kbin VS Discourse

Compare kbin vs Discourse and see what are their differences.

kbin

A reddit-like content aggregator and micro-blogging platform for the fediverse. (by ernestwisniewski)
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kbin Discourse
74 198
755 40,538
- 0.8%
9.8 10.0
5 months ago 3 days ago
PHP Ruby
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 GNU General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

kbin

Posts with mentions or reviews of kbin. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-31.
  • Ask HN: Which Lemmy communities and instances are you visiting daily?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 31 Jul 2023
    One will notice the regrettable duplication in that list, and it's (AFAIK) a massive unsolved problem in the Fediverse. My mental model is that Lemmy is exactly like signing up to mailing lists but where one can also upvote and downvote posts (err, some instances don't allow downvotes, so there's that). That means that folks who want the most coverage for their submission will post it to every one of the duplicated mailing lists, which results in their own message-id along with their own threaded replies and upvote/downvote scores. Some folks have proposed using the link-url and subject for deduplicating them, but I believe it's just a proposal from the client side and the servers will do no such thing (although running your own instance hypothetically would allow for such customization)

    There's also https://kbin.pub which is its own ActivityPub implementation and behaves a little different from Lemmy, I'm sure with good and bad parts. IIRC there's some federation drama between Kbin and some Lemmy instances, and (AFAIK) Kbin does not have any mobile apps whereas there are currently several which speak the Lemmy API. I'd credit it with "first mover effect" more than one being objectively better than the other

    I do hope Lemmy catches on and siphons users off of Reddit because the rug-pull from Reddit was a trust-breaking middle finger, IMHO. I wished the same thing for Mastodon, too, but I think the inertia is just too strong with X

  • Alternative to Reddit: @[email protected]
    1 project | /r/jankEDH | 9 Jul 2023
    The Fediverse - which kbin is a part of - is a network of interconnected servers used for publishing content, much like Reddit. The benefit is that the Fediverse is decentralised and not controlled by any company or authority, cannot be monetised in the same sense as Reddit, and the code is free. Different servers - also called instances - are independent but communicate with each other.
  • Is there a way to take a image / snapshot of my present installs / config?
    1 project | /r/SteamDeck | 3 Jul 2023
    There is pretty big one on kbin and iirc there is one on lemmy as well
  • Steamdeck at lemmy
    1 project | /r/SteamDeck | 1 Jul 2023
    There is pretty big one at kbin, specifically on the kbin.social instance
  • Lemmy now has over 2M users across 915 instances
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023
  • RIP Nitter
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023
  • Lemmy.ml's admin is pro chinese government and actively censors comments that are critical. (Reposting this for awareness)
    4 projects | /r/RedditAlternatives | 27 Jun 2023
    Lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy has definite technical advantages vs https://github.com/ernestwisniewski/kbin -- use of PHP is a bit of a red flag. I'm going to try a small ARM64 instance so explicitly supporting that is nice.
  • A Reddit transcription community will shut down over a 'lack of trust' in the platform
    5 projects | /r/technology | 25 Jun 2023
    Lemmy (https://join-lemmy.org) and Kbin (https://kbin.pub) - those are like reddit, but federated (means there are multiple websites and are connected to each other so you can access "subreddits" of each of them, it's similar idea how e-mail works, you don't need to be on gmail to send e-mail to friend on gmail). The Kbin is distinct from lemmy, but it looks like you can access lemmy communities from kbin and vice versa. Also this might be useful https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances
  • Des équipes entières voient leur droit de modération retiré sur des subs passés en nsfw
    1 project | /r/france | 21 Jun 2023
    Sinon kbin (qu'il faut que je test).
  • accessible solution for lemmy?
    6 projects | /r/Blind | 20 Jun 2023
    You can use kbin instead, if the political views of Lemmy's developers makes you feel uneasy.

Discourse

Posts with mentions or reviews of Discourse. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-01.
  • Discord to Start Showing Ads for Gamers to Boost Revenue
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    > Tell me another platform that is free, has realtime chat, voice and video, has stable service, allows sharing images and other media, with good ownership management... and is open source.

    Mattermost: https://mattermost.com/

    Rocket.Chat: https://www.rocket.chat/

    Nextcloud Talk: https://nextcloud.com/talk/

    Self hosting and some assembly required. I've run all of them on cheap VPSes to explore a Slack/Discord replacement, neither was mindblowing but all of them seemed okay (Nextcloud's offering was rather barebones, though).

    Audio and video support varies because getting those right is challenging, at best you'd just integrate with something like Jitsi, that one's actually pretty good for meetings and such: https://jitsi.org/ and has a cloud version too: https://meet.jit.si/ (yet people still go for Zoom and it's odd UI/UX choices)

    I actually rather liked forums back in the day, but I guess nobody will be setting up that many phpBB instances in the current year, though projects like Discourse also seem promising: https://www.discourse.org/

    I don't think many people at all will be leaving Discord, due to how entrenched the platform is (network effect): if you want people to help you with what you're working on, you go where they are, not vice versa.

  • Introducing the new Godot Forum
    2 projects | /r/godot | 8 Dec 2023
    Discourse is also open source https://github.com/discourse/discourse
  • My views on NeoHaskell
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Oct 2023
    I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.
  • Is BuddyPress still a viable option to create a community-based website? Or should I be looking at other options?
    1 project | /r/Wordpress | 20 Sep 2023
    Why isn't Discourse being listed here for forum software? It's open source and designed for modern communities. https://www.discourse.org/
  • Don't Use Discord as a Forum
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Sep 2023
    Discourse is open source: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

    You could hook it up to a mail provider and can host it yourself for less if you wanted.

  • Why does the mastodon.social's privacy policy template link to Discourse's GitHub?
    1 project | /r/Mastodon | 7 Sep 2023
    I was reading mastodon.social's privacy policy, and noticed that the link at the bottom to Discourse's privacy policy links to Discourse's Github. I'm surprised because I thought it would be the privacy policy on discourse.org.
  • So Long, Twitter and Reddit
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Aug 2023
  • Think Twice Before You Use Discord for Your Community
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Aug 2023
    Yep. Any platform run by someone else can kick you off for any reason, and time.

    You should consider looking into running discourse, which is a modernized forum software: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

    Nice examples of what it looks like:

    https://discourse.nixos.org/

    https://forum.level1techs.com/

    As a bonus, the content and community will be accessible to search engines, so it’s easy to find answers to problems that gave been already been addressed.

    In general, consider combining the two, where discourse is the anchor of the community that can’t be yanked out from under you, while discord is the one that sells the data from your players in exchange for free voice and text chat.

    It’s also possible to enable logging in with discord credentials https://meta.discourse.org/t/configure-discord-login-for-dis...

    As well as pushing content from discord to discourse so it’s not hidden and losable: https://blog.discourse.org/2021/05/discord-and-discourse-bet...

  • Is there interest in a specialized forum for gifted people?
    1 project | /r/Gifted | 10 Jul 2023
    So, I'm asking myself if you would be interested in joining a good old-fashioned forum (probably using discourse as software) in order to communicate with other gifted people around the globe. And please add any ideas you might have for a platform like this.
  • Twitter now requires an account to view tweets
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jun 2023

What are some alternatives?

When comparing kbin and Discourse you can also consider the following projects:

Lemmy - 🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse

Forem - The best Rails 3 and Rails 4 forum engine. Ever.

jerboa - A native android app for Lemmy

nodeBB - Node.js based forum software built for the modern web

Mastodon - Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community

Flarum - Simple forum software for building great communities.

awesome-lemmy-instances - Comparison of different Lemmy Instances

Reddit

phpBB - phpBB Development: phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin board written in PHP. This repository also contains the history of version 2.

Mlem - The Lemmy client [Moved to: https://github.com/mormaer/Mlem]

FluxBB - FluxBB is a fast, light, user-friendly forum application for your website.