Twitter vs Reddit

mastodon is styled like twitter. If you take a look at the “microblog” section of kbin you’ll get a gist of mastodon style stuff.

kbin also has “threads” which we’re in right now, that’s styled more after reddit.

mastodon and kbin users can interact and talk with each other just fine. so it’s just a matter of which instance you’re on, and the ui you prefer.

Mastodon is like Twitter.

Mastodon is more Twitter-like; Lemmy is Reddit-like; KBin has elements of both (Magazines and Threads being more Reddit-like, Microblog view being vaguely like Twitter). Mastodon has had a couple of big influxes of people considering leaving Twitter, similar to how Kbin and Lemmy are getting a lot of interest considering leaving Reddit.

What’s intriguing is that because they all use the same protocol (ActivityPub), people on Kbin can vote and comment on Lemmy posts, and Mastodon users can comment on Kbin or Lemmy posts. This is called federation, and software that uses ActivityPub is considered part of the “fediverse”. There are also dozens of other fediverse software platforms – Pixelfed is Instagram-like, Bookwyrm is goodreads-like, micro.blog and WriteFreely and others are blogs, etc etc. – that can all all interact, at least somewhat. Of course the reality’s more confusing, sometimes you can’t interact between different sites or software, and sometimes interactions are limited (for example you can’t vote on Kbin or Lemmy threads from Mastodon).

Here’s a post I made a few days ago from a Mastodon account that’s also visible in the Lemmy fediverse community, because I tagged the community. It didn’t go to Kbin (even though I tagged a Magazine) because federation wasn’t working at the time; and some of the replies in on Mastodon went to Lemmy as well, others didn’t, who knows why. Oh well. Still, it’s amazing when it works!

I think the easiest way to explain mastodon vs kbin is to compare mastodon to lemmy. (At least, this is how I look at it)

• Mastodon looks at the world through time-based history of what people post. The topic, or how many likes/upvotes does not matter so much as the time. Though replies to other posts are grouped together. This is how twitter behaves.
• Lemmy looks at the world through posts made about a topic. The time posted does not matter as much as the topic. Replies are called grouped under the posts by people in a tree structure. While how many upvotes usually factors into how the replies are ordered, there are multiple options on how things are ordered. This is how reddit behaves.

Kbin can look at the world in two ways, with “Threads” being a topic based one and “Microblogs” being time based. As they (mastodon, kbin and lemmy) speak the same ‘language’ you can load and interact with content across the software, just it will present it in the way the particular software thinks about the world.

Mastodon is to Twitter as kbin is to Reddit. Mastodon: a feed of posts from people and/or hashtags you subscribed to. kbin: a set of rooms (magazines) that you subscribed to. So kbin is more like a bunch of smaller bulletin boards / forums, while Mastodon is a linear time ordered list of posts from people/things you like.