It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place.
With the influx come new points of view, new kinds of users with different expectations. This change is already visible, with obvious trolls and attention seekers throwing out bait. What if there is more to it however?
Browsing casually I noticed more and more kbin posts critical of its development, its functioning, and the speed at which @ernest is able to implement updates.
I find it odd that, while denouncing kbin for its current flaws in deployment (despite being clearly stated to be in alpha) the owner of that instance proceeds to praise Lemmy and wave away concerns regarding its devs who
(Lemmy devs) are willing to create a product that makes the entire internet better, and share it with everyone, for free, regardless of your beliefs.
despite having proven that their politics do affect their product.
“Just defederate” in my opinion also is not an argument. It’s closing your eyes to a problem propagated by those who benefit from influence from the shadows - on both sides of the political spectrum.
Hence my mention of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and Tribalism.
Pushing users towards a preferred platform (in this case, Lemmy) by seeding threadiverse posts with statements such as
- kbin isn’t ready
- kbin won’t have the same engagement as Lemmy
- the single kbin dev @ernest doesn’t have enough time/skill
- it will never be as good as Reddit
will just lead to Reddit 2.0 painted in red and yellow. As kbin users, we should combat this kind of behavior.
We’re all here for a better threadiverse, and a singular means of interacting will not be beneficial to its growth. The reason we’re here is because we want a Reddit-like environment, not a single ‘frontpage of the internet’. Tribalism in the threadiverse will get us nowhere fast.
Perhaps it was unintentional that kbin was not federating properly with Lemmy instances. What I am afraid of is, knowing the track record of Lemmy devs, it follows a scary trajectory, reminiscent of a few tried and true tactics Reddit and others have used before.
I’d like to state that I am not unbiased. I am helping out with Artemis, a kbin app currently in development.
I do not want to support or make use of Lemmy for many reasons. However, I could not care less if someone is from a Lemmy instance, or if I interact with them in that same space. If I see Lemmy.ml/Lemmygrad.ml behind their name, I will be cautious of their intentions however.
Let’s hope we, not as ‘rexxiters’, ‘kbinauts’ or ‘lemmings’, but as fediverse users can actually create a product that makes the entire internet better, and share it with everyone, for free, regardless of our beliefs.
kbin isn’t ready
It isn’t? Its rough, but since most hosting issues where solved its been a stable and nice experience.
kbin won’t have the same engagement as Lemmy
Who cares, both are just ActivityPub and are compatible with each other.
the single kbin dev @ernest doesn’t have enough time/skill
One ernest is better then 100 tankies.
it will never be as good as Reddit
Now that is clearly clownish, the bar is very low when it comes to being “as good as reddit”
I find the kbin website to work rather well, it’s good work. Also the backend seems stable for now, I didn’t notice any hiccups recently when commenting. If things can be made simpler and more intuitive over time, it does seem like a viable alternative.
On your first line, agreed 100%.
I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.
I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.
And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).
Why do we want another reddit? Why don’t we want something better/different/more engaging than reddit? Reddit has made the mistakes, we can learn from them. And even better, we don’t have angels to make happy at the end of it all. Just us.