EnglishMobster
EnglishMobster avatar

EnglishMobster

@EnglishMobster@kbin.social

Hello!

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.

Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!

As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

You can disable join requests for private subreddits by going into your subreddit settings on new Reddit and turning them off there.

That button doesn't exist on old Reddit, so if you just checked there then you didn't have the option.

I had a 500k sub and I forgot to turn off join requests until midway through day 1. After that we got about a dozen modmail requests but that's it.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Lemmy purposely doesn't allow that; it's one-way with no intentions of changing.

Kbin allows it, though. Kbin merges Lemmy and Mastodon so you can easily flip between one or the other. You can follow Lemmy communities and Mastodon users, and you can be followed by Mastodon users. It's one reason why I switched.

https://fedia.io is the currently-recommended instance right now; should still be open sign-ups. Check your email for confirmation if you register; it tends to go to spam.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

It worked! ;)

Now that federation is starting to work, the experience is a bit funny. Already had experiences with lemmy and beehaw threads just being purged lol

Idk what the culture is over there but it was just a bit funny to see the entire thread I was replying to just removed. Like that doesn't happen here on kbin lmao. a bit of a culture clash there I guess....

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Beehaw has strict instance-wide moderation policies (which don't really work in a federated model tbh, but they haven't seemed to realize as such yet).

Beehaw's trying to funnel Reddit-related stories into a single megathread. However, if people aren't subscribed to that community on their instance, they don't see the megathread and don't know to post in it.

Simply put - while Beehaw is a nice place, their moderation style is at odds with much of the fediverse. I wouldn't be surprised if Beehaw started defederating fairly broadly to prevent users from other instances coming in to their communities without respecting their rules and standards.

I also wouldn't be surprised to see Beehaw remove themselves from federation entirely, since they very much want to be their own thing.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Hot take: The old way of searching is outdated.

Bing Chat is rough, but it's the future. You ask it a question - it uses a modified ChatGPT to generate an answer and cites its sources.

About 60% of the time, it's right. About 40% of the time it's wrong. But either way, it cites its sources using links that it found during that search. You can click those sources and see responses from humans, who generally have the correct answer.

I rarely use Google now. Bing Chat is always my first stop for any kind of question or general knowledge query. Give it 5 years - 10 at most - and that'll be the only way to use a search engine. The tech isn't going anywhere, and it's only getting better.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

The way you describe it is how things were intended to be used, I think.

Basically - find or make a niche instance. That niche instance has communities relevant to it, things that kind of person may enjoy. The niche instance federates with other niche instances, and people are able to reach across and create the unique set of communities that define them.

A great example is https://lemmy.blahaj.zone, which is a LGBTQ-focused instance that has communities relevant to LGBTQ folks, and rules intended to be LGBTQ friendly.

Lemmygrad is another example, although it's an example most disagree with. They have their own culture, their own rules, and their own communities that are relevant to tankies. I'm sure at some point there will be a Neo-Nazi instance as well; it's just how it is.

But largely... people are used to Reddit. And Twitter. And whatever other big monoliths. So they want to use things in the same way, and that's why we have these instances full of general topics.

And it works fine, for what it is. It's not how things were intended to work, but both can exist in harmony. If anything, it's a step up from Reddit where you had PCM and Conspiracy and GenZedong all on the same website.

Here, for the most part, things are separated. The general instances are... general, and if you want specific answers for something that you're interested in you can follow communities on one of those niche instances. Alternatively - places that don't to be associated with another can block that instance.

I think long-term we'll see a mix of both. We see this already on Mastodon; lots of people on big servers and lots of people on niche servers. I think Lemmy and Kbin both lend themselves more naturally to the niche server model, but at the same time places like lemmy.world and kbin.social and beehaw.org have such large userbases that they're all going to have staying power unless their admin team does something to drive people away.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Adding on to this - if you're browsing from Kbin (like me!), Kbin plans to integrate directly with Mobilizon in the future: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/511/Kbin-Roadmap-2023

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

I'm still not able to subscribe to magazines on here from Lemmy, which is interesting. Maybe federation needs some time to catch up.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Figured it out - you have to put the entire URL into the Lemmy search bar. For example, to find @modeltrains, you need to search Lemmy for https://kbin.social/m/modeltrains.

Once one person subscribes, then the community will show up in searches for "modeltrains".

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

For Lemmy -> Kbin, type @streetfighter@lemmy.world in the search at the top.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

IMO, Lemmy is the one that's incorrect by requiring the URL. Kbin does the same thing Mastodon does by having it use the @ instead.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

I'd argue that the population isn't politically disengaged - Millennials and especially Gen Z are showing high rates of political participation relative to historic trends.

People have simply shifted to different sources. And this isn't just true for those on TikTok either - look at how many grandparents get their news from questionable Facebook groups.

The issue is that the internet - while making everything more accessible - has also proliferated sources that are confident, but incorrect (whether out of malice or not).

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

1k subs thus far have committed to staying dark indefinitely. Hopefully this news spurs more to join on.

According to Reddark, 6.6k subreddits (out of over 8k) are still dark. We'll have to see what the numbers look like in 16 hours or so once America wakes up and gets off work.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

You're 100% right and I completely agree with you.

But to play devil's advocate: people are saying that drawing attention to Lemmy will mean more donations to Lemmy's dev team, which in turn supports them.

I personally don't care what the politics are behind a good piece of software. I don't know Linus Torvalds' politics; I don't know the politics of the folks behind Mastodon; I don't know the politics of Jimmy Wales. I can guess, of course, but regardless of their politics they've made a good product and that's found success.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
EnglishMobster avatar

Lemmy very much tries to be "federated Reddit". It's Reddit as it was in 2010ish, and that's all it tries to be. And that's fine, but it limits the development of what the Fediverse is. You can use a Mastodon account to browse Lemmy, but you can't use a Lemmy account to browse Mastodon (and the devs aren't planning on adding it - I asked).

Kbin, however, looks at things from a different perspective. On Kbin, you have both threads and microblogs. This replicates modern Reddit's ability to post to your own profile, except instead of going to some user subreddit that nobody reads - it's treated like a post on Twitter or Tumblr and shared more widely. You can follow people on Mastodon from Kbin, and vice versa. There are plans in the future to support more things that make the Fediverse great - you can read the roadmap here.

Note Kbin as a project is less than a year old, and this "main" server only came online a month ago. Until very recently it was just ernest talking to himself... this amount of growth wasn't planned for!

Long-term, Kbin will be somewhere that connects the Fediverse platforms - you won't need a Mastodon account and a Pixelfed account and a PeerTube account. I really like that approach. Rather than trying to do one thing to the detriment of everything else, it goes beyond just a Reddit clone and is also its own thing. That's why I joined; it's a completely different approach to how the Fediverse should be interacted with.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
EnglishMobster avatar

I agree - I actually made a bit of a longer post originally, but I realized I was ranting a bit so I cut it down. But I suppose I can rant a little bit.

The thing is... actively denying a genocide is a bad look. Standing against so-called "imperialism" while simultaneously supporting Russia's imperialistic invasion of the sovereign country of Ukraine is a bad look. Taking down posts critical of China for so-called "orientalism" is a bad look (and shows you don't really understand what orientalism means - I took a whole-ass class on orientalism in college, and the definition is definitely not "anything critical of China").

It's true that most people can overlook Tencent being part of the PRC. You'll see some grumbling, but nothing huge. People don't like it, but they also don't see Tencent or TikTok as actively doing the worst that the PRC can do. And you see that same grumbling with the bad actors of capitalism - Nestle gets a lot of hate (rightfully!).

But at the same time, Nestle isn't calling for a return of Nazi Germany the way Lemmygrad (and those affiliated, e.g. Lemmy's maintainers) calls for the return of the Soviet Union. Peter Thiel wants a fascist ethnostate, but Peter Thiel isn't the CEO of Reddit and his influence over Spez/Reddit's board is likely minimal.

Again, there is absolutely the point of "the maintainers of open source are not the project". I completely agree with that. I fact, I will even give an example:

You know Truth Social, right? Do you know what Truth Social is built on? Mastodon. Do you know what protocol it uses to communicate? ActivityPub. Truth Social is part of the Fediverse, same as Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, etc.

Does that mean the people behind Mastodon agree with Truth Social? Absolutely not. They are completely independent of each other. Mastodon has no influence on Truth Social and vice versa.

Lemmy is the inverse of that. The "main" instance is distasteful politically, and there are child instances (like Beehaw) which are more neutral/progressive. Beehaw can fork if they wish and be fully independent of Lemmy; but they are of the same mind as me that good software is not political, and it is impossible to only use that which is morally righteous. Lemmy is a tool fit for their purpose, and while forking is always an option... they don't see the point in abandoning good software just because they disagree with the maintainers politically.

The issue... people get squicky when they find out the platform they use is associated with tankies. It's turned a lot of people off, because they see "Stalin did nothing wrong" or "China is the true beacon of democracy" and don't want to be affiliated with that group. Knowing that they're contributing their effort to making that platform better - and thus elevating the developers to a spot where they can more easily get donations and improve it - just doesn't sit right with some folks.

If Peter Thiel started his own open-source project and everyone started flocking to it, I'd reject it on principle. I don't care how open it is or how good everyone says it works; if he's actively running it and making day-to-day decisions there's zero chance I'd support that. Just like I don't support Truth Social.

I joined Lemmy back in 2020, when it was a little babby project. I watched the tankie community bud and fester. I'm left-leaning myself (but not that left-leaning), and originally I thought I had found a group of like-minded folks... until the masks started coming off. And then I realized that Lemmy was so small that there was no choice but to interact with them. I spun up my own instance for a hot second where tankies (and fascists) were banned... before just giving up and shutting it down because the only people on Lemmy were people I didn't want on my instance.

So I returned to Reddit. I didn't like Reddit much, either (hence why I tried Lemmy), but at least the worst parts were segmented into T_D and PCM and GenZedong etc., where I could pretend they didn't exist.

When the protest started, I was hesitant to come back to Lemmy. I knew at some point the userbase was going to discover that fact and have the same reaction I did when I realized how far down the rot went. I returned reluctantly, hoping that when the drama started people would at least go to another Lemmy instance instead of back to Reddit.

I'm glad I found Kbin, though. Kbin seems nice and friendly. The most drama is due to a tech issue (Cloudflare), which is totally solvable and something I can live with. It feels a lot more like Mastodon here than it does on Lemmy.ml. (Lemmy.world seems alright too, if people must use Lemmy.) And at the very least if the Lemmy guys pull something shady and people start leaving en masse there's https://fedia.io/ (another Kbin instance) to point them at.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

So until... Friday, I think? Thursday? There was a difference between Kbin and Lemmy. Kbin used "boosts" for upvotes and "reduces" for downvotes, but Lemmy used "Favorites" for upvotes instead.

Kbin literally flipped the switch right before Reddit started coming over here en masse to follow Lemmy's lead and have it be favorites/reduces instead.

The issue is that the reputation code doesn't seem to have been updated (probably because... y'know, the website exploded). So the reputation displayed on your profile counts "boosts" as upvotes still. IIRC sorting algorithms like "Hot" still use boosts instead of favorites too.

So I'm giving you a boost right now - which should give a +1 to your reputation.

This is just a visual bug for now, though, so it'll probably be fixed when things die down. This site has only been live for a month or so, so there's still bugs here and there.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

The app devs have looked into it. Kbin's API is currently borked (returning errors on all instances), so for now they're focusing on Lemmy.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

There already is an option to turn endless scroll on/off - it's in the settings menu on the side of the screen (hit the little gear icon).

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

People who want Facebook accounts will make Facebook accounts.

The Fediverse isn't going anywhere. There will be plenty of people who don't want to make Facebook accounts, and they will live on existing instances as before.

Note that Meta is trying to make a Twitter clone. The "threadiverse" (Lemmy, Kbin, etc.) - while it can interop with Meta's Twitter clone - will always have a better UI for making content. Kbin and Lemmy will continue to have a reason to exist.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

Bear in mind that there are already large ActivityPub platforms that are run by bad actors. Most of the users of those platforms don't even know they're on the Fediverse.

The one that comes to mind is Trump's Truth Social. Internally, it's built on Mastodon. It can technically federate with anywhere else.

Most places defederate with Truth Social because they don't want to be associated with it - but it's still Fediverse and still technically can interop with everyone else.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • cisconetworking
  • khanakhh
  • mdbf
  • magazineikmin
  • modclub
  • InstantRegret
  • rosin
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • Durango
  • tacticalgear
  • megavids
  • ngwrru68w68
  • everett
  • tester
  • cubers
  • normalnudes
  • thenastyranch
  • osvaldo12
  • GTA5RPClips
  • ethstaker
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •