Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?
Love Reddit but tired of what’s happening to it? We check out Lemmy and Kbin, two open-source fediverse alternatives that are growing fast.
By Max Eddy
Between widespread online protests and threats from its CEO, Reddit has been having a rough time lately. If you’re looking for something like Reddit that isn’t Reddit as it exists today, consider these two alternatives: Lemmy and Kbin. Both recreate the so-called “front page of the internet” experience, but do it with open-source code and a decentralized approach that’s very much the opposite of Reddit and other social media platforms.
Neither is a perfect replacement, and the most interesting features of both sites are also the hardest to understand. However, if you’re looking for Reddit alternatives and a glimpse into what might be the future of online social platforms, here’s what to expect of Lemmy and Kbin:
What Are Lemmy and Kbin (and Reddit, for That Matter)?
Reddit is a message-board-style website where people post links, images, or text to be shared with fellow members, and Lemmy and Kbin are both alternatives in that sense. A key part of the Reddit experience are the upvotes and downvotes given to posts by other Reddit members. Combined with a threaded comment system, Reddit has garnered a reputation for surfacing some of the most popular narratives on the social web.
Although influential, Reddit hasn’t maintained a sterling reputation. The site has struggled with content moderation and has occasionally been a staging ground for some of the internet’s worst elements.
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Kbin and Lemmy, meanwhile, attempt to recreate that same community experience but without the corporate oversight that has long lurked behind Reddit’s friendly exterior. These sites aim to use new, decentralized social platform technology (explained more below) and put more moderation tools directly into the hands of users, with mixed success. But fundamentally, Kbin and Lemmy are platforms where users share and discuss online content.
One thing that’s clear from my time using Lemmy and Kbin is that they’re teeming with excitement and energy, some of which may come from Reddit’s recent implosion. Many posts are about the platforms themselves — a pattern I’ve seen through several waves of new users on Mastodon and other new platforms like Threads — often reflecting the exhilaration and frustration of trying out something new. Some of that should die down as these services become more established and communities solidify.
It’s also clear that neither Lemmy nor Kbin command the same amount of attention as Reddit. The most popular posts I’ve seen have hundreds of comments or upvotes while a glance at the front page of Reddit shows posts with tens of thousands of upvotes and thousands of comments. These newer platforms are still figuring out where they should be and what they should look like, so that’s to be expected.
Decentralized and Federated, Kind of Like Email
Rather than a monolithic structure like Reddit, Kbin and Lemmy are decentralized, meaning they are composed of numerous installations of their respective software called instances. These instances can talk to each other because they’re built on the ActivityPub protocol, the same technology that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other services. This ability to intercommunicate with other platforms is called federating, and the larger constellation of federated services is called the fediverse.
You can think of a federated system as being similar to email. For example, if you create an email account with Proton Mail, you can communicate seamlessly with someone who has an account on Gmail. The same is true with Kbin and Lemmy. I first signed up on an instance called Kbin.social. With my account on that site, I could see posts from other Kbin instances like fedia.io. I could even see posts from Lemmy instances like Lemmy.world. In some situations, I could even see Mastodon posts. This interoperability is what makes these services so exciting, and not simply homespun versions of Reddit.
A decentralized, federated structure means that you have a choice about where to sign up and whom to trust with your data. You can search around to find an instance that reflects your values, or you can dive in and start your own instance. Best of all, decentralized systems are harder to suppress or take over. Someone like Elon Musk couldn’t come along, buy Kbin and Lemmy, and then start making his own rules for how the sites operate.
Drawbacks to Lemmy and Kbin
Federation and decentralization do have some drawbacks. For one thing, new users have to seek out instances to join. Both Lemmy and Kbin have lists of instances (Kbin’s is here and Lemmy’s is here), but it’s a friction point and very different from how most social platforms function.
Another major drawback is that not every post is visible to every person on Lemmy or Kbin. If your particular instance doesn’t connect with my instance or if my instance is blocked by yours, we may never see each other’s posts. That undercuts a big attraction of Reddit — that its main page is a kind of greatest hits of an enormous community. But I encourage people to not see the quirks of federation as a downside. After all, you would never expect to read every single newspaper, listen to every single radio station, or even read every single website.
Years of using Mastodon have made me pretty familiar with how decentralized social platforms work, but I confess I was initially confused with how Kbin and Lemmy handle federation. For example, I blundered into my own Mastodon posts in Kbin’s Microblog tab (more on this below), but not on Lemmy. In Mastodon, I can easily search for the URL of a post from another Mastodon instance to interact with it, but I found doing the same thing didn’t work with Lemmy or Kbin. I hope the platforms build out these capabilities, making it easier to find and interact with posts from across the fediverse.
Familiar Main Pages and Options for Content
The main page of any Kbin or Lemmy instance looks almost exactly like Reddit. There’s the familiar list of posts with upvote and downvote buttons. Both services let you sort posts by activity and show the number of comments, upvotes, time posted, and so on. Both offer additional filters, too, like showing only the posts from communities you’ve subscribed to or only the most recent comments. Note that Kbin calls these threads while Lemmy calls them posts.
Posts and threads on their respective main pages show a title and the author’s username, but also the instance of origin. Lemmy has a handy option for selecting Local (i.e., only posts on your instance) or All (posts across everything your instance federates with), and Kbin has a toggle in the right rail to turn federated posts on or off. I like these options because they let me toggle between what’s being said by immediate neighbors and the wider fediverse.
I should note that Lemmy has a few other options for engaging with posts that I found quite useful. You can expand a post to see its full contents, save it, and cross-post it to a different community.
Click any post or thread and you’re taken to a page displaying a threaded conversation view of all the comments on it. Both platforms let you sort comments by newest, oldest, highest rated, or “hot,” meaning lots of interactions. Individual comments can, naturally, be up or downvoted as well. I think Kbin does a better job of clearly displaying how conversations are threaded, while Lemmy’s thread design takes a little getting used to.
Lemmy and Kbin’s posting interfaces are similar, with options for formatting across the top and the ability to embed images and links. Both provide dropdowns for easily adding your post to a particular community (like subreddits — more on that later), and both have checkboxes for marking content not safe for work (NSFW). This last point is important, as both platforms have built-in filters for content tagged NSFW, and communities have different guidelines for posting such materials.
Although clunky, I like that Lemmy supports markdown — a text-based formatting system — for posts and includes a preview so you can see how your post looks before you publish it. Lemmy also supports spoiler tags, which let you hide some content behind a break.
Notably, both Kbin and Lemmy instances have RSS feeds for the main page as well as communities. Although RSS has been largely forgotten in favor of social media platforms like Twitter, it offers an easy way to receive updates about sites you’re interested in.
Kbin lets you do more to change the look and feel of its interface than Lemmy. Both offer multiple light and dark mode options, but Kbin goes far beyond that with a persistent Settings page in the right-hand rail. From here, you can change the theme and text size on the fly, as well as toggling various navigation controls, icons, media previews, and even rounded corners. Kbin is just a more elegant experience; Lemmy is more utilitarian.
Communities Are at the Core of Lemmy and Kbin
The beating heart of Reddit is its sub-Reddit communities, which are replicated in both Lemmy and Kbin.
Kbin calls its communities Magazines, a confusing name that I do not care for. Like subreddits, each Kbin Magazine has its own front page with the same filters and sorting tools as the Kbin instance front page. In each Magazine, the top navigation changes to show the name of the Magazine in URL style (for instance, “/m/RedditMigration”), and the Threads and Microblog tabs get parenthetical numbers indicating the number of posts. Confusingly, the People and Magazines tabs persist and don’t change in function.
Down the right side of each Kbin Magazine is the option to subscribe or block the community. Below that is a little information about the community and usually a code of conduct, as well as additional stats, a list of moderators, and active users.
Lemmy calls its communities, appropriately, Communities, and they’re laid out almost identically to Kbin’s Magazines: posts across the main page, a right rail to let you subscribe or block the Community, and information about the Community’s rules and moderators. Again, Lemmy has the same set of tools to save, view, and cross-post to Communities.
Looking at the available communities on both platforms, I found the usual mix of gaming and tech-related groups one would expect to find. It’s surprising to see a hyper-local Magazine on Kbin for a city in California, however. Most communities are still quite small, and perhaps unsurprisingly the most popular community on my Kbin instance is called RedditMigration.
Because Lemmy and Kbin are fediverse services, you can subscribe to communities on either platform and any instance regardless of where you create your account. But Kbin’s list of available Magazines only shows the communities in your local instance. Lemmy lets you view either local Communities or Communities that federate with your instance.
Content Moderation on Lemmy and Kbin
The dirty secret of the social web is that it only works if moderators set rules for communities and ensure those rules are followed. I explored what moderation tools are available on Kbin and Lemmy for individual users, and read the available documentation to learn about the tools for moderators.
Individual users have several moderation tools at their disposal with both platforms. Lemmy and Kbin let you block individual users and communities regardless of what instance they’re on. Both also let you easily browse lists of users and communities you’ve blocked, in case you want to revisit one.
That’s good, but other platforms go further. With Mastodon, users can block other users, as well as filter out posts with certain words or tags. Mastodon also lets you block entire domains. If you see a lot of bad posts coming from troll.fart, you can ensure that you never see any posts from anyone on that instance. These tools are useful for curating the social web, and Kbin and Lemmy lack both. I hope that changes.
The moderators of communities on either platform are responsible for enforcing their rules, removing content that violates those rules, and removing members as necessary. Individual users can flag content as violating rules. Instance administrators have the greatest amount of control over each instance, and can choose to block (also called “defederate”) entire domains, which keeps their content from appearing to all users on the administrator’s instance.
An interesting feature Kbin and Lemmy share is moderation logs (called modlogs on Lemmy). These are running lists of all moderation actions, including the violation, the consequence, and the reason for the consequence. It’s a great way to bring transparency to the often opaque world of content moderation, and it provides a measure of accountability for moderators and administrators. Lemmy’s approach is more comprehensive, as it also shows a modlog for the entire instance as well as Communities. Kbin only shows moderation logs for its Magazines.
What Makes Lemmy and Kbin Unique?
One of Kbin’s most interesting facets is that it includes a Microblog section for every Magazine, as well as a top-level Microblog tab on the instance homepage. In practice, it works a bit like a miniature Twitter, with lots of short messages you can boost (think reblog or retweet) or reply to. This setup gives you an interesting way to have community-level conversations that aren’t attached to a particular post.
The Microblog section of the main Kbin page also federates with other platforms, meaning posts from Mastodon and other services appear here. While browsing, I blundered into posts I had made on Mastodon just hours before. This connection to other platforms is a great way to bring the fediverse experience together into a single place, but it’s still hard to understand where some posts are coming from and why other posts don’t appear at all. I could not, for instance, seek out posts I knew were on other platforms.
Lemmy, meanwhile, suggests in its documentation that you can use it as a blogging platform. Simply create a Community and limit posting to only moderators. I’m not sure it’s a practical idea, but it’s at least interesting.
Speaking of documentation, Lemmy’s is far more extensive, detailing not only the platform’s main features but also its history and the creators’ impetus. I found it enormously helpful. Kbin’s documentation is woefully incomplete.
Lemmy and Kbin Platform Privacy and Security Features
Both Lemmy and Kbin tout their open-source bona fides. Unlike other online platforms, the code that runs Lemmy and Kbin is available to be inspected for any potential security issues.
Currently, Kbin does not support multi-factor authentication (MFA), while Lemmy does. I’d like to see Kbin add MFA, given how damaging it can be to lose control of your online accounts. However, the MFA scheme Lemmy uses isn’t one I’m familiar with, and I wasn’t able to enable it. Both platforms need to look at their approaches.
Because Lemmy and Kbin instances are hosted and managed independently, each can handle privacy differently. In my brief exploration, both the instances I signed up for required that I provide a valid email address and then verify the email by clicking a link sent to my account. Other instances may work differently. Be sure to look for a privacy policy on whatever instance you sign up with.
Why Not Both?
Picking a favorite between Lemmy and Kbin is difficult. I’m more impressed with the look and feel of Kbin. I also like its Microblog tabs and see them as an innovative way to have community discussions and a bridge to services like Mastodon. However, Lemmy offers robust tools that make creating posts simple and has more options for interacting with posts. It’s also easier to find Communities to join on Lemmy than on Kbin.
But unless you plan on hosting your own instance, you don’t need to choose between these two platforms. You can try them both and make numerous accounts across many instances and communities, or just try one and let the magic of federation bring the world to you. Whether you’re a longtime Reddit user or just looking to form connections with other humans online, they’re both worth a look.
Originally published on PCMag.com
