "copy url" to see what the origin of the thread is - if it shows another domain name like lemmy.ml then you know you are looking at a thread that originated on a different "fediverse instance". Likewise you can also look at the URL of a username to see where they are posting from.
Lemmy presents things a little bit differently from kbin, and when things are federated to different instances there's no guarantee we see exactly the same things as each other(voting stats, replies etc.) What we do get is roughly enough to have a discussion, though.
In case the email analogy doesn't work for you, let me let me try to explain. You're on kbin, you can tell because your username ends in @kbin.social, which is a kbin instance. Instance is just another name for a server. Due to federation you can view and comment on threads from any other federated instance. You can also join maganzines (called communities on Lemmy, groups on mastadon, and subreddits on reddit) from any other federated instance as well. The only thing I don't think you can do is become a moderator on another instance. Note, the content is being brought to your kbin feed because we are federated, if you go to to the original instance you've left the website and thus won't be logged in. There's nothing to stop you from making another account with a Lemmy instance, but there's not really any reason to because you can see the same content.
You don't. You are logged in to a kbin account but, just like if you were logged in to a lemmy account, you can read and post to the same threads and comments. Just like if you were logged in to your gmail account you can send an email to somebody with a hotmail account or another gmail account. Doesn't matter.
While you're on kbin, the servers share basically everything under the hood, so the distinction isn't that strong. Compared to Lemmy, you'd see a different interface and some features may differ, but the underlying content is basically the same whether you're on kbin or Lemmy. So despite being different products, it's basically one big community. The likes of Mastodon are technically in there too, but the threading structure of kbin and Lemmy means you'll mostly see those two products sharing content.
Though note that the specific site you're on does control things like the sorting of posts. What's hot for a kbin user might not be for a Lemmy user. Similarly, sites could hide or block some kinds of content if they want to. Eg, I think kbin probably did something to filter porn off the front page, cause I don't see porn anymore unless I look for it. Beehaw is another good example here. It's a Lemmy instance that decided to block the biggest other Lemmy servers to limit access to their communities.
TL;DR: same content, different interface for viewing and interacting with the content.
I stumbled across it a couple of years ago. Bookmarked it with a "look into" flag, and promptly forgot about it. Then, with all the reddit fuss I remembered and figured it was about time.
Found it about a year ago after looking for social media alternatives that respect privacy and are open-source. Mainly lurked for a while, but then decided to try and get some communities active here. about two or three weeks back.
Just happened to be a coincidence everything going on with Reddit started occurring shortly after.
I think it was on /r/selfhosted or the Awesome Self-Hosted repo on GitHub about a year back. I definitely don't think it was censored by mods/admins or anything on Reddit (back then anyway). It just seemed to lack the critical mass back then. In fact, I was looking at it as a way to host a private, non-federated link sharing board for friends but never got around to it.
Fastforward to this Reddit shitshow and hearing about lemmy.ml and lemmy.world and other bigger instances I finally decided to register and try it out!
I honestly don't recall, even though it was just a week or two ago. It was one of the Reddit alternatives that people were talking about, and I liked the federated aspect - it reminds me of the Usenet of old, which was my first online social experience. I tried signing up to one of the handful of non-lemmy.ml servers that were being recommended at the time to balance the load, but only lemmy.ml was actually online when I made the attempt so I signed up there.
Then I started noticing the odd popularity of Russia and China in the news communities, and around that time I heard about kbin. Again, even though I'd have loved to load-balance, kbin.social was the only one available at the time so I signed up there.
As soon as account transfer gets implemented I'll start looking to move to another instance and finally do my part to distribute things a bit more.