I’m trying to get my head wrapped around the identity (or purpose) of Kbin.
I tried out #Lemmy and #Kbin for a little more than a week each and found Lemmy a lot easier to onboard. You create posts that you post in communities. And you have threads of posts within communities that are centered around a common topic. Very similar to a forum. The terminology used is relatable since “community” also has meaning in other parts of life.
The curiosity in me always keeps going back to Kbin and really wanting to understand it more. Partially because Kbin’s UI/UX was more engaging. But the terminology was a bit confusing at first until I did some research and read the FAQ posts. Magazines = communities. Articles = posts that goes within the magazines. But the one part that still confused me was the “post” option that goes to a completely different microblog section. For the life of me, I couldn’t grasp what or why there was a microblog section for a link aggregator software. And when do I create an article versus a post.
It finally all clicked when I came across this thread in Kbin’s code repo: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/406. I finally understood the reasoning behind the Microblog section and that it interacts with other parts of the Fediverse (i.e. Mastodon). And that if setup properly, Magazines can pull in Mastodon (and other Fediverse software) posts based on tags and it goes to the Microblog section for that Magazine.
My question to the community is this. What is Kbin trying to be? What is its purpose? It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software, but I could be wrong. Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!
I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I’ve come to.
“It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software”
I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.
It’s almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren’t connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.
Whether we need what it’s trying to be, I don’t know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven’t used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.
I don’t think it’s too confusing to combine Mastodon natively. Reddit was filled with screenshot and links of Twitter, so if Mastodon is the Twitter replacement and kbin is the Reddit replacement, I’d much rather have the posts natively federated than reposted with the author having no idea.
If implemented correctly, comments on kbin would appear to mastodon as replies to the post, right?