As someone who first switched to lemmy, and then quickly switched to kbin due to rampant de-federation in the lemmy world, I say I just first heard about lemmy.
But, Kbin is much more modern, and spectating the changes done in the last days alone, it moves fast and attracts many developers while all lemmy 0.18 did was breaking federation with kbin. I can fully recommend the switch to Kbin, its that good.
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
It's for all these reasons I'm fascinated Kbin hasn't received a larger influx of new users. It seems truly the easiest to easily switch from Reddit, you just need a browser.
Kbin.social was not really ready to accept a large user amount until a few days ago when they did a large update to the infrastructure, also a little more then a week ago the site still had stability issues and would error out a lot. That just changed and now it is ready to grow faster. But, so far 51k users on kbin.social already.
Arguably it's probably still not ready - I have heard rumours that running a kbin instance is still much more complicated than Lemmy, and that moderation tools are still somewhat lacking. Which probably explains why there are currently more Lemmy instances out there than kbin.
The confusing thing is that despite this, kbin.social seems spectacularly well moderated at the mement. I guess that's partly because ernest is a champion, and partly because it didn't have to deal with the same insane influx of users that Lemmy has.
Still - I think the slow growth model benefits kbin quite nicely, and with federation it doesn't really matter to the feasibility of the platform whether people are here or on Lemmy. :)
Honestly, I've appreciated the smaller community size here. Sure there are less niche communities with actual users like reddit, but there is just a much smaller concentration of idiots here than other social media sites, which makes actually talking about shit fun, rather than infuriating.
Part of the reason I stuck around even after all the redditors swam back is because I like the company here much more.
Kbin already is, it was very much a side project by Ernest that was no where near as mature as Lemmy. As it stands it is growing extremely fast, proportionally it is way more active and grows faster than Lemmy itself. Kbin.social iirc is neck and neck with Lemmy World.
Well, there's the thing, you need a browser. You'd be surprised how many newer Reddit users access the site primarily or even exclusively on their phones, and who tend to use apps rather than their mobile browser.
I use kbin primarily on a browser (firefox) on mobile. My only complaint is the side menu options for aubscribing/blocking being located at the bottom of the page instead of higher up.
Artemis is in the works for a native android client, but, also, kbin is a Progressive Web App on mobile. By that I mean, you can go to the site with chrome, firefox, etc, click the menu, and find "Install" or "Install App". That will give you an icon to put on your home screen, which will just open the site like a standalone app. But using your browser. Which means if you use Firefox mobile, you can still use extensions and user scripts and such if you want to.
You should always use the language you are most comfortable with, and for ernest that simply is PHP. Its not what I would have chosen either, but things like the facebook and telegram backends are in PHP and they certainly work very well.
Yeah i heard of Lemmy first, but when I found out about the developers being tankies I switched to Kbin. I actually prefer Kbin a lot now! It's obviously still earlier in development but I think it shows more promise.
About Tildes, it seems to be more of a clone of Digg in the old days.
It may resemble digg 1.0, but it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit. It's a project by the guy who originally built Automod and is very much like Reddit was just prior to the launch of the subreddit system - two years before digg 4.0 launched and the refugees started arriving.
Intended to be more of a wide-open commons than a platform for subdivided or niche communities.
Tildes has very limited adoption during the reddit protests because it's on an invite system and doesn't want a huge influx of new people all at once, for all that it is accepting and even seeking growth over time.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Reddit thinks they don't need mods. Tildes seems to think they don't need users.
it's intended as a spiritual successor to pre-diggpocalypse reddit.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
This reads a lot like you're kind of working to shit on them, though.
It looks dead.
Ok? I don't know how you'd get that impression and you don't really elaborate, but I don't really see what might lead to that impression.
You can't even join unless you know someone, to recover your password you need to send an email, and the most upvoted post has 500 votes.
Yeah. Invite systems are a valid solution when you're looking to limit the pace of growth, and social media sites like aggregators often want to rate-limit growth in order to avoid an Eternal September moment changing their culture. Password recovery is amusingly antiquated. Their scoring works different and the numbers don't translate 1:1.
The about section has a philosophy section which likely took longer to write than was taken designing the website, and one of the top posts is about how they're going reorganise everything into their equivalent of subreddits. What's the point if you only have 100 users?
Yeah. Welcome to Tildes, a site utterly dedicated to high-concept, high-content, participation and engagement - with near every aspect of its design based around discouraging low-bar contribution and encouraging effortposts. If you personally find a long philosophy section and a ultra-simple aesthetic to be disengaging to you - then they're probably working as intended, and you're just not the target demographic. They're reaching about the same growth point as Reddit did when it made that decision themselves, and from what he said in the announcement they're facing the same problems. They're sitting at numbers well above "100 users" though, - as mentioned, they're not trying to be a highly-active and super-busy space. Several thousand users on Tildes produce a much smaller total footprint than several thousand users on lemmy or kbin.
Because the guy who created it, seemingly doesn't get that times have changed. I mean, the nokia 3310 was a great phone in its day, but it's 2023.
And I get that they don't care, but if your main audience is former mods who like organising things without the interference of users, they're not going to have enough or sufficiently interesting content to attract critical mass and a wider audience.
At which point, you might as well turn your reddit replacement into a wordpress blog and have the same discussions you're having now in the comment section. Because unlike tildes, people are working on plugins which will allow wordpress to become fully part of the fediverse.
This is the part where it's just like ... did Demiorz kill your dog and fuck your wife or something? Because these read as if it's coming from a pretty personal set of feelings for you.
It's a website where you are not the target user. That's fine. You don't need to hate them for that. They don't need to change for you.
If this whole thing isn't personal between you and them and is simply about the fact that they're a 'reddit alternative' that isn't the Fediverse, I think playing Websites We Use like it's sports teams where our guys are the best and everyone else is shit is ... kinda juvenile.
A fantastic answer, though I'll add that OP is likely unaware that the vast majority of the "growth" on Lemmy is actually due to bot accounts. Which is somewhat irrelevant as it is still an enormous platform even after accounting for that.
Also I saw that r/ModCoord leaned more towards Lemmy, seemed somewhat biased against Kbin, and was reportedly enormously biased against Squabbles even to the point of deleting posts trying to talk about it (which not being able to check deleted posts anymore, I did not try to verify). That would make sense then that that could be why people heard about Lemmy before hearing about Kbin.
Plus the mobile app too - although I'm mostly happy with the browser view of kbin (for reading, though writing comments in it is a huge pain).
There is also the issue of Lemmy being developed by a group of genocide denying tankies.
That’s probably the one thing that will catch up to them. I think there will inevitably be a hard-fork of the codebase in order to get away from the original devs.
I personally also went with Lemmy first but switched to Kbin after 2 days because I preferred it's interface (as well as the full transparency on up/downvotes).
I heard about Tildes way before all the API stuff went down (like 2021-ish) but a text only platform just never was my cup of tea, personally.
I have an account on both. But I timed myself for about 5 minutes on both Kbin and Lemmy (yes I am that kind of person) to see which I found more intuitive, fun etc and just felt like Kbin worked better for me. Just feels more natural somehow
But it's also good that there's different options for different people and everyone's not just having to use one centralised website like the one most of us have just come from...
I have also signed up to Squabbles which is another centralised service, kind of a cross between Twitter and Reddit. It's so-so, but a lot more interesting than tildes
I wouldn’t say defederation is rampant, but there were a few very high profile examples that hit right when people were new. Specifically, Beehaw/LW and Exploding Heads/everyone. Plus the whole thing about NSFW content and types.
While it’s true that many of the original devs have problematic views, it’s not really meaningful. The software is open source, there are tons of new developers (with varying views), and the code has nothing to perpetuate their ideas. In fact, they are pretty isolated on their own instance (Lemmygrad) since everyone defederates them almost immediately.
Worth noting that lemmy.ml is also run by the developers as their general instance (while Lemmygrad is the tankie one). It's easily forgotten at least for kbin users though, as federation with it has been somewhat broken for a while now.
Besides lemmygrad and explodingheads which are truly legitimate cases, defederation just hurts everyone. New users just expect to sub to the communities they like on reddit. That includes NSFW because that simply is something people want, and it never was an issue on reddit. The whole discussion on larger lemmy is childish and prude.
And about the developers, lemmygrad is largely isolated, but lemmy.ml is not and those same tankies run that. In fact its also the only lemmy instance that blocks all kbin instances via blocking the kbin user-agent. The development is also still largely steered by those tankies.
The NSFW stuff was/is a bit more complicated than it might appear on the surface. A lot of instances do not allow NSFW. No judgement, it is what it is. But people on those instances could sub to NSFW communities elsewhere, primarily LemmyNSFW. Less so now, but for a while it was common for those posts/communities to not be tagged NSFW, which caused them to show up on All for people that didn’t want to see it.
Then there was the question about types of NSFW content. Even people that enjoy your standard porn categories had lines they didn’t want crossed in their feed. Specifically animated/cgi CSAM and scat. The former is illegal in some jurisdictions, and caused a different instance (name withheld) to be widely defederated. The latter was more of an issue with limited tools, but the result was the same- either LemmyNSFW blocks that (at least until better tools are available), or they also get cut off.
I am not even speaking about LemmyNSFW and the discussion around what should be allowed on there and the discussion if they allow CSAM or not. It hit me when my favorite furry focused instance got blocked from feddit.de which was my home on lemmy because it has two mild NSFW communities on there. Nothing illegal, nothing legally questionable. Still de-federated.
Assuming they mean the thing with the loli. There was some poll or something about what was allowed, but if I recall, things that were visibly meant to be children was not too well received. They settled on allowing porn of people that looked youngish but not verifiably underage, because the consensus was it could be hard to tell.
Obviously a polarizing issue. One side wants scorched earth on anything under 35, severely limiting half of porn and almost all of Japanese porn. Other side wants to know if it's logically illegal to date short people now.
Other side wants to know if it's logically illegal to date short people now.
Bit of a tangent, but I've noticed a bit of an over-correction with the age thing. Back in the 'good' old days, a grown ass man like 40 year old Seinfeld would date a sixteen year old, and it would be tolerated or accepted. Obviously icky in retrospect and it's good that it's now illegal. But now you'll often read people say online that a 35 year old dating or even being attracted to a 25 year old is a red flag. I mean, it may not be ideal, and age gaps can cause issues (IRC women who date older men are more likely to be abused), but adults finding adults attractive or dating isn't necessarily creepy.
I do find porn where a petite 20+ actress is clearly pretending to be younger quite problematic though. It's not so much what they look like, but how they act. Like Piper Perri, the small blonde woman from that meme with her sitting on the couch with the black guys. Looks really young even though she's 30. As you say, there's a lot of porn like that.
Obviously even having this discussion and discussing the nuances of it can make you seem really creepy, and as you say make the discussion polarising. A bit like deciding to have a discussion about how to solve Israeli-Palestinian conflict on your first day, no one sensible wants to have it whatever side of the argument they may fall, and I get why many people would not want to see anything even remotely questionable pop up in their feed even if the actors are in their 20s. If only that they don't want to have to explain why they're subscribed to that content to their significant other, family or friends.
Child Sexual Abuse Material, basically the current term for child porn. Nepenthe@kbin.social is completely right on all of it. There is a missing detail that loli (along with a few other questionable/objectionable subs) were banned from LemmyNSFW, and went to a different one that promised to be less restrictive, and is widely defederated because of it.
(Side note: While it can be difficult/impossible to draw the line based on appearances, these were clearly and obviously meant to be depictions of children, and often very young children)
While it can be difficult/impossible to draw the line based on appearances, these were clearly and obviously
Ugh. Why am I not surprised?
I think there's a discussion to be had about questionable porn, like I mentioned in a comment above someone like Piper Perri (of sitting on a couch with black guys behind her meme fame) is nearing thirty. I get that people wouldn't want something featuring an actress like her in their feed because she looks younger, but I also get why people would find it draconian to ban it as she is an adult woman.
But you can't really have a nuanced discussion on where to draw the line, and end up having to err on the side of caution, because of the creeps.
Reminds me a bit of discussing free speech or Israel. There are nuances, and the line is blurry, but nuanced discussion is impossible, because before you know it you're agreeing with someone with a swastika tattoo on his forehead.
Sounds like you joined one of the anti-porn instances. I can’t read German, so I can only guess that the rules say that, but it’s not obvious on Join-Lemmy. I really wish they’d include some meaningful detail on their standards for fed/defend, since that’s what really matters. Instead we have that garbage about matching your values, and each one has a one-liner about who they are.
You are correct that there’s overlap of users with lemmy.ml, but I don’t see much of the offensive content coming from there. If nothing else, they put their masks on when on that instance. I’m sure there are people on EH with alts elsewhere, but they aren’t given the free reign to cause the same problems.
Lemmy.ml is no longer a recommended instance, and probably won’t be again. But yes, I agree with you that the confusion caused by defederation is a bad thing.
Does some of them being tankies have an effect on the code?
Tildes, for what it's worth, is not intended to be a replacement for Reddit. Its creator/admin is trying to purposefully cultivate a very different culture than what you might find on Reddit or Reddit replacements like lemmy/kbin/squabbles/discuit/etc. From their Philosophy page:
High-quality content and discussions
Tildes prioritizes quality content and discussion through its mechanics, design, and organization. Fixation on growth and related metrics results in other sites having a bias towards high-appeal, low-depth content like funny images, gifs, and memes. The priority on Tildes is to cultivate high-quality communities, which are far easier to build when they don't have to fight an uphill battle against the platform itself.
Limited tolerance, especially for assholes
Tildes will not be a victim of the paradox of tolerance; my philosophy is closer to "if your website's full of assholes, it's your fault".
This is a difficult topic, so I want to try to be clear about where on the spectrum Tildes is trying to land. I'm never going to refer to the site as a "safe space" or ban anyone just for occasionally acting like a jerk in an argument—I'd probably have to ban myself fairly quickly. However, it will also never be described as anything like "an absolute free speech site".
Personally as an old, I love it. The whole vibe promotes longer, better thought out replies, as opposed to the modern internet where people are more often looking to do quick hit n' run posts with popular sentiments for easy internet points. I also love the proactive removal of problem posters. Some people are just looking to stir up trouble wherever they go, but don't fall under a specific rule that might get their account axed. Tildes isn't afraid to uninvite problematic assholes.
If its culture is something that resonates with you, feel free to hit me up for an invite while I have some.
By requiring invites, they are already punishing people not the abusers as their philosophy states
Trust people, but punish abusers
By gatekeeping. And making it difficult for people to join, it assumes that everyone is a criminal/troublemaker until proven by a some sort of vetting process.
Reminds me of when malls used to check your pockets for stolen goods before your exit. The assumption of guilt sours the whole experience.
They’re “vetting” process sucked too. I just asked for an invite and they gave one with no questions asked. I could easily just start spamming troll stuff and they would ban me but still. Quality moderation and an approval process can accomplish everything tildes wants to do without stifling its ability to add users and variety of discussion.
Lack of awareness of Kbin I think. Also the monthly average users are the same, but lots of communities were created on lemmy instances.
Lemmy is older and I think when people thought a million people had signed up they thought that was the place to be. But it was all bits and the two are similar in terms of users, although most Kbin users are on Kbin.social at the moment.
I've tried both and I prefer Kbin. I like the interface, I like the mobile PWA app, it just feels more modern and polished compared to lemmy. But it's just a preference thing they're largely the same.
So when I was scoping out an alternative, there were five platforms I was looking at.
Lemmy
Kbin
Squabbles
Tildes
Raddle
I opted against places like tumblr since I was looking for a similar experience to reddit (didn’t mind some innovations, but places like mastodon or tumblr weren’t the right fit)
Squabbles was interesting but I did not care for the interface, especially on desktop. It’s a bit better on mobile but it’s basically the card interface on steroids and it’s not my preference. I like the flexibility in apps/ways you can consume Lemmy in comparison
Tildes is invite only and tightly controlled. If you aren’t interested in like the 4 topics of discussion they have there it’s just not that engaging.
Raddle is open source and not for profit which are pluses, but outside anarchist political communities and a few meme ones theres basically nothing else there. Also some of the theming for their forums on desktop are atrocious.
Kbin has some pluses in that in that it can interact with Lemmy and the fediverse. It even has some better integration with places like mastodon due to the microblogging tab. It’s still an option in my mind depending on how it and Lemmy evolve. But for now im on Lemmy and haven’t regretted it.
I think the big reason Lemmy grew though was exposure and circumstance. It’s very decentralized nature I think appealed to people who have experienced what guys like Musk and Spez have done to their social media sites lately and the idea that if an admin/owner here goes off the rails there’s some recourse available besides having to entirely leave the platform they’ve invested their time and energy to. Squabbles, tildes and raddle can’t really promise that by the fundamental fact they are closed platforms. So when the reddit drama popped up and after what people have dealt with in Facebook, tumbler, digg, Twitter, etc this place and the fediverse was pushed really hard as an alternative experience that sought to resolve this recurring problem.
I could actually find my subscriptions feed on Lemmy
tildes
Well, I actually got an invite. Which is a gigantic barrier of entry, and is enough of an answer. But more to the point: It was boring as hell inside.
That is it?
Oh, no, not even close. There were more places I made an account for just as a placeholder thing. Some of them were actually nasty (one called communities straight up had transphobic memes on the frontpage) Lemmy is actually the best on offer. Period.
The fact it was recommended more, and doesn’t require an invite like Tildes. I only heard of any of these because of the migration, and only heard of Kbin here on Lemmy.
I wanted to try Tildes after seeing the page, but I have no friends there to invite me to try it.
Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.
To answer the question about Tildes specifically, Tildes has been around for years and remained effectively dead. Its moderation is extremely controlling and screen all people before letting them in. It’s a club of people the owner approves of that only post “quality” content (I.e. the in-group’s definition of quality). This results in an extremely inorganic experience where content is removed for little reason beyond mods thinking it’s too “low quality” (the definition of which is very flexible). Your presence on Tildes is considered a privilege that can be taken away at any time for any reason (no alts, no second chances), so there is a perpetual sense that you’re under the lense, and can’t disagree with the rest of club. It’s a custom built wind tunnel, ostensibly to screen out hate, but in effect created a gated community of the same people celebrating their own exclusivity and very concerned with strangers walking down the sidewalk.
In essence, it doesn’t want to be reddit, because it views itself as “better” than the riffraff. It’s an elitist clubhouse, not a true social network.
That first comment isn’t wrong though. It was definitely an issue of growing pains that Tildes wouldn’t have to deal with, since they have a centralised model, rather than the Federated one Beehaw and Lemmy had to deal with.
The issue Beehaw had was with people firing up an account on an open instance, and then going over to cause trouble, bypassing their account creation policy. Lemmy grew too quickly for their moderation to deal with, and lacks the relevant tooling, so they just disconnected from the biggest trouble instances, until Lemmy comes out with a better mod toolkit.
I suspect that if Tildes connected to open instances, they would have the same issue.
I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).
The other poster failed to mention the biggest advantage of Rust - it’s inherently a lot more secure and a lot less vulnerable to bugs compared to other languages. For starters, Rust is designed to eliminate common programming errors like null pointer dereferencing, buffer overflows, and data races, which can lead to serious security vulnerabilities.
Also, variables in Rust are immutable by default, which means they cannot be changed once they’re set. It’s also strongly typed, which is strictly enforced and there are no implicit conversions. PHP, however, is loosely typed and does perform implicit type conversion, which can lead to unexpected results and potential security vulnerabilities.
I could go on, but then we’d be getting a bit too technical for this space.
Although Kbin does have the advantage of being compatible with older devices, as a result of it using an established platform. If you have an older iDevice, for example, neither Lemmy nor most of its apps/interfaces work at all.
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