Looks like the admin for kbin.lol has some pretty valid gripes with the current status of Kbin. I have to agree, you can tell the platform is not up to speed at all.
Kbin looks visually great but the backend just isn’t there. Check out his statement, it’s worth the read.
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.
Yes, definitely problems federating, kbin.social is under quite some load and I made a new kbin instance (I’d previously only been testing). It’s been up over 2 days and not received a single thread or comment from kbin.social. In the meantime it’s filling with content from lemmy instances, like this thread for example.
But, I’m sticking with kbin for a few reasons. First as you say it’s a younger project and things will only get better, and as a software developer maybe I can help with that some. But, also because I like how it looks and prefer it over others.
I think there’s a lot of functionality missing, but it’s going to come over time. For people not prepared for this kind of bleeding edge operation I’d certainly not blame them for wanting to use a more established project.
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.
Just a note,
It was shown a lot of the recent threadiverse federation issues were/are being caused by Lemmy. Major Lemmy instances were/are intentionally or unintentionally (due to a bug in their platform), blocking inbound federation traffic from Kbin and Lotide. While allowing their own outbound to go through.
The jury is still out on if it was an oversight/issue with their latest release, or something more nefarious on the part of the devs with regards to competition.
