With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site. The site is really not suited for mobile devices however, and there have been minimal user-facing changes in the last few months.

I know Ernest is trying his best, however with the current pace I worry about growth (and I’m not alone, as shown by mbin). If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone. Some of the gripes are below:

  • With the “+” button, what is the difference between the four types? I know the answer (as do experienced kbin users) but it is not “newbie friendly”

  • When you go back, you are forced to randomly scroll up and down the feed to find the post you were just looking at (this has been an issue for months)

  • Images load when they enter the viewport instead of just before (also, images are not cached and as a result they need to load again when you back out of a post, leading to excessive data usage)

  • A slight but very noticeable lag when backing out of posts or clicking on them (presumably while data fetching is happening)

… etc. There are more (such as issues with certain HTML / code templating stuff, seeing “span” and other tags instead of the actual code block), but these are the main ones in my eyes. I was assuming that there would be fixes by this point for these sort of issues, but I haven’t noticed the interface change for a hot minute and it’s seriously hampering the experience (as a solely-mobile user).

When can we expect stuff like this to be addressed? I don’t mean to be a downer or belittle the efforts by the kbin contributors (I love kbin, that’s why I care enough to make this post!), but this has all been consistent since July and I worry that these will just become cruft that never gets addressed and will simply be something new users need to “deal with” or “learn”, when we are the only site that has this unusual flow and these bugs.

Thank you!

  • TheArstaInventor@kbin.social
    13·
    7 months ago

    I think ernest (kbin dev) has already stated that he will start working on Kbin’s own mobile client now that artemis is dead, although not sure how soon that will come, hope is still there. But you are right, we need a better third-party ecosystem for mobile than ever.

    • averyminya@beehaw.org
      6·
      7 months ago

      Kbin core is first priority still last I saw. Which is more important IMO since then devs can use the API.

      I always felt that Artemis was doomed from the start given that it was working around not having an API and seemed to be more focused on Kbin support over lemmy. Not that that’s a bad thing, Kbin is the only fedisite I use other than this one. But for example, I’m on Boost for Lemmy right now and the dev has mentioned Kbin support, but there’s been no mention of it until some comments about the API releasing, then again nothing.

      Idk, it just seems like modding an early access game. You can make your own fork and spin it up and it can make great, incredible strides until the maintainer loses interest. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be done or no one should ever make and maintain a fork, but I was just always confused as to why I was always seeing posts on Artemis alpha releases but the subject matter revolved around Kbin if the app also supported lemmy. Have compatibility be the focus until you don’t have to maintain the instance fork and the app development at the same time.

      Moreover it’s just unfortunate that the instance is gone, hopefully there was an account merge available if anyone wanted that. I also certainly don’t have the full picture by any means, just the development posts and then the moderator goodbye post.

      I’m personally happy with Kbin on Firefox until the account is supported in Boost. Yes, I have noticed a bug or two that has been mentioned but they are consistent in how they appear in my experience and I tend to not interact with how they often pop up. (I comment less on Kbin so scrolling up isn’t often an issue.) The bug I get most commonly is trying to view the bottom of the page with infinite scroll turned on. If it’s styling that’s an issue, Firefox Nightly or Fennec to play with CSS to your liking with something like Stylus.

      I feel bad for the Artemis community, hopefully everyone finds something that works for them soon.