Coelacanth

Exactly. It’s harder than it sounds to ask the right “why”.

The thing to get across to people is that you don’t need to understand it to use it. Hell, that goes for most things. The average person has no idea how an internal combustion engine works but can drive a car just fine.

Search-Lemmy is under development for this.

Not really. Also by your logic you can’t trust anyone ever because there is always a risk they turn bad at some point in the future. All we can do is evaluate what we have in front of us at the moment. Current evidence suggests Ruud is trustworthy, committed and capable of running a large Fediverse instance.

Well, this was in regards to the Devs of the actual Lemmy backend.

Well Ruud who runs .world also runs Mastodon.world which is a fairly large mastodon instance, so he is somewhat of a known quantity and has experience running large Fediverse servers. His mastodon server has handled a large population and donations happen through Open Collective for transparency as well. He also runs Calckey.world though that is much smaller.

The danger in randomizing servers is that some smaller servers not only have less than 99% uptime but are also just run by random regular people who couldn’t handle the increased load and/or have no desire or ability to keep the servers running long term. It could maybe work if the randomization occurs from within a vetted list.

Account migration is a feature that has been noted for the future and would indeed be very important since it would essentially make the entire network bulletproof. Being able to move instances and/or link accounts across multiple instances would create the necessary redundancy and reduce fears of choosing a smaller instance as home.

Yeah I see a lot of good things about Kbin but the terminology is not one. I don’t even think calling communities Magazines and threads Articles makes a whole lot of sense. Does anyone know where that comes from?

Right now though the two most pressing issues are the poor notification alerts (very slow, sometimes doesn’t work and defaults to off) as well as the super slow federation sync with Lemmy instances. Those two problems combined makes participating in conversations very hard, and almost impossible if trying to cross the border to Lemmy. I’ve also had issues where posting on a Kbin magazine from a Lemmy account, the comments don’t show when viewing it from the Kbin side.

In addition to the backend, I’m not sold on the terminology used in the front end either, though visually it does look good.

Why call communities Magazines? Why am I starting a microblog when I press new Post? Why is upvote called Favorite and what does Reduce mean? And what the hell is Boost and how is it different from Favorite?

Still, the number one issue at the moment for sure is the slow federation and syncing with Lemmy. Communicating across different Lemmy instances is no problem, but Kbin<->Lemmy seems incredibly slow, with threads from Lemmy often lagging many hours behind when viewed from Kbin which makes it impossible to participate in conversations.

I do like a lot of things about Kbin, and visually it’s much better than unmodified Lemmy in a browser, but it also has its own share of problems, not least with intuitiveness. I don’t understand why communities are called Magazines, and the terminology of “Favorite”, “Reduce” and “Boost” are very confusing to me. Trying to make a new thread might lead you down a microblogging path instead since “Post” sounds more like a new thread than “Article” to a newcomer.

There also seems to be much slower sync between Kbin and various Lemmy instances compared to intra-sync between lemmy instances themselves. Kbin also doesn’t have an API (yet?), but a more tech savvy individual than me will have to say how big of a deal that is.

Both Sync and Boost have large and loyal userbases and will probably attract plenty of users to Lemmy, and good Third Party Apps might help with first impressions and onboarding for new users.

Ultimately though, content is king. I liked Kbin better when I first made my accounts, but then we had a Race Week in Formula 1 and the community here was dead while discussions were happening on Lemmy, and since the sync was slow so I ended up over there.

I’m waiting for both Sync and Boost to come out with their Lemmy offerings and will probably end up with one of those. In the meantime, I’m trying Thunder and WefWef, but have also heard good things about Liftoff. Here is a list of the current (and upcoming) crop if you want to experiment: https://lemmy.world/post/465785