this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2023
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In absolute numbers perhaps, but that's almost double the active user base. What's more interesting to me, however, is the respective growth. Kbin soared to 50k+ users extremely quickly, but has since then experienced a very flat curve. Wasn't Kbin's user base larger than Lemmy's a month ago? Or at least equal? It will be interesting if Kbin grows more rapidly with API and 3rd-party app support or if it will become more niche in the future, provided Lemmy's growth continues.
This is definitely true, and thank god for it or this split of the Reddit refugees would have been catastrophic. It still was a problem for a while when Kbin had bugged federation, but it seems better now.
I still don't understand the point of calling communities Magazines. Who would refer to this as an "Article" in a "Magazine"?
Kbin had a tiny lead for a while in active users, but that changed when lemmy.world hit the scene and we got the first Lemmy instance ready to accept a huge number of users without the controversy surrounding lemmy.ml. At the same time, Kbin was getting hit very hard by those 50k users and had to disable federation for a few days, which drove people to sign up for lemmy.world instead. I think this is also when Lemmy-hosted communities became the go-to "default" as opposed to those on Kbin.
What's also interesting though is if we break it down a little further, kbin.social still has the most active users in a single instance. Lemmy.world has more accounts, but most of those don't post or comment.
Either way though, whichever has more users doesn't really matter because they don't directly compete.
Yeah, Kbin really wasn't ready for mass adoption, I heard about Ernest needing to activate Cloudflare protection to save the server, though I wasn't around for that incident.
Funny enough lemmy.world was created June 1st, what I think triggered the mass adoption of Lemmy over Kbin is actually Sync and Boost announcing they'd be making Lemmy apps. Two major apps moving over signalled that this was a serious alternative to Reddit, and most users wouldn't realise Kbin is federated and would just go with the name cited by those apps (Lemmy).
What I find interesting about it is that every Lemmy instance sits at about 10-25% of the total user base being "active users", while every single Kbin instance apart from Karab.in reports over 50% if its users as "active", with some being at or close to 100%.
Either Kbin attracts a vastly different, more active userbase, or the software behaves slightly differently, and with "boosts" being based off of retweets it wouldn't surprise me at all if they get counted when determining "active users".
The latter would also be in line with the amount of activity I've seen on and from Kbin.social versus lemmy.world, though that is of course merely anecdotal.