The Eldritch Rain :Eldritchness: (@rain)

It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place.... #fediverse #lemmy #kbin #fud #tribalism #tankies #rexxit #reddit #artemis #kbinMeta

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.

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.

@0xtero I truly resonate with this message! The Lemmy admins are sus and I'd much prefer hosting Kbin over Lemmy. It is truly just a pain that the difference between getting a functioning Kbin instance running vs a functioning Lemmy instance is so great.