How does the popularity of Lemmy.world compare to kbin.social?
We all know that lemmy.world is the most popular instance, but how does it compare to kbin.social? Which do you think will be more popular in the long run?
Average Lemmy user and Kbin user counts as a whole across all instances are about even, but the cool thing about it is that it doesn't matter. Any user on any lemmy OR Kbin instance can access content on any other instance, barring any "defederation" activities by the instance owners.
There are occasional issues depending on traffic but in my experience it generally works pretty well. Keep in mind that kbin has a slightly different syntax for adding completely new communities that nobody has subscribed to yet, it's not !x@y but rather @x@y and it only works in search, not all communities, tab.
I’ve had no issues before when using kbin and finding Lemmy communities but I’ve just tried again there to check and the search is not working for me either now.
Holy shit, you just made me realize that third party platforms don't seem to be tracking the active users on Lemmy accurately. Either that or kbin is defining an active user very generously and Lemmy is being more strict.
See how kbin.social and lemmy.world have nearly identical trajectories? Lemmy.world actually has significantly more posts and comments. However, lemmy.world only shows like 12k active users and kbin shows all 42k of it's users as active.
Incidentally, the answer to OP is that lemmy.world is slightly more popular now, but kbin.social is looking like they will overtake eventually.
This is a vital issue to get to the bottom of, because the narrative from reddit is going to be that Lemmy's userbase is all bots. And then you go to a page like this and it does look pretty bad.
Thankfully, fixing Lemmy's UI on desktop is as simple as installing a CSS browser plugin and copy/pasting in one of the many custom themes that are already available.
I hope they continue to serve their users and federate together, along with other large instances. The more the better! We need stability and options. (I'm saying this as a .world user, who is very happy here. Ruud seems to know what he's doing.)