As you may have heard, Reddit’s decided to pull a Twitter and start charging an extortionate amount of money for access to their previously-free API, in order to drive third-party clients like Apollo and RIF into extinction. Under Reddit’s proposed pricing, …
Because they’re both part of the Fediverse, Lemmy and Kbin do federate with each other. You can follow Lemmy “communities” in Kbin, and Kbin “magazines” in Lemmy, and I believe other Fediverse groups (like Frendica groups) also federate.
I’ve been leaning into this from Kbin, as a way of dipping into communities on Beehaw and other Lemmy instances while keeping my distance from Lemmy’s devs.
I have one concern. As we’re seeing with Reddit, it’s a huge effort to move internet communities. If Lemmy-the-app becomes untenable even for more reasonably admin’d instances, then the most obvious solution won’t be to fork Lemmy (a huge undertaking) but rather to move to an app that’s maintained by more reasonable people. That’s probably going to involve a messy migration, some data loss, some loss of community, and some dead links.
I’ll keep using Kbin as a way of tapping into existing communities, but when it comes to building new ones I’d much rather see it done on kbin.social or other Fediverse instances where there’s no long-term dependency on Lemmy’s devs.
What’s wrong with Lemmy’s devs?
The linked article summarizes the problems in the paragraph starting “I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time”. For an alternative view: the Fedi.Tips account on Mastodon – typically a cheerleader for all apps of the FediVerse – shared some more pointed words about them in this thread and reiterated the warning just yesterday after noticing the Lemmy team’s successful recruitment campaign on Reddit.
I was one of the people they recruited, and ran into problems myself only after signing up at lemmy.ml and being surprised by the amount of CCP propaganda posted there. At first I thought it was strange that I was being downvoted for pointing it out, and that the devs (also admins of that instance) ignored/downvoted me when I flagged the issue for their attention. After researching a bit, I found that Lemmy’s basically developed and maintained by two people, both of whom seem to be westerners fetishizing Mao Zedong Thought – literally to the point of writing lengthy apologetics for the CCP’s human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.
They’re clearly skilled engineers, but I can’t trust or support them, and relying on instance of Lemmy means I’d have to do both.
they’re also pretty open about this, it’s not some dark secret.
Absolutely. The details do seem to surprise people, but I think that’s because they’re often elided in euphemistic summaries and don’t stand out in someone’s profile history the way that trolling and right-wing invective often do.
It’s not like they’re all-caps yelling about gas ovens, they’re just politely welcoming people into their instance and occasionally upvoting or suggesting that wellactually everything’s fine in XinJiang and it’s racist to believe Uyghurs who say otherwise, etc.
And I’m pretty open about not wanting to support a site ran by people who think like that
They’re tankies, and theres a lot of pro ccp and north korean propaganda on lemmy.
@tojikomori This 1000%.
While I can’t say I agree with the political views of the lemmy devs (at least as described in this article, as I have no other reference point), I think that it shows one of the really cool things about the fediverse. So what if those guys over there are weirdos? I can take the ball they gave me and go play somewhere else with other people.
Yeah can’t say i am on board with the hardcore tankie stuff but like you said that’s a positive of the fediverse other instances can choose not to play with them. Been on lemmy only for a few days but so far i haven’t seen anything terrible, no more than the shit popping up on reddit now lol.
All the really obnoxious Tankie stuff seems to be contained to Lemmygrad, at least. I’m glad they had the foresight to cordon it off from their showcase instance.
I mean, Reddit had its share of tankies too. A lot of the Lemmygrad stuff is just copies of the Reddit garbage.
Reddit is giving me huge “digg” vibes at the moment. Also, they might want to remove NSFW content next.
That second part is going to be harder to replicate as no instance currently wants the task/responsibility of moderating that content.
Haven’t heard about the NSFW thing so far. Any source on that? I guess they will suffer like tumblr then.
That seems like a pretty good write-up overall. I guess I may do some more poking around on lemmygrad to see what the devs really think about the Russia/Ukraine war, but ultimately their politics are irrelevant to how they build this service as a whole from a technical perspective and I can still happily use Lemmy even if I disagree with them. Lemmy enables people to have different opinions in their communities on their respective servers and I respect that the Lemmy devs are keeping their political beliefs more or less out of Lemmy.ml.
However, Kbin maps upvotes to boosts, and displays “favourites” (which include Lemmy upvotes) separately.
Does anyone know if that applies for both threads and replies? I think it make some sense for threads. Would get a bit annoying though if you followed some kbin account on mastodon or similar and every single upvote for every single reply gets boosted.
It applies to both for now. I opened a thread about this yesterday and as Kichae said, it’s something the dev is experimenting with and is open to discussing. They also helpfully shared a roundup of links to past discussions on this topic.
For now I’ve created a separate Fediverse account for my Kbin activity (this one!) which seems to be what most people are doing on Lemmy anyway, but I agree it’ll be nice to change Kbin’s behavior so it’s a less jarring experience for followers on other Fediverse apps.
I think it’s both. The dev says it’s something he’s experimenting with - kbin is very early in development - and who knows if that will stick or not.
Where can I get help with kbin? Is there a magazine for support?
