Does anyone else have multiple accounts while looking for new reddit alts? So far I've got accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and Squabbles and I've been lurking on Raddle, Sqwok, and Tildes from the outside.
Also, man, that sentence is just the most 2023 statement ever. "Raddle" ... "Sqwok" ... "Lemmy" ... None of these sound like real things. What even is this timeline we're in...
I tried Raddle and the people there are crazy. I gave it a fair chance but even calling someone "he" is seen as an attack because I didn't instruct myself "whether or not the person wanted to be called he or she or they". This is the hill they are dying on.
I tried lemmy and the big problem is that people are attracted to the most populated subs, namely the subs hosted on lemmy.ml, which is administrated by the crazy chinese. It doesn't matter if you register yourself on beehaw, you will still talk on lemmy.ml, and when you are banned because you said "Taiwan number one" or because you insulted Putin, then you are out of the biggest channels. You can still talk on your own server, sure, but you will talk in a ghost town. The federation model has a limit. This is why we should populate Kbin and not jump on the lemmy.ml ship when the cloudflare component is eventually removed. Build here, stay here.
Yeah, I feel like one of those always online people now constantly having to flip between screens and work out who’s replying to what where. It’s kinda fun to be part of the buzz right now but I’ll be very happy when it all settles down a bit.
I'm also new but that's a positive thing for me, especially considering all of the "controlling instance owner" talk above. It gives users a chance to find their ideal community by providing multiple options. For example; There are two different magazines called 'Tech' but one of them is filled with people you can get along with and the other is filled with crazies. Now you aren't stuck with the crazies as the only option!
I deleted my lemmy.ml account when I found out about their pro-China stance. Honestly, I don't care about anyone's personal opinions, I just don't want my media curated by anyone's political agenda.
I’m in Beehaw and here. Beehaw is good if you stick to its local communities. You can’t create new communities at the moment, just join the existing ones. Don’t know if this model is good or bad - but it’s peculiar at best.
Hoping to Kbin gets traction and the project stays alive. Fediverse is a good thing and will prevent crazy admins to lock you out of “major” communities/magazines once new instances get relevant.
I don't want to start a war here, and I don't have the context of what you experienced over there. Perhaps they did go too far. But if you don't know the gender of someone, it is indeed incorrect to assume "he" is OK. That's inclusion 101: don't assume things about people. There is a commonly accepted solution to this problem, used e.g. in the academic peer review world where the reviewer is anonymous, which is to default to "they". That's a good habit to take, costs nothing, and helps (particularly) women feel included. That's a hill I'd happily die on.
Speaking about assuming things about people, don't assume everyone is an English native. In some other languages there is no gender-neutral equivalent and instead the normal and expected way to address a stranger is by using male pronouns. Reacting aggressively instead of just politely correcting someone is the difference between making someone have a positive or a negative opinion on a given topic.
Being a non-native speaker doesn't help, for sure, but one can learn. Point in fact: I'm french :) And as a non-native speaker, I find it great that English has well-known gender neutral pronouns, so I'm more than happy to use them. I wish French had one so commonly accepted as "they" and "it".
Also I don't know if you refer to my post as aggressive, but if so I'd appreciate if you could tell me why. I haven't called anyone names, and I think I responded respectfully to the OP.
Even then some people throw their toys out because they believe "they" assumes a person is non-binary. "They" as a singular pronoun for someone of unknown gender has existed since at least the 16th century.
Look if people are getting mad because you're using "they" to refer to someone who has not disclosed their pronouns, then they're being unreasonable. But I've literally never seen that. What I have seen is people getting mad when someone uses "they" to refer to someone who has disclosed their pronouns. And often, this is something that is done by mildly transphobic people who aren't fully comfortable using, e.g., "she" to refer to someone who they feel looks insufficiently like a woman, but recognize that using "he" is wrong. Using "they" in this situation is just as wrong.
That being said, it doesn't help that there's no easy way to disclose your pronouns on this app. I'm a lot of discord servers I'm in, they use badges for pronouns so you can click on someone's username and see their pronouns. But no such option exists here
I would say people getting mad about a they instead of a he/she even after disclosure are being unreasonable. The word they is neutral ground in text conversation. I can see it being awkward to use in a direct conversation, but so often in threads, we're talking to the public not the individual.
Having said that, I still haven't seen anyone really get mad except in cases of direct misgendering. Yes some people will be unreasonable, but they are the exception.
They aren't in your face about the tankie stuff on lemmy.ml but when it comes out holy shit. There was one thread discussing bans for "orientalism" where people were going on about westerners being racist without any hint of irony (that was also where I found out the .ml stands for Marxism–Leninism). I deleted my account there straight away.
At least with lemmygrad.ml you know what you're getting into...
Yea... I was in the same boat. Saw what the .ml stood for and the devs stances on russia and china and noped the fuck out of there. Capitalism bad but genocide and oppression good? Fuckin wild.
Why are Marxist Leninist so pro-China anyway? Like doesn't China practice heavy capitalism and have a crap load of billionaires? Not very marxist there. Nor is their insistence on horrible worker rights and disallowing trade unions.
I mean, the term "State Capitalism" was originally invented by the USSR to describe their economy. So China isn't really doing anything that MLs are unfamiliar with. Plus, it's all part of the historical determinism that MLs vaguely ascribe to -- China/Russia has to first develop a capitalist economy in order to then become socialist.
Personally I think it's all a load of horseshit but you never know, maybe China will be fully socialist by 2050 or whatever
You're looking for reason and consistency where there is none.
Why do US right wingers who go on and on about "core American values" and the bible cozy up to Nazis and Russia? Obviously those things have literally nothing to do with core American values and the "good old days", in those days large parts of the population took part in WWII killing Nazis and the cold war was still going on. Paying any mind to anything they say is absolutely useless, what they do is what really tells the story. They just want to get their way and the power to punish those who they dislike and those who do things they don't want.
Tankies really aren't any different. They might say they are communists because they eventually want a utopia for all or whatever but what they do is cozy up to hardcore inhumane regimes like China and Russia because it's never been about creating a better world and doing what's right, it's just about furthering and protecting their ideology.
I think for many it's a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". USA bad therefore China good.
You also see it when tankies disguss the current Russian war. There's not so much justifying the actual invasion as there is whataboutism about the West.
This is my issue with the fediverse. We are getting out of the frying pan and into the fire. If you think reddit mods and admins are bad you're in for a whole other level of crazy power tripping instance owners with insane rules.
Basically: admins server - admins rules.
If you don't like the admins behavior you can (in the fediverse) simply register on another instance/server, with an admin you like (or even at mastodon, misskey, calckey,.). Do that on reddit
And you can still follow and comment all subs from all servers (instances) that are federated, no matter where you registered .
I think that's a little unfair, speaking as a fedi admin.
There are certainly instances that like to block any instance that doesn't match its admins' precise ideological priors (i.e. "X on Y server of 10,000 people is a 'cop' through some loose definition... COP!!!! BAN!!! BAN THE WHOLE THING!!!!" - has literally happened). I don't agree with them or their methods.
But honestly they're relatively small and few, and safely ignorable by the people on the big instances, who by and large will only block places that simply won't moderate away their users' hate speech or harassment.
Same way how on Reddit you can easily go a million years without having to interact with the weird uber-tankies or the racists, you can quite easily join Mastodon.social or any other reasonably well-moderated instance and let the whole fediblock discourse just pass you by.
you literally jumped down his throat for no fuckin reason "Why spread false info again when you're not informed on the matter??" why be so argumentative out the gate?
Well, the owner of an entire instance going power crazy would be equivalent to what spez is doing to Reddit, except that with federation only the subs/magazines/whatever on that specific instance are affected. With enough distribution of users across multiple instances, no one person can take down a significant amount of communities.
Also, as a side effect, leaving somewhere is much simpler because other fediverse mags will remain untouched, whereas the relatively niche reddit subs I used to frequent just don't exist over here yet.
Another thing to consider is that there will invariably be alternative communities if one goes away. There's a "tech" or "technology" community on just about every lemmy instance right now. You might find that the one on Lemmy.ml is the biggest, but if that one gets out of hand, people can migrate to another one fairly easily. And in fact, people will probably be subscribed to more than one "tech" community, so they won't even need to migrate. They just become more active in one of the other dozen tech communities.
For communities that are more niche, this will be more difficult but I think the same concept rings true. When something starts getting out of hand in a community or on an instance, there's much less friction to creating another community and getting the word out for people to migrate there. It happened plenty with subreddits fracturing into multiple subs or a new sub after a mod threw a tantrum. Now it isn't just mods, but also admins that we can escape.
And even if they do, everyone will already be used to the interface and just go through the pain of moving. Email providers don’t shut down very often but it’s the same concept
I find that the Magazines are the key to make this site more reddit-like. Magazines are like subreddits, From the magazine page you can search for specific interests.
Hopefully someone can create something like this for kbin instances. I would say all federated 'groups' but I'm currently not sure how that would work with things like Mastodon.
I imagine in the future, we'll etiher have better built-in discoverability or a site that includes the whole of whatever ends up being the biggest aggregator platforms.
They do indeed, but whether it's to do with Cloudflare screwing with federation, I'm doing something wrong (which is more than possible), or the communities straight up don't exist yet, I've found that you're better off going straight to a Lemmy instance to find a magazine than trying to find it via kbin itself, before this link of course.
I know you can do something like search for @gaming, but it would be nice if you could just search 'gaming' and see all other federated magazines. I believe you can only do said 'gaming' search and get results if someone else has already subscribed via that particular instance of kbin?
I'm fine with there not being an exact replacement for Reddit.
"The alternatives will never be as big as Reddit" As if reddit having that many users is a good thing, the majority probably never comment, just scroll through on mobile looking at gifs, pics, short videos. And if they do comment it's the most cringe inducing, asinine attempt at being funny. Oh the 7 billionth reference to The Office. A Simpsons reference? Wow! A pun? How funny? Reddit's huge size is a negative, not a positive.
"But the post with useful information to answer your questions" -
Yeah, there are useful comments or threads, but in all honesty a lot of useful advice on Reddit only seems useful because of how oddly specific it is.
Post showing car veering off the highway and rolling over into the grass. And the top comment will be like, "Little known fact, but I actually used to work as a highway planner for my state and all highways in the US have little markers with unique numbers on them every 50 feet. The markers have a little dot that align with the position of the sun or brightest star. If you go to the marker, turn on the spot 3 times while staring at the sun, then divide by the square root of the highway number you are on, you can get the exact coordinates of your location"
Regardless of what your personal opinion might be on content quality, reddit brought a massive number of people together in ways that previously weren't possible. Shared experiences and references although overdone create a sense of community.
And the useful advice was definitely not limited to the overly specific. There were help subreddits and learning subreddits and advice subreddits, on everything from knitting to programming, to general career advice. People gained jobs through reddit and pivoted their career and finances based on redditors support and advice.
Reddit as a platform had plenty of flaws, but it was, for a long time, one of the best places on the internet.
Yeah, I have a username on both Lemmy and Kbin, the exact same username - before I found out about how federation works. I've been using Mastodon for a while now.
Previously on lemmy.ml, moved to lemmy.world this weekend, and now I'm trying out kbin. So far I've had a smoother experience on lemmy.world, including communities on other instances.
I'm also on saidit.net not federated but we've got a nice little community there. Definitely some trolls and other unsavory types, being more free speech oriented, but nothing the block button won't fix.
Started with kbin but just created an account with lemmy. So far I prefer the kbin interface enough to stick with kbin while they try to stabilise performance.
I'm checking out Kbin, Squabbles and Tildes (from the outside, waiting for an invite). I think Kbin is my favorite so far, because I don't need to log in to Mastodon or Lemmy to get content from there, and because we can downvote stuff. Also, promoting decentralized sites seems appropriate after all the drama around Reddit, Twitter, Facebook etc.
I really like Squabbles' design though, I'll keep checking it out, maybe both sites will evolve into something unique given some time.
I've got accounts with Lemmy, kbin, and squabble so far. I prefer kbin over the others, but as a 100% mobile user, the lack of a mobile app has me discouraged.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe a kbin API is currently in the works. Once that gets up and running hopefully some devs can create some nice 3rd party apps for mobile users
Did you read this somewhere? I’m Jw. I’ll do a search of it myself too, really this would be a game changer imo.
Right now it needs someone to be incentivized who already has an established group of followers. If this were the case I can’t see why someone like Apollo or Relay wouldn’t make the jump - so many people (like a vast majority of the ones who already love their app) would stick with them over Reddit.
I expect there will eventually be a mobile app. I’m new to kbin, but I get the impression it’s sort of at an MVP stage. But I will say the mobile site is excellent. Frankly, both the kbin and lemmy mobile sites are better than the one lemmy app that’s out there. They will all get better in time.
Honestly I have another account on Mastodon Social. I have to wait and see which ones takes up my time the most. Because Mastodon is more similar to Twitter, in more of the UI side of things. And kbin is more like Old Reddit.
I don't think Mastodon and kbin scratch the same itch - I have been using Mastodon for years already and it's great for following interesting people and participating in good faith discussions. Kbin seems like a power tool of procrastination, which I'd argue Mastodon is certainly not.
In the end Mastodon is less entertaining, but for me personally that's the appeal of it.
Honestly I just made a Mastodon account two days ago, so I am still trying to get used to it. And honestly having both Mastodon and kbin having " hey respect other people" in the user agreements is like having a breath of fresh air.
With that being said I do agree with your points that you had made.
How are you able to have discussions using Mastadon? It looked to me like it was just a Twitter post and I’d never see anything else. Am I wrong on that?
The best way to use it is to follow users and hashtags of things you're interested in. It is a lot like Twitter, in that you push posts and people can answer them.
There might be two main differences from Twitter. First, it's must harder to go viral, meaning that different users will generally see completely different content (unless something is "boosted" across the network). Second, but maybe because engagement is spread more across the platform, the atmosphere is much more chill. The toxicity Twitter is famous for is really rare, and when you see it it's easy to mute people.
Even though Kbin doesn't have a mobile app, I like the mobile interface better than Lemmy's app. And I like Kbin a little better than Lemmy in general.
This is where I’m at too. It honestly could be as simple as the font and text-box outlines/sizes. Something about the interface is significantly more comfortable on Kbin (as a mobile user). The Lemmy app is even worse than the mobile browser version, honestly.
Right now Kbin just feels right.
I’m starting to vibe with Kbin and a Mastadon dual setup. Just gotta figure out how to easily navigate the two.
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