Welcome to kbin.social!

Hello, fellow Kbinauts! It’s your least favorite moderator, @ThatOneKirbyMain2568, at your service.

We imagine that many of you have come over here from Reddit in hopes of an alternative. If you’re one of these former Redditors (Fledditors?), this guide is for you! If there are any further questions you have or things I should add to this guide, feel free to leave a comment.

Do note that /kbin is actively in development. Many features are in the works and will be added in the near future. You can follow what’s going on over at /m/kbinMeta.

There’s a difference between kbin.social and /kbin, but that’s explained in the fediverse section. Until then, you can treat them as somewhat interchangeable.

Table of Contents

• What is kbin.social?

  • Threads
  • How do I add in-line images to text threads?
  • Microblogs
  • Threads

• Searching on kbin.social?

  • How do I search for magazines?
  • How do I find my subscriptions?
  • How do I search only for stuff within a magazine?

• Visuals & styling

  • Sidebar settings
  • Userstyles and userscripts

• What is the fediverse?

  • What’s the difference between kbin.social and /kbin?
  • What’s the threadiverse?
  • Boosts (but actually explained this time)
  • Threads

What is kbin.social?

Kbin.social is a platform modeled after Reddit. Just like Reddit, it consists of different communities where you can post, vote on, and comment on threads about a topic.

Magazines are the equivalent of subreddits. Right now, you’re on /m/mcsuggestions, the kbin.social version of r/minecraftsuggestions.

Threads

Threads are like Reddit posts. To create one, click the + sign at the top of the page. From there, you have three options:

• “Add new thread” just makes a normal thread.
• “Add new link” makes a thread that goes to some link when you click the title. This can be used for, say, making a thread about a news article.
• “Add new photo” makes a thread with an image.

How do I add in-line images to text threads?

This can be done using markdown:


This requires that you have a link to the image. To quickly generate an image link, upload the image to Postimages. Then, copy the “Direct Link”.

For the image to automatically display in the thread, click the gear icon to the right of the page and enable Auto Media Preview for threads.

Microblogs

While I say /kbin is modeled after Reddit, it has some elements of Twitter mixed in. Microblogs are more like Twitter posts.

They can be used for small side discussions. To make one, either:

• click the microblogs button at the top of the page
• click the + button and then ”Add new post”

Upvotes, downvotes, & boosts

Like Reddit, /kbin has upvotes and downvotes. In the UI, upvotes and downvotes are called favorites and reduces. But realistically, you’ll see many people (myself included) referring to them as upvotes and downvotes.

Boosts can be a bit confusing and so will be explained later. For this magazine at least, you probably don’t need to care about boosts.

Right now, reputation = boosts - downvotes. This is a bug, and it should be fixed in the near future.

Searching on kbin.social

The search button can be found at the top right of the page. There, you can search for posts all over the fediverse. However, this has some limitations.

How do I search for magazines?

The search button isn’t great for finding magazines. Instead, click the Magazines button at the top of the page. On mobile, this can be found by clicking the menu icon at the top left. Once you’re at the Magazines page, there’s a search bar you can use to find magazines.

How do I find my subscribed magazines?

This is not a vanilla feature yet, but you can download this userscript to get a floating subscriptions panel. All it requires is the Tampermonkey browser extension.

How do I search only for stuff within a magazine?

This is not a feature yet.

Visuals & styling

If you don’t like the default look of /kbin, there are plenty of built-in options and user-made enhancements to improve the experience.

Sidebar settings

Clicking the gear icon on the right sidebar opens a bunch of visual options. Here, you can choose a dark theme, toggle compact mode, toggle infinite scroll, etc.

We recommend enabling Auto Media Preview, since it allows images to appear in this magazine’s threads.

Userstyles and userscripts

Many users have written userstyles and userscripts to customize the look of the site and even add new functionality. These can be found at /m/kbinStyles.

You’ll want to download the Stylus and Tampermonkey browser extensions—or similar software—to use these.

Here are a few that I recommend:

Userscripts

• Floating Subscriptions Panel
• Improved Collapsible Comments

Userstyles

• Kbin Slim
• Kbin-it
• idkbin (by yours truly)

What is the fediverse?

Let’s return to the Reddit analogy.

Reddit is a platform. This platform is run by server admins. People can make individual communities (subreddits) on this platform, and those communities are run by individual moderators.

The fediverse is a collection of different platforms. Like Reddit, these platforms each have their own admins that run them. Kbin.social is one such platform.

The key thing, however, is that people on one platform of the fediverse can see content from others.

For example, you’re here on kbin.social. However, you’re able to see, upvote, and reply to content from lemmy.ml—a completely different platform—because it’s part of the fediverse. You’re even able to subscribe to lemmy.ml communities and make posts on them, and people from other platforms of the fediverse will be able to see it.

To put this in fancy technicalese, kbin.social and lemmy.ml are both instances (platforms) of the fediverse. They are federated, meaning that you can be on one and interact with the other.

What’s the difference between kbin.social and /kbin?

Go to fedia.io, kbin.cafe, and karab.in. You’ll notice that, despite being different sites, they look identical to kbin.social. So what’s the difference?

The difference is that these sites are run on different servers by different admins. While these all use the same codebase—/kbin—and thus look the same, they’re all different platforms on the fediverse. Kbin.social, for example, is run by the maintainer of the /kbin codebase. Kbin.cafe, however, is run by someone else entirely.

You also see this with other codebases. Lemmy, for example, has a ton of different platforms, such as lemmy.ml and lemmy.world.

What’s the threadiverse?

The “threadiverse” is a term for Reddit-like fediverse platforms. Lemmy and /kbin platforms, for example, are part of the threadiverse because they’re organized like Reddit.

Not every platform on the fediverse is part of the threadiverse. For example, Mastodon platforms are part of the fediverse but modeled after Twitter.

Boosts (but actually explained this time)

Since Twitter-like sites such as mastodon.social are part of the fediverse, some of their features need to be accommodated. One such feature is boosting, Mastodon’s version of retweeting.

To deal with this, kbin.social also supports boosting. When you boost a post, it’s like a retweet. You can go to somebody’s profile to view the posts that they’ve boosted, so a boost essentially has the function of sharing the post to followers (like a retweet). Additionally, if somebody on, say, mastodon.social boosts your post, the boost counter on your post will go up accordingly.