Kbin.social passes 30k Monthly Active Users

It’s feeling a bit like 2008 all over again, the community feels smaller, more engaged and with a main sense of purpose. It’s refreshing.

I’m glad to be journeying on this spaceship with y’all.

Something nostalgic and familiar about beta testing new apps, seeing the community grow, and getting 500 Internal Server Error screens in the process... I like it in a quirky kinda way
- I kinda consider the errors and lags to be like those dog bowls that keep pups from eating their kibble too fast.
That's the same sensation I found with leaving Twitter and joining Mastodon. I found that I was more inclined to engage rather than simply read information, and it was more straightforward to curate the information and people I wanted to follow.
- This 100%. Quality > quantity!
- Completely the same! I now even run my own calckey instance and have lots of interactions. Also at almost 200 followers in just few months. Twitter felt like posting into the void instead.
Right?, it feels rewarding to add the discussion, to help solve issues in the code (if you can), helping people navigate where they want to go.
At least for me, reddit failed in something, making me feel part of its community, kbin is succeeding at this so far.

Edit: Obligatory plug of other kbin instances for new users to join: fedia.io, readit.buzz, fediverse.boo,
By joining them you are spreading the load so we can keep all instances stable.
- I agree, right after getting used to swapping from reddit to kbin, it felt more like I was part of a community! I like to think reddit was a large city and kbin is a small village that is gradually growing.
  
  I'm really glad I took the opportunity to swap from reddit to kbin, I already feel happier on the site and I haven't even been here for a week. I definitely feel like more people should swap which thankfully most likely will happen as reddit dies down.

It seems to me that there are several factors. Firstly, the instance was created recently, about 1-2 months ago. There wasn't even an official instance opening, you know, with cake and confetti ;) During this time, I've been observing people on the Fediverse. It's unlikely that any follows were given by chance. Later on, wonderful people who discovered kbin did the rest. That's how it is in the Fediverse. In the beginning, not everything is easy and obvious, but if you put enough heart and effort into it, it pays off in the future.

Oh, it seems like I responded in the wrong thread. But hey, it fits here too ;p
- You're awesome dude, just wanted to say this is the most fun I've had on the internet in years.
I saw kbin recommended by someone on Reddit (my apologies for not being able to give them credit - I didn't clock the username) and out of all the alternatives shared that I checked out, this one just felt right. If that makes sense. Thank you for creating such a wonderful space!
- this was my experience as well. I visited /r/redditalternatives, saw someone mention kbin, I checked it out and it felt right. So here I am.

I've tried lemmy.world, Beehaw and Kbin. Kbin is by far the closest experience to Reddit as you can get (That I have tried)

As someone who landed on the lemmy side, I'm glad that choosing a side here didn't l doesn't have to fracture the community. You can pick the experience you enjoy best but still have scess to a broader universe of content.

30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook, but it's very large compared to what's necessary to keep a space lively and engaging.

And on that front, there is such a thing as too big. Subreddits with hundreds of thousands of active users all engaging with a single topic stop being, well, engaging, and start becoming white noise generators: See a post, comment on the post, never have anyone read your comment because 20,000 other people have also done the same. That kind of environment just turns us into consumers of media, rather than social beings, and is just fundamentally kind of bad for us.

We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume. Spaces like this are better when they're not one of them.

I always had a decent mix of subs. Large ones for content consumption; smaller ones for discussion. Even then, the large ones I interacted with were further fragmented (big example being sports game threads, it was usually only fans of the two teams). Hoping to find that here; that is a beloved part of watching sports for me now.
30k is small compared to Reddit, or Twitter, or Facebook

Yeah for sure. The entire fediverse, with all sites and services included is somewhere around 9M users, which is still minuscule compared to Reddit's 450M users - not to talk about billions at Facebook.

We have enough passive, unidirectional media we consume.

Exactly. Not everything is about big numbers, in fact, I tend to believe we (humans) perform best when we are in smaller groups. Dunbar's number puts that at around 150 people - so if your favorite community group reaches that number of active members, you're golden. You don't need millions. That's detrimental to good communication and community building.

Of course we often have several interests (for example, I'm looking for good discussions around tech, linux, cybersecurity, science, sustainability, specialy coffee, NHL and music!). All of those are communities haven't really established themselves here yet (some of them never protested on Reddit), so I'm still waiting to discover new discussions and corners in the fediverse.

It's lot of fun!

I’ve registered on and experimented with a handful of fediverse instances, apps, etc this week and really keep coming back to Kbin.social as my main point of entry. With the progressive web app on my phone and iPad I’m having a similar experience to Apollo, and really liking watching this community (and Lemmy) grow. Glad to be here with you all, let’s keep this excitement going!

Enough to get some balls rolling, and possibly broken.

That's basically a stadium full of people. Well except that most people here probably have never seen a stadium from the inside.

Nerds.

I have seen an inside of a stadium once! Does this mean I am not a nerd??
- Now you're bragging
You just kicked the ball through our hoop and gained 7 points of... sports... points...

Fine, i'm a nerd.

I like it here! I'm glad to see so many people!

thanks for making this possible @ernest

@ernest is the best, all my homies love @ernest
- My takeaways from this are fuck /u/spez and @ernest fucks.

So how do we new users help keep kbin alive? What are the hosting costs and what do we need to do to stay adfree or at least prevent long-term enshittification now?

There is a link to buymeeacoffee.com on the About page at the bottom.
Right now, your main goal should be enjoying the site. Ernest has been getting quite a few coffee purchases lately, so I imagine he's financially ok for the moment. But what Ernest can't do is populate the site with content and community. That's where the kbeaners come in. So the main goal you should have right now is to enjoy yourself.

I’m happy to see the fediverse growing nicely!

I'm one of them!

Good, making this place active!

I joined Kbin.social four days ago, and I'm already having a great time! 😃 Excited to see what the future holds for this project!

I'm so happy to have learned so much about the Fediverse and its communities in the past week. A big thanks to the admins and developers who have put in all the hard work.

It is great here! I love how much engagement there is. It doesn't feel as if I'm yelling into the wind anymore

Yeah the signal to noise ratio is much more palatable here

Seriously loving kbin so far

First day it's been usable for me! Grabbed some niche mags and trying to populate. Really enjoying the UI. Brings me back.

This is exciting! It's like being a pioneer on the "new" internet.

It's strange, because Reddit changes so slowly that I've forgotten how much discussion used to take place. This platform actually has people engaging in conversation and it's awesome.

Yeah I actually feel seen on this site. People like to hype the fact that reddit has so many users but most of the time my comments and thoughts were just lost to the void.

being on here made me realize of what has been missing from reddit for years now. This is a refreshing site, hopefully it continues to grow.

I joined on Sunday. Took a few days to figure out how to do things. But I haven't opened Relay since then. Loving it here.

Same here, I loved relay. I'm thinking of opening it up before the end just to spread the good word about the fediverse before I delete everything.

And may it keep growing!

For 30k monthly users some magazines that seem to be popular for most people (gaming, pcgaming) seem awfully dead

Too much focus on Reddit drama threads and not enough on actual content (I am guilty of this too). I think as the drama passes it will liven up in the popular topics/magazines. Reddit needs to stop pulling the trigger on their foot gun first.
- That's to be expected. Mastodon was dominated by Twitter discussions for quite a while before it tailed off
- That’s a very fair point
- That happened with digg back in the day. It will go away.
The vast majority of users on an aggregation site like this are just lurkers. Like, the vast, vast majority. Scroll, read, updoot, move on.
Well post something then lol. The individual communities on each instance may seem small but the posts should still be visible on all the federated sites in the verse.

Not a kbin user but love how I can hang out with y'all just the same :D

Right? This whole federation thing is great. Now I just gotta figure out how Lemmy federation with Mastodon works because right now it feels like the answer is "not very well".
I love this!

This feels like old reddit :) I love it here

You could say that we’re a community on the… GROW!

This is awesome !

I remember back in the day when reddit was like this, fun, high effort discussions, even with people complaining about how confusing reddit was to use.

@Sam_uk Where is everyone on https://u.fail? :D

While this is great, I hope it's not too much. The system is really really promising, but still apparently needs a lot of work. Hope the refugees like me came to stay!

Does anyone know how Kbin calculates active users? Lemmy only counts users which posted or commented at least once during that time. But in case of Kbin, the number of active users is almost three times the total number of posts.

But it’s not three times the number of comments. My guess is that, like Lemmy, both are factored?