Kbin is nice. It’s easy to register on kbin.social so might as well check it out, although they are possibly under DDOS attack right now. I’m on there and lemmy at the moment.
Both systems are very similar and are compatible. You can follow lemmy from kbin and vice versa. Lemmy is probably more mature, but kbin is also pretty slick and seems to be moving fast. The community on kbin.social is fairly large so you will likely find more interaction on there without having to subscribe to federated servers. That probably makes onboarding a little easier for reddit refugees. They also have a microblog feature that works like Mastodon (federated twitter alternative) so you get to use lemmy-like and mastodon-like in one app and federate with both.
The fact that kbin is written in PHP shouldn’t put anybody off. Modern PHP isn’t the same as the old stuff that earned a bad reputation. I haven’t used PHP for a long time, but my understanding is it’s now a solid stack that’s on par with other mainstream stacks.
Honestly, I joined lemmy.ml first before really taking a look at the ideals of most of that userbase and I just do not agree with a large part of what they identify with.
Bounced around to a few other instances that all seemed... Idk not the right fit. But kbin so far seems much more my style and I finally now got an account created so we'll see how it goes.
I feel like the server owner matters more than the platform itself. Which is to say that while I'm also not a fan of how far left the lemmy devs are, I have found some lemmy communities to be more in line with my values. I imagine if lemmy grows at all we're eventually going to see many views represented. So I think whether to use kbin or lemmy should really come down to aesthetic preferences. I personally prefer the look/feel of lemmy, but I respect anyone who prefers kbin. It's pretty cool that we can communicate across platforms. Really shows the power of ActivityPub.
I'm curious what has turned you off here, since I'm very new. Reddit's weirdly right wing political tilt has been turning me off for some time now, hoping that's not the case here.
Also new, and I'm with you- reddit was always too full of right wingers for my liking. I also like this instance (lemmy.ml)and it seems to have a more left tilt, specifically when it comes to bigotry.
Most of the communities federate with Lemmy though, so Idk if you can escape it.
For example this post is on Lemmy.
And now that I think about it it kind of makes sense. Most of the time if you want a non-corporate protocol, it's made by leftists or people that are really right-wing.
I think it might serve it's own niche. I heard the microblog tab makes it a bit nicer to see content from mastodon users that someone is following. so it could develop to be like a hybrid lemmy/mastodon type of tool. But I haven't read too much into what kbin is aiming to be
I mean it's easier to develop new features when you're using a language like PHP. I love Rust but it's going to be laughable at how slow they will move new features out compared to other platforms unless they can get a ton of more developer volunteer support (and way less people know Rust to begin with).
Better profiles, followers, better community customization, better embeds, I can keep going on. Yeah, Reddit has a ton of stupid features that nobody asked for but it also has a lot of things that are very good for everyone. Obviously we're still in the early days but they're already running into issues (they are just finishing ripping out all the websockets and chat server stuff, which was one of the big things slowing down instances)