Moving to: m/AskMbin!

Kbin identifies as 'Not Reddit' and that's good enough for me.

If I remember correctly @ernest once described kbin as a "gateway for the fediverse" (but at the moment I don't have a source for that).
This would allow kbin to gather and integrate even more services from the fediverse - maybe

Why use Kbin over Mastodon to post a microblog to the Fediverse? Genuinely curious!

There were so many times I was browsing reddit and thought to myself, "this didn't deserve a post of its own." Was it content related to the subreddit? Absolutely. But it was simple, trite, repetitive - for example, just someone having a halfway neat experience in a game, but with an incident for which the novelty had worn thin for long-term players long ago. (oh so your taming inspiration lined up with a thrumbo passing, wao sugoi moving on....)

On the flip side, I'd often want to share my inane thoughts about a topic with others interested in that topic, but I knew my inane thoughts didn't really warrant a whole post. Sometimes I just wanted to say "I thought this event story was neat" without adding a "what did you think?" and massaging whatever discussion thread followed.

So, in short, I had a higher standard for what counted as discussion-worthy and was dissatisfied when both consuming and producing content because of it.

The kbin magazine blend of discussion threads and microblogs is perfect for this sort of problem, in my opinion, which is why kbin is my ideal setup. You clearly define when you want to make a discussion space for everyone vs. when you want to just bounce a thought into other like-minded people simply by whether you create a thread or a microblog, and you don't need two different sites (reddit/twitter, or lemmy/mastodon) to do it.

It's a decentralized link aggregator in the design of Reddit with federation support for Lemmy & Mastodon content.
I use kbin because it's simply easier to use and more familiar for me as a Reddit user. Lemmy's layout is just confusing to me and I don't like the extremistic ideology of the admins.

Kbin seems to be pretty ambitious in that it's aiming at being a hub for (almost) all of the fediverse. So Lemmy's reddit-like forums, mastodon's quick posts a la Twitter, and peertube's youtube - style services - it's looking to bring all of those fediverse platforms so they're all accessible in one place rather than having to sign up for each. That way it's an easy place to go to for your decentralized social media content. So really it's just looking to make the fediverse more easily accessible and improve the user's experience.

It's a pretty big idea and it's pretty damn impressive what Ernest accomplished before this big fediverse boom. I'm excited to see where it goes.

For consistency,

Threads should be renamed to "Articles"
Microblog should be renamed to "Posts".

As for Kbin identity - well.. I guess it's a "user interface to fediverse".

Fediverse, in turn, is a sprawling network that publishes and makes different types of ActivityPub objects available to users.

Kbin has tools to work and interact with some of those object types.

At the most barebones level, I think kbin was meant to be "Lemmy and mastodon with a cohesive UI on one account." So far it has ended up being, "Lemmy but for people who were eeshy about tankies when they were trying to figure all this out to get away from Reddit."

kbin just seems so much easier to me

I think post need to be renamed and to keep with the magazines motif we should call them "Inserts".

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 agree that the naming scheme is a bit weird and confusing. In most people's terminology, when you leave any kind of a comment on the internet it's considered a "post". You "post" a comment. I'm kinda hoping this gets changed, but I suppose I might just get used to it. It's all still quite new after all.

If set up properly, Mastodon can pull in Lemmy and Kbin posts and comments. What is Mastodon trying to be?

The answer in both cases: it depends on how you set them up.

I agree the terminology, etc, is confusing. I do hope it gets revamped a bit.

It's trying to be one-stop shopping for decentralized social media. There are future plans for integration with Pixelfed and other federated services.