Lemmy.ml is run by tankies who brook no criticism of Russia for its conduct of the war in Ukraine. I was on there, saw posts about the war being deleted and users who raise even pointed criticism at the mods/admins for their Russophilia get banned.
The Lemmy devs are actively asking for donations and every Lemmy instance - apollo.town and vlemmy.net included links to the join-lemmy.org landing page with donation links, so I'm a bit more wary of the whole construct. Perhaps the instance admins mean well - but at the end of the day, they and their instances are soliciting links that finance tankies. That's a no-go for me personally. But each to their own.
Some of the Kbin criticism in those posts is valid, though.
Kbin is not "production ready" software and it's missing a lot of Quality of Life features for instance admins.
It's hard to deploy, hard to to troubleshoot, operate and update. It's not packaged. We users are missing moderation and migration tools necessary to deal with the federated nature of the content (moving instances, content filtering etc)
But such is life on the bleeding edge.
I fully understand if fedi-admins don't want to spend all their free time fiddling with the instance. Many of them are volunteers. It's their choice and no one can fault them for installing Lemmy instead.
Ernest has stated multiple times the project is just a prototype and it very clearly is. People are working on it though. The tracker isn't exploding with issues anymore and Ernest seems to be back working on pull requests instead of battling with the server load, There's 53 of them currently - and they're from multiple contributors. It's going to take some time, but seems there's good work being done - by multiple devs.
Starting a software flamewar between Lemmy and Kbin seems incredibly silly and unproductive though, so I'll just say this - the fediverse puts lot of decision making power into the hands of users. There is choice. So use the stuff that works for you personally. No need to build walls, throw FUD or talk down the other software product or act as a knight in shining white armor for the one you happen to use and prefer.
There's space for everyone and there's space for multiple software projects and products. There's no division.
Politicizing the topic through the means of tribalism is certainly an objective of interests against the fediverse so undoubtedly we will see more of that happening as unfortunate as that is. There are absolutely parties interested in pushing manufactured division and creating "us vs them" camps. I certainly hope that most users steer away from the quite frankly silly discussions of why one is better than the other. At the end of the day it should simply be a personal choice based on perhaps aesthetics or some other set of minuscule factors rather than politics. In regards to kbin and it's currently limited functionality: many of today's large platforms began in a very similar fashion. I personally enjoy the quirkiness of kbin and my proverbial hat is off to Ernest for the effort he has put into this.
With eyes on the future of the fediverse, I would prefer not ending up with another Facebook-like situation where 'one place' is the 'default' place - where the 'default' place is run by people less trustworthy than Mark Zuckerberg.
It won't. There will be different federations with different politics, specially on the NSFW content, corporatism level and global militantism. All these instances will be incompatible and will defederate and refederate differently.
You will have a Microsoft instance, which will never federate with google or facebook or amazon or Apple. They won't share their customers. Lower brands will probably federate for techsupport for example, etc. This will be interesting to watch.
We won't stay on kbin forever anyway. Let's face it, if we are on kbin it's because we fled reddit and we saw that lemmy was...weird. As soon as a sane other implementation of a forum/microblogging using activitypub is proven to be robust there will be another migration. And it will probably involve actors like Facebook and co.
Now that people made the initial jump of leaving reddit they will be more inclined to making another jump to a platform that suit them better.
But it won't be just about technicalities but also about language and community. I'm not a fan of the lemmy agenda, but I'm also not a fan of the american soft power leaking in every sub. And to fight this a regional instance of activitypub tools will be very welcome.
I feel it's also important to add that, at least in my understanding, Ernest never meant to be next large content aggregator CEO. From what I gather, he is a dev first and foremost, who was publicly alpha-testing what he built as an alternative to lemmy. Somehow this test instance ended up being a reddit migration outlet which he is now trying to keep alive all the while developing its underlying software. That's at least two substantially different full-time jobs with very diverse objectives. It's a miracle it all works as well as it does, tbh.
Give it time to settle down. Mastodon vs. Pleroma vs. Misskey, and recently Akkoma vs. Calckey, etc etc etc. all of this stuff isn't really new. Use this. No use that.
Just use what you like. I prefer /kbin. Likely will always. If someone judges me for using a software they don't, then I probably didn't want to talk to them anyway.
Also keep in mind that /kbin was in very, very slow development for a very long time before a lot of things all happened at once. Very much a passion project. Like this is someone building a shed in their garage for their garden except somehow now suddenly 50 thousand people are in your garden and they all want in.
One of the things that really seemed to spook new Mastodon users late last year was the fact that there were multiple microblogging platforms on the Fediverse. Telling someone who lamented the lack of quote-tweets, for instance, that Calckey and Misskey had quotes, and they could use those instead, brought people out of the woodwork to argue somewhat vigorously that people should kind of shut up about both the missing features and the alternative piecds of software.
They wanted Mastodon to win.
I partially wonder if it's the centralized, disconnected social web that's to blame. You can't read Facebook posts from Twitter, so the idea that there was no meaningful different to Mastodon users if people they followed used Calckey maybe just wasn't something they groked, and they saw the suggestion of options as a threat?
I'm really not sure, but that kind of behaviour went away with time.
My worry is that Lemmy does as Mastodon does, and doesn't display the instance type of other users. Most microblogs other than Mastodon show what kind of service a post came from. It keeps people aware of what the Fediverse really is - people using many different bits of kit to talk to each other. Meanwhile, on Mastodon it just looks like everyone is using Mastodon, and that the Fediverse is Mastodon, and discussion of anything else is an attack on the Fediverse.
I would like to see instance signifies on other users in kbin and in Lemmy, but if the Lemmy Devs are financially motivated to hide that they're usersaare interacting eith other services... Well, I don't like that.
I do think we‘ll eventually have some sort of split among corporate/anti-corporate instances in the fediverse as companies like Meta begin to intrude and some defederate while others do not. Similar to how it is now with the tankie instance and some defederating from them. In which case, I‘ll be hanging out somewhere among the anti-corporate instances.
My take on the fediverse is that it‘s all about enabling people to find a community which feels comfortable and if it doesn‘t exist, there is the tools to build it.
I mean the same thing that happened to reddit: the intrusion of american culture in the platform.
Is it normal that europeans know the american constitution better than their own? No, this is the result of soft power.
This is a known concept in Europe, some people tend to import problems from remote countries into their own. How many times did a subject completely unique to america popped up in a discussion where it wasn't relevant? Very often. Now take the opposite, when did americans stopped talking about the subject of like microtransactions in gaming and started to talk about Italian politics instead? Never. But start talking about any of the subject below and you will unleash more and more comments. Even if it's among europeans.
Example: gun laws, we all have an opinion about american gun laws. Even as europeans we have an opinion about american gun laws. But do you have an opinion about Greek gun laws?
another example: prisons
another example: no cake for lgbtq
another example: gerrymandering
So far the noise level is low on kbin, but it's growing steadily, I can see it. It is inherent to America, (and somehow uk). They have a business in making people mad, in feeding them anything that will polarize them and make them angry. And of course people will talk about these subjects on their social networks. The net result is that we end up talking and talking about america. That's why I'm talking about regionalization of instances. It's about talking with people who will join because they are interested in a specific subject, but will eventually end up discussing about other things which will still be relevant to you, to where you live. We can only care so much about the governor of Florida.
During the Twitter migration waves late last year, many new arrivals were rather disappointed, or even irritated, to find that search was hampered and that quote-posts didn't exist. I had many, often lengthy, discussions with such folks trying to inform them that literally everything they were asking for was already available, just... "Over there" * points off to the side *
These users didn't really get it, despite my best efforts. Obviously, my best explanations were not up to the job of helping these folks grok the situation, which is fine. Sometimes when things feel intuitive to you, you lose sight of the parts that really throw people off. I expected such communication blocks. What I didn't expect was people who were in no way associated with the discussion to start interjecting with rather strong words and feelings about, well, anything but Mastodon existing.
They behaved as if discussions of other Fedivese microblogs themselves were some sort of existential threat to the Fediverse. The people arriving were struggling to understand that they could use something other than Mastodon to interact with people and content on Mastodon, and these folks were popping up in their DMs to accuse people trying to show them other possibilities of, well, basically "stealing users" from Mastodon.
As if it were a competition.
It was very, very weird, and I strongly suspect that those users were also new and didn't understand the relationship between Mastodon, *key, and the Fediverse at large. And that this kind of boosterism led to a not insignificant number of users going back to Twitter because Mastodon just didn't work "how things are supposed to work".
Incidentally, where in kbin does it show what type of service other users are using? I'm not seeing anything like that in the UI. The best I've found is being able to see the user's full username@host name, which... Well, let's just say that if I spun up "kbin.fun" using lemmy, knowing that I was using kbin.fun would in no way inform you that it was actually a lemmy-based website.
Dark or light. #iOS or #Android. You’ll get theming options to personalize your #Threadiverse experience with #ArtemisApp! Shout out to our designer @lvndr!
How did Lemmy.world become more popular than Lemmy.ml?
I don’t understand how Lemmy.world developers managed to surpass both Lemmy.ml and Beehaw.org instances in user activity.
NEW: Update & Clarification on Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points on kbin
Ernest just posted some comments clarifying recent changes to Votes, Boosts, Favorites, and Reputation Points:...
OC Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?
It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place....
Where to start with final fantasy?
I’m thinking about picking some up in the summer sale but have no idea where to start with them. Any suggestions?
Commenting now works in Artemis!
I'm developing an iOS and Android app for Lemmy called Bean and I'm looking for testers (forms.gle)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/925265...
Kotaku Staff Furious After Owner Announces Move to AI Content (futurism.com)
G/O Media, an online media company that owns Gizmodo and Kotaku has announced that it will begin a "modest test" of AI content on its sites.
Showing off some of the themes for Artemis (coming soon) (tech.lgbt)
Dark or light. #iOS or #Android. You’ll get theming options to personalize your #Threadiverse experience with #ArtemisApp! Shout out to our designer @lvndr!