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Why use MBin instead of Lemmy?
(fedia.io)
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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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I run fedia.io. I also run Infosec.pub. Which is lemmy so I know a lot about both. Lemmy is much more robust, but I personally find the interface for Mbin much nicer and the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy. At least for now.
Jerry ... admin of many instances!
Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here ... it's been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).
Mbin is very community oriented in it's development, collective decision-making and all that. Lemmy is more subject to the ideas of it's creators, for better or for worse.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I picked up by the Beehaw drama is that the Lemmy devs do not seem to be too interested in improving moderation support. I don't know if this is politics related but I wouldn't be surprised.
I think everyone is always interested in improving, but there are a billion different ideas of what improvement looks like. Especially with content moderation.
What is a brilliant way to handle some issues might cause new problems that may or may not be difficult to predict. A lot of people have a lot of ideas, and people feel strongly about it. And most importantly, it's a lot of work to implement and typically not the most fun work for developers who tend to be be underpaid at best anyway.
It seems every fediverse service that gets big enough has people chanting about a hard fork because the developers don't care enough about content moderation. I believe it's probably more that it's extremely difficult, and that developers facing the reality of the situation might come across as dismissive when responding to ideas and suggestions.
The Lemmy developers initially included a filter for numerous slurs - I have a hard time believing they don't want content moderation to be their own vision of as good as possible.
In the end our strength is in fragmentation. I believe, no matter how little moderation tools improve, the small instances I'm on will never get as awful as Reddit. And if they do, I'll migrate to another one that's more trigger-happy about defederating. :)
That said, not sure whether you're wrong and absolutely not correcting you! Just my five cents.
The problem is that them being on a political extremist side of things makes it incredibly hard to take their word for it and to take them at face value. The most trouble Lemmy communities are facing is coming exactly from the spaces that align not just with the devs views, but in case of Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad even the ownership. So when more moderate lefty instances like Beehaw complain about the lack of moderation tools to handle the trolls from those places, it might just be that the devs are completely fine with what's happening.
Yeah, they certainly don't have the same sense of urgency as the rest of us. I don't think it's bad intent as such, it's just that their priorities are very different.
Don't get me wrong - this is a massive part of the reason why I've never bothered to use Lemmy. So I absolutely think you're on to something.
While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.
For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it's the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome ... when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don't really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I've gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.
Point being that it's all probably a bit of a mess that doesn't neatly align with left v right.
I'd bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don't like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I've come to understand over time actually).
What?
They've been defederated from lemmy.ml, lemmygrad and hexbear for much longer though.
I guess that explains the heavy Tankie presence on that instance, which I've negatively noticed as well.
I'm not sure what your point here regarding Beehaw is though.
And here you lost me completely. What right-wing-ish instances are we talking about? Because I have yet to see anything that even mildly steers into that direction. And what moderation? Banning non far left positions and those who talk back against far left disinformation? Just look at their news sub and how much mod abuse & disinformation there is. Tankies can freely insult people and the mods do absolutely nothing. Correct disinformation and you get banned. If that's an issue for the admins, then they could actually do something about it, since they literally own that instance.
"Demanding open source users" is a nice way of framing community demands negatively. lol
They're not defederated from lemmy.ml
That they're defederated from lemmy.world, a centrist/mainstream/reddit-like whatever instance, which plenty of others have trouble with too, indicating things aren't as simple as "left instances are trouble".
It's apparently historical, so prob 2020 or so.
Well it can cut both ways I think. That open source burn out is real and that open source has attained a strangely consumerist culture is real. If you're not aware you may not be plugged in enough. That of course is no excuse to neglect your community, I'd likely agree with you that the lemmy devs could do significantly better on that front. I think I've even seen them admit as much.
Thanks for answering! Nothing against fedia, after all I'm posting from here, just asked out of curiosity.. would've been fun if the local magazines were somewhat more active. Though I guess there lies the fediverse's strength, of being able to post and read in this collection for example.
There’s a reason for that. About a year ago, Reddit started to implode. I set up Infosec.pub and Fedia to give people an alternative. There was a huge influx of people here creating all sorts of magazines, the same that you would see on Reddit. Fedia ran kbin at the time and it had all manner of problems, and over time people sort of wandered away. Either because they were tired of the problems or because they went back to Reddit.
In any event, what we see in the local magazines is the remnants of that initial migration. I really need to go and clean them up.
Now that Fedia is on mbin, things are much better. We still have issues now and then, but generally things work well.
Thanks for this! I escaped Reddit to Kbin.social to Kbin.run, and now landed at Fedia.io. I need to reconstruct some of the communities I started on the previous two. And will soon. It's just gotten a bit busy IRL.
Unrelated, but does anyone know what happened to kbin.run?
The admin deleted all of his accounts and the kbin.run server without warning a few days ago.
Well that sucks, I was enjoying that instance. Oh well, Fedia will do, mostly the same in the end 🤷♂️
Unfortunately the risk of joining something hosted by usually lone individuals. I'm guessing the admin has mental issues, some life event happened and they decided to vanish. Sucks to do things this sudden and without warning though.
Why are you guessing the mental issues part? Has the admin given any indications of that in the past?
Because, it sounds to me, that if he was running a free service on his free time because he felt like it, then he doesn't owe anybody anything. He can simply vanish for the simple reason that he got bored, and that should be enough.
Because people don't normally just remove all of their projects and accounts from one day to another.
I don't know, man. To me that's still speculation. But did say you were guessing, so that's okay. I just thought that you had a clear indicator of mental issues.
It could very well be that someone started stalking him, or sending him death threats, and he simply said "yeah, fuck this."
Or that he started the project to get some groupie ass, then got ass, then he was done with it all.
Or he got bored and moved on to the next interesting thing.
I'm trying! :P
I originally chose Kbin/Mbin over Lemmy because of the added support for Mastodon-like posts, but it's still suffers from wonky early adopter stuff. I still rather like Mbin's interface more than Lemmy's defaults, though Lemmy's support for third party front ends is very cool. Whichever way you go, I'm happy that Mbin and Lemmy have access to all the same content. Mbin could grow more if some of a magazine's custom CSS could federate to other instances, or if it supported bots like Lemmy.
Oh dang, I'm gonna have to look into PieFed, though. That looks good! I'd like to see how my community looks, but I think a registered piefed.social user has to do this community lookup for federation to begin.
Haha I definitely appreciate /m/FloatingIsFun, also great stylesheet
An offtopic but federation is not working on fedia.io right now.
I fixed it a few hours ago, but it takes a while to catch up.
From a moderator perspective it seems essential to have a microblogging section, because otherwise people make entire posts for simple questions or personal achievements. That plagues Reddit, drags down the whole site.
I still think it's missing something though, streaming video service support. Mbin's idea of combining known socials works great in that respect. Text and image, but needs video support. P2P maybe, no storage needed.
P2P? How is that supposed to work? You cannot expect every user that uploads a video to even have remotely enough uptime for any arbitrary interested person to successfully watch their video
Only for streaming and I'm just brainstorming, I don't actually know how it would work. I'm just thinking about what mbin needs to be truly next generation rather than just a Reddit replacement
Reddit didn't replace anything directly, it innovated. And whatever comes after will have to innovate as well
I love seeing simple questions and personal achievement posts though.
On mbin you'll still see them, just in a separate section. And that's only my perspective too, communities you join might dislike my methods entirely.
I just tried to see them and I couldn't. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place though. I saw dates but not the actual posts/comments.