[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

It's written in PHP, which a lot of devs dislike.

It is drowning in pull requests: 83 open as of right now. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls

Ernest (the lead dev) wasn't really expecting it to blow up yet. Kbin was created in January of this year, and the first "major" instance was launched in May. It blew up basically instantly due to Reddit imploding, and Ernest has been playing catch-up.

But it still has rough edges - no API means no mobile apps. Lots of bugs and such from being a new project. It's improving every week (including an API in code review), but Lemmy is more polished and has an relatively mature API.

You can see a list of instances here: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

As far as I know, there isn't specifically a privacy-focused instance like what Lemmy has. But I also didn't browse that list of instances too closely.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I'm sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I've spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it's pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we'd have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it's been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn't an option obviously since it's run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they'd like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It's also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I'm thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they've simply not been the best stewards of the project - it's succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Agreed. Fuck tankies.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

I'm also in Vulkan on Linux with an AMD card. I don't get those black boxes.

The main menu has terrible framerate, but everywhere else is acceptable through Proton (45-50). DX11 has great framerate on the main menu, but like 8-10 FPS ingame (my Windows partition can hold a steady 60).

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

That's because they check your user agent.

This API aims to break those kinds of extensions, making it impossible to spoof a user agent or certain kind of machine.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

I love everyone always saying "Lemmy, what's XYZ?" or whatever not realizing there's a good chunk of people not on Lemmy.

It does get annoying when I see Lemmy-specific questions in my feed, though.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland@kbin.social during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.

There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:

  • Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.

  • Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.

  • Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).

We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

There's also Century Club (more than 100k karma) and the 10 Year Club (account older than 10 years).

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

/r/196 was a popular sub on Reddit, about 500k subscribers. A lot of them were dedicated users who were very active and had recognizable usernames.

196 was one of the first major subs to shut down and point everyone to the fediverse. It helps that 196 was very LGBTQ-friendly and Blahaj.zone is also very explicitly LGBTQ-friendly, so it was a good match.

196 creates a lot of content because their "rule" was anytime you visited the sub you had to leave an image, whether it was a repost or not. This also works very well for a nascent fediverse where not a lot of OC is being made yet.

Thus 196 was pretty much in the perfect position to become one of the biggest places on the fediverse.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

For Lemmy, if nobody is subscribed to that community on your instance you have to copy the entire URL. E.g. you need to search for https://instance.social/c/sub in order to find !sub@instance.social.

Once one person on your instance searches for it, then you can find it by searching !sub@instance.social.

I don't know why Lemmy works like that. Kbin doesn't have the problem; you can find things by searching @sub@instance.social no matter what.

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Reddit sees "anonymized" data as being okay via GDPR. Thus Reddit thinks they can comply with GDPR by simply deleting your name off of the top of all the comments you leave behind.

This is why you occasionally see comments marked as written by [deleted] with the comment body intact - that user used the GDPR to wipe their account.

I'm not an expert on any legal system, let alone the European one, and so I can't say if that's sufficient by the letter of the law. But Reddit seems to think so, and thus if you "delete" your stuff it really just deletes your username (basically).

[-] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The moderators organizing the protest had been trying to organize their own thing for a while to port their communities over.

It's becoming increasingly obvious that the "own thing" was untenable; too many differences to reconcile. Different mod teams had given up on the process and have already started to make places on Lemmy/Kbin.

Remaining closed is seemingly impossible; if you remain closed, Reddit will replace you within 24 hours). That's not a bluff; Reddit has done it (and is creating more and more powermods in the process as these big subreddits get centralized into the hands of giant powermods that cooperate with the admins).

With that in mind, they've decided the best way to damage Reddit is from within Reddit itself. Over the last couple days they've been putting together guidance on how to stay within the letter of Reddit's rules while maintaining the protest. Among that guidance is tips to make Reddit as miserable as possible while heavily promoting alternative communities. Everything is officially following Reddit's rules to the letter, so if the admins punish these communities they're proving those rules to be a farce.

A lot of places are now making the jump to alternate communities. Some are on the fediverse (here's a list), some aren't. But now it's "official" guidance from the protest leaders, so expect to see a lot more advertising for Lemmy/Kbin from subreddits that participated in the protest.

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EnglishMobster

joined 1 year ago