Good to know! I guess we will have to wait for ernest to come back then to enable it on kbin.social.

I hope he is doing well, his last post mentioned a hospital visit.

Very well said and you have captured many of my exact fears.

Personally, if the decentralized fediverse was more developed and mature, I would not be as concerned about federating with Threads. But, Meta is entering at a time when everything is really just starting to develop.

They’ll be the big instance and they’ll have a lot of influence over the others as a result.

Just to give an example, What would happen if Lemmy.world decided to cut off kbin? Kbin would lose a ton of content and access to most of the large communities. Threads, thanks to Meta’s resources and huge Instagram user base, will likely gain more active users and communities than lemmy in no time and they could do the same. The difference is I believe Meta may be more likely to down the line because an open fediverse doesn’t fit super nicely into their business model.

I understand many people disagree and that is fine; nobody knows the future. If we decide to federate with Threads then so be it, and if it turns out I am totally wrong then I will eat my words. All I am trying to articulate is that I think there is reason to be skeptical of Meta.

While I agree the web app is not the perfect solution, I think it actually works fairly well all things considered. It will never be as smooth as an actual app, but I think time will eventually fix that.

Artemis being abandoned was very disappointing, but there are other developers working on adding kbin support - Lunar for Lemmy is one of them: https://kbin.social/m/lunar@lemmy.world/t/682006/Kbin-Support

Lunar is being developed for iOS. I think there is another one being developed for android but I forget the name.

If it weren't real life I'd like to see that go down lmao.

It would also be hilarious to see Trump's reaction to being taken down by the Swifties.

I hope you're right. I was definitely one of those people who thought Hillary was a slam dunk and thought Trump would never win.

I've not been confident in an election cycle since. I want to be optimistic and say Trump will sink himself and that we will all have the satifaction of seeing his ass in prison. But, he has weasled his way out of every negative consequence in his life and survived political scandals that would have sunk any other politician.

The dude is a cult.

Can’t say I feel too bad for him.

He should have known this would happen once he agreed that one person could motion to vacate. His only chance was for democrats to come to the rescue, but he dealt them in bad faith.

On the bright side, everyone got to see how disorganized the republicans in congress are. The downside is now we have a crazy religious lunatic with porn-monitoring software on his phone as speaker of the house.

Incredibly shortsighted. This conflict has no easy solution and everyone involved wants Biden to take their side.

The trouble here is that the democrats coalition has stakes in both sides. This entire conflict was practically a gift to the republicans.

I understand what you are saying here, and I have flip-flopped on the issue myself. At the moment I personally am a fan of the limited downvote federation because I do think it acts as a hivemind barrier; to use reddit as an example, as it got bigger the downvote was used as a means to disagree without adding any value to the discussion or to simply silence a dissenting point of view.

That is not to say there were not times when a downvote was warranted - hateful comments, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry are all more than deserving of a downvote. There are also bots and general off-topic posts & comments that may warrant a downvote.

Overall though, I think the problem is how the downvote was used (on Reddit, at least) was not conducive to discussion. However, due to the fact that upvotes and downvotes are public on kbin it is possible that behavior could change, but then that could create problems with other instances where none of that information is public to begin with. (Nobody wants to have a crazy person come after them over a downvote.)

Right now, the fediverse is pretty small and Kbin is actually the most welcoming instance I have found so far. I am not sure if the lack of downvote federation has anything to do with this, but so far I actually like it. Maybe once kbin and the expanded fediverse grows larger my opinion will change, but right now I feel like it’s helping to make it more hospitable than reddit.

Edit: grammar and clarity

To the surprise of no one here, they are continuing to make reddit worse.

There is truth to this. But, Reddit’s drama also put the spotlight on the fediverse and the need for alternatives to Reddit in general. Personally, I can say I did not even know it existed. Over the last ten-or-so years, Reddit really did develop a monopoly on forums. The progress we have seen with Kbin, lemmy, etc is because of their heavy-handed and poorly executed crackdown on third-party apps.

But still, you are correct that the fediverse was not yet a full-fledged alternative to Reddit in June. Many lemmy clients, such as Memmy or Mlem, were not ready yet. And most promising Kbin client, Artemis, is still in beta as well. Even Kbin itself is still technically a beta (not that I don’t love them both lol). Had all of these been ready in June, then I think the Reddit exodus would have been much more dramatic and impactful.

I think we need to give it a bit more time. After all, Reddit didn’t get huge overnight either. So long as we keep posting and commenting away, and create environments/communities that are welcoming, we should be able to eventually grow into something that can rival Reddit.

I wish I could say I’m surprised.

To the right, the “rights of a fetus” are only relevant when its convenient to their agenda. Otherwise, they don’t exist. They’ll shamelessly use whatever arguments are in their arsenal to achieve their version of reality. Consistency and hypocrisy be damned.

It actually already is a feature. Kbin puts it upfront, and I think lemmy also has a way to access it.

I think it remains to be seen whether or not it’s a good idea.

I’ve seen some people say they like the idea because it make people think twice about downvoting - it cuts back on the instinctive “I don’t like this so I am gonna downvote.”

But, as you said, do we really want people coming after you because you downvoted them? There are crazy ass people out there, and if you ever get doxxed it could be a problem.

Maybe that last point is hyperbole, but crazy people are gonna do crazy things.