I’m a bit confused with my options here. I am looking at Reddit alternatives and see a lot of people flocking to lemmy but it seemed like kbin was the more centrist option?
Apparently lemmy was set up by a tankie and has some CCP propaganda and other problematic background?
https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379
I have accounts with both and definitely seems like kbin is struggling compared to lemmy but that could just be because lemmy is better established? What are people’s thoughts?
I’ll paste here what I wrote on reddit a few days ago about the same topic
I think it’s important to distinguish Lemmy as a software from Lemmy as an implementation (servers).
The software is opensource, noone “owns” that kind of software, many people contribute to it, anyone can fork it, modify it, and setup their own servers with it, regardless of the belief of the one who started the project.
Now, telling people to avoid the “main server”/“grad whatever” is fine, because those are the servers in which those “political views” are expressed.
But any instance of it? It doesn’t make sense, many new Lemmy servers are popping up because of redditors trying the platform, and surely people setting them up now have nothing to do with what the main devs believe.
You can’t put everyone in the same basket, it would be like saying that anyone having an iPhone is in favor of child labor, or that anyone eating Nutella is in favor of destroying the Amazon forest, or whatever other example you can think of products we consume daily that are detrimental to the health of our planet.
Heck even Reddit got investments from Tencent, a Chinese company, and we all know what the Chinese government thinks of human rights, yet we’re here using the product.
Where to draw the line is of course a personal matter, but again, it doesn’t do any good to “categorize” everyone based on the views of a few.
adding
Not to mention that kbin and lemmy are federated, they “talk” to each other, so if your only reason to choose kbin over lemmy is to avoid lemmy communities, you’re out of luck, you’ll see them all on kbin too.
Thanks this does make sense obviously and you seem to know what your talking about so I’ll ask this:
Am I right that searching for a kbin community/magazine on Lemmy, or vice versa, will only pull in new posts on that community as well?
For example I just searched for the home assistant community on kbin and found nothing local, so it pulled up the lemmy home assistant community, “great!” I thought, but when I go to look at the posts it shows a number of posts,but not the actual posts, instead directing me to go to the original source to view old posts. In that instance then I am taken directly to lemmy from kbin and can’t post using my kbin account. This seems like a bit of a limitation of the federated community if you want to take part in historical/existing threads on another server.
Adding to wht has been said about the current load. Obviously, everyone was taken by surprise, getting so much attention while still at finishing the platforms. So this is a stress test and it shows that quite some optimising needs to be done before the thing can accomodate millions of users. From a developer’s POV, this must be welcomed because it could not be simulated.
The other thing is, that the federation has been purposefully limited to pull in only a bunch of recent posts, i assume for reasons of efficiency. IDK if this will get changed but i guess that some of the devs will want to address the issue of complete replication at some point, given that there will be a requirement to be able to back-up/migrate communities and user accounts. It’s perhaps a kind of non-trivial task that can severely impact database performance if not done correctly. That’s not the top priority ATM, though.
The kbin server is massively overloaded right now so things like federation of messages are badly impacted. But once that is over you should see the the same content in a group no matter where you follow it from.
On top of every community being massively overloaded right now as myk said, kbin had to set up an attack protection, temporarily, because the servers couldn’t hold the load.
It’s probably not a real attack, just immense load, but in any case, all that seriously disrupts the communication between the 2 platforms.
Nothing is working as intended right now, we have to wait a few weeks probably, until the reddit influx slows down and things go back to normal, before we can truly see how the federation is supposed to work.
Thanks, that’s sober and very reasonable. One objection though …
This is not a fair comparison. Ultimately, the only way of combating bad corporate behaviour is sincerely having one’s awareness follow consequence, and that means not to buy from such companies. Else that’s cognitive dissonance. In the case of free and open stuff however, we do not “buy” it in that same sense, but we own it if we wish. Therefore, the only responsibility we have lies in what we do with the product, ourselves. If we use it for doing bad things, then there is no-one else to blame.
It’s true that we need to be aware of corporate behavior and do out best to avoid products, my point is our life is so full of bad things that if we had to avoid them all, we’d end up living as hermits completely cut out from the rest of the world.
It’s not feasible, we all need to make some compromises, tho where to draw the line is a personal matter, as I said.
My point is also that we should be coherent as much as possible, so if you use Reddit that’s part owned by Chinese investors, you can’t be so against everything about Lemmy because of political reasons, it’s not coherent.
The purpose of my comparison is to explain those points, it doesn’t matter if you don’t “buy” opensource, some people are not familiar at all with how opensource works, but I believe my comparisons can still be understandable to them.
I get it. If one isn’t aware or if there are really no viable alternatives. It’s just that those examples you took are just not in that category. If one goes like, “I really dislike tha company for how it operates but i like the product they make in that way, so i will support that company by buying the product” – that’s called a cognitive dissonance. The world is not going to get any better by our indolence.
btw. fun fact, this man here is living half of his time in a cave. :-D