I see a very small minority of people using Kbin, but I don’t understand why.
Is this just a coincidence and did some people choose Kbin over Lemmy or is there a good reason to use Kbin?
Yes you can follow users on kbin, which you can’t do on lemmy, and this applies to both users on mastodon/mblogs and lemmy/kbin.
However, from what I can gather, kbin is still community/magazine focused. For instance, I don’t think you can get a feed of just the posts of those that you follow, as you would on mastodon. You can select the subscribed channel and then look microblogs, which can get you close, but is really a view of all the posts from the people you follow and that have the hashtags for all of the magazines you follow (I think). THe important bit here being that kbin puts posts form mastodon/mblogs into magazines based on hashtags, where each magazine can defined what hashtags it will “scoop up”. And so “subscribed microblogs” includes all of those posts tagged with hashtags scooped up by the communities/magazines you follow.
I have no idea what kbin’s road map is for this, but for me personally, who has a mastodon account on an instance I’m rather happy with, as well as this lemmy account, it doesn’t offer something that would prompt me to migrate as a user.
One thing I’m probably missing here is whether one can more easily post to both communities/magazines and one’s mastodon followers from kbin. I don’t know enough about whether that is so and why and how far lemmy would be from achieving the same, but at this point in the fediverse’s development, it’s a not insignificant factor, as, IMO, so many are on mastodon and other microblog platforms that bridging that gap is vital to creating a sustainable and healthy ecosystem of platforms on the fediverse.
Fwiw you can post to both Lemmy communities and Mastodon at the same time, that does work pretty well, but it has to be from your Mastodon account and you tag the Lemmy community as a user. (First line of the Mastodon toot becomes the post title on Lemmy, fyi if you’re going to try it, and you can tag the community at the end it doesn’t need to be the first thing in your toot)
Not actually sure if that works the same way for Kbin magazines, I’m subscribed to plenty of them but most of them are kind of inactive so never had chance to test it. If anyone’s done the science and can report back, that would be interesting to know!
Yea posting from mastodon to lemmy is a nice way to join the two platforms actually.
I keep encouraging mastodon users to do it more, as they don’t have any groups and hashtags and not great IMO.
For those interested, I’ve written a little demo of doing so from mastodon, with comments/replies that provide links to the resulting lemmy post: https://hachyderm.io/@maegul/110483509521476095. If you think it’s helpful, feel free to share it around to anyone else you know that might be interested in posting to lemmy from mastodon.
Nice! Bookmarked for when this inevitably keeps coming up in support threads haha :D
I’ve definitely found it to be a good way to get interactions going in smaller communities so far, if the topic has a decent presence on the Mastodon side. Can’t quite decide if that’s cheating or not but some of those communities need all the help they can get!
