Is it speed? Features? Ease of development? Just curious why lemmy is seeing more activity as opposed to other networks.
It’s for all these reasons I’m fascinated Kbin hasn’t received a larger influx of new users. It seems truly the easiest to easily switch from Reddit, you just need a browser.
Well, there’s the thing, you need a browser. You’d be surprised how many newer Reddit users access the site primarily or even exclusively on their phones, and who tend to use apps rather than their mobile browser.
Artemis is in the works for a native android client, but, also, kbin is a Progressive Web App on mobile. By that I mean, you can go to the site with chrome, firefox, etc, click the menu, and find “Install” or “Install App”. That will give you an icon to put on your home screen, which will just open the site like a standalone app. But using your browser. Which means if you use Firefox mobile, you can still use extensions and user scripts and such if you want to.
I use kbin primarily on a browser (firefox) on mobile. My only complaint is the side menu options for aubscribing/blocking being located at the bottom of the page instead of higher up.
If you press the hamburger menu button at the top it opens a sidebar that has a subscribe button as well!
Kbin.social was not really ready to accept a large user amount until a few days ago when they did a large update to the infrastructure, also a little more then a week ago the site still had stability issues and would error out a lot. That just changed and now it is ready to grow faster. But, so far 51k users on kbin.social already.
Arguably it’s probably still not ready - I have heard rumours that running a kbin instance is still much more complicated than Lemmy, and that moderation tools are still somewhat lacking. Which probably explains why there are currently more Lemmy instances out there than kbin.
The confusing thing is that despite this, kbin.social seems spectacularly well moderated at the mement. I guess that’s partly because ernest is a champion, and partly because it didn’t have to deal with the same insane influx of users that Lemmy has.
Still - I think the slow growth model benefits kbin quite nicely, and with federation it doesn’t really matter to the feasibility of the platform whether people are here or on Lemmy. :)
Honestly, I’ve appreciated the smaller community size here. Sure there are less niche communities with actual users like reddit, but there is just a much smaller concentration of idiots here than other social media sites, which makes actually talking about shit fun, rather than infuriating.
Part of the reason I stuck around even after all the redditors swam back is because I like the company here much more.
