As much as there is plenty of new people joining the threadiverse, the real wave starts today, with thousands of subreddits going dark.
Existing Lemmy/Kbin instances get hammered with new user registrations and deploy different coping strategies. Some plead, some close registrations. New instances spring up.
Soon, mainstream media will discover Lemmy exists. They will probably miss Kbin entirely, and most will also be very confused about the federated nature of Lemmy. Some might be able to remember Fediverse exists.
When Kbin finally shows up on their radar, they will find it difficult to explain how it fits into the narrative they already spun. My money is on someone calling it a “fork” of Lemmy. 🤣
Eventually, as more instances start turning off registrations, and as some buckle under the load temporarily, the narrative becomes “this is why Lemmy will fail.” Threadiverse will get treated like a VC-funded walled garden. Media will be flabberghasted at how “poorly” Lemmy and Kbin were able to “capture” the people wanting to migrate off of Reddit. They will complain endlessly about how hard it is to choose an instance, “confusing interface”, and ask “thoughtful” questions on “how will they monetize”.
Eventually, the wave subsides. Maybe Reddit reverses their silly ideas, maybe people get tired. There is a drop in active user accounts on the Threadiverse, compared to the peak of the wave, which is then taken as “proof positive” that Lemmy and Kbin could never “succeed”.
What they will ignore, of course, is that by then Threadiverse is several times bigger and more active than before all the Reddit insanity. Communities stay active, people stay active, and slowly Threadiverse grows, as (just like the broader Fediverse) it is not a VC-funded startup that needs a hokey-stick growth.
It’s a long-term project of making community-run platforms work. And that takes time, and effort, and love.
I’m new to all of this, can you explain the difference between Lemmy and Kbin? And why would Kbin get missed over initially?
Lemmy and kbin are both similar to Reddit in functionality, but are two separate projects. Lemmy runs on rust, and kbin runs on php. Luckily both lemmy and kbin use ActivityPub, which means that users on each platform can see and interact with content from the other platform! Right now Lemmy is the more popular option, so most of the big communities are hosted on Lemmy servers, hence kbin being missed.
Essentially, if you’re already registered on a Lemmy instance and are enjoying that, you don’t really need to worry about kbin, but if you check it out and prefer the interface, you could register on a kbin instance and still access all the same content you were seeing on Lemmy.
These are just two different software projects that a Threadiverse instance can use. They federate with one another, so it doesn’t matter all that much if you have an account on a Kbin instance, or a Lemmy instance. The differences are in the interface, some functionality, and the tech stack used (Lemmy is written in Rust; Kbin in PHP).
There are 100+ instances of Lemmy, and ~10 instances of Kbin. Kbin is a much younger project (hence it might get missed), and it’s main instance, kbin.social seems to be experiencing more issues with the wave of new registrations. If you want to try Kbin, https://fedia.io/ might be a good instance to check out.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is the fediverse and the threadiverse the same thing different names?
I feel like I’m finally wrapping my head around a lot of this stuff, but I’m still learning all the terms.
Yeah, Threadiverse is a part of Fediverse. I can interact with Lemmy/KBin discussions from my Mastodon account, for example.
In other words, “Threadiverse” is just a convenient way of referring to Reddit-shaped Fediverse instances, if that makes sense.
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thank you!
The Fediverse is everything that is connected via ActivityPub. You have Lemmy and Kbin, but you also have Mastodon serving as a Twitter analogue, PeerTube as a YouTube analogue, Pixelfed as an Instagram analogue, etcetera, all of which are part of the Fediverse umbrella.
The Threadiverse is just the “forum” side of the Fediverse, the Reddit-alikes. At this point that means just Lemmy and Kbin, but there’s no reason there couldn’t be more alternatives in the future.
@melmi @FallGuy217
“#Threadiverse” - nice term. :)
On the technical side: I’m doing this toot from the Mastodon side. I used
https://MYINSTANCE/authorize\_interaction?uri=LEMMYCOMMENTURL
where MYINSTANCE is the instance I’m on (https://framapiaf.org) and LEMMYCOMMENTURL is the comment I chose to reply to (https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/90402).
If I understand federation correctly, my reply should/could turn up on the lemmy instances involved in the thread - even though I don’t have a lemmy account.
Yup, it got added to the comment chain, and I’m replying directly from Lemmy!
Fediverse is applicable to all types of applications federated with ActivityPub. Mastodon is microbloging (Twitter). PeerTube is video hosting (Youtube). Pixelfed is photo hosting (Instagram). Lemmy is link aggregation (Reddit), and link aggregation is being called Threadiverse. But all of these platforms are built on ActivityPub, so you can interact directly between all of them. The kbin platform does both microblogging and link aggregation in one (so it’s like combining Mastodon and Lemmy into one).
Ah ok. Thanks for the info!
By the way, this isn’t so one or the other as people think! You can see your Lemmy account on Kbin instances and vice versa. You can also interact with Kbin communities (“magazines”) from Lemmy!
So same protocol, different front end essentially?
Correct. They just provide different front ends but will talk to each other over the ActivityPub protocol.
It’s the same with Mastodon. Although it gives a Twitter-esque front end it can still display Lemmy threads as conversations.
Thanks for the info. I heard about kbin in the past couple days, and had yet to see how it looked like.
Visually, I like it a little bit more than the currently available lemmy themes. Looks a bit like a “modern” old.reddit, albeit also suffering from a little blankspaceitis. And the fact it’s written in PHP… well… 😒. But since it can talk to Lemmy, it doesn’t really matter, I guess.