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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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?
