I'm more satisfied with my experience here personally. I don't scroll for hours, I read a couple articles, maybe comment on them and move on. If I come across something interesting that isn't already posted in my community here, I'll actually post it because it might actually get some engagement.

One reddit, my post would either be removed by overzealous mods or generally ignored. I had one instance where I posted a question on r/askScience. I searched before I posted but couldn't find a post that asked the same question. A mod removed it saying that it was too similar to other posts. When I asked which post it was similar to, the mod said "You need to search for yourself, we aren't librarians" then muted me for 10 days so I couldn't respond. The sheer ego trip of the matter just appalled me. I thought that a community about scientific inquiry would be a bit more open, but nope - just as toxic as every other sub.

It's an interesting conundrum for sure, but I think a lot of people are looking at this the wrong way. People seem to want what they used to have on reddit: one massive community for each topic. In reality, federated services like Kbin and Lemmy are like lots of small reddits. Each instance has its own group of users and it's own magazines/communities.

This is a bit like how things used to be before gigantic sites like reddit were around. If there was a particular interest you wanted to follow or discuss, you would seek out a forum site that catered specifically to that interest. You might have a few different sites that you would log into to see new posts, add comments, etc. This fostered some pretty tight knit communities where you might actually get to know other users because they're might only be a couple hundred active users or even less.

And there might have been some overlap between those forums. If you're into cars, you might participate in one forum specifically for corvette owners and also a more general car enthusiast forum. Both of those sites might have boards dedicated to a particular model of corvette. The difference now is that you only need one account to participate in both forums.

And when a forum site would shut down, either the owners would give notice ahead of time so that users could relocate, or if the site disappeared, users were left to find new places to congregate on their own.

Kbin.social is a general forum whose purpose is to provide users with a centralized place to log in to to discuss a variety of topics. I think as the fediverse continues to spread, we'll see more specialized instances. Midwest.social is a good example of that that I am aware of.

So as it pertains to magazine ownership and faith in moderators and admins, is it really all that different from what we've been doing? If a magazine owner starts doing something that the community doesn't like, someone can create a new magazine and users can migrate if they choose. The same is true of an instance owner. In this case, I have faith that if Ernest decides to shut down the Kbin.social instance, they'll give us fair warning. And if the instance disappears overnight, I'll have to start over on another instance. The nice thing is that the communities that I participate in might be spread out. So just because this instance goes away, that doesn't mean that all my content and communities are gone with it. Merely those that were hosted on this particular instance.

I think the better approach would be something akin to multireddits where you could collect posts in similar communities from multiple instances into a single place. I believe magazines already have a feature sort of like that, but I'm not positive. That way, community posts would naturally be spread around to multiple instances and one instance going down wouldn't be the end of the world.

Hey cool, my first opportunity to block a troll on the fediverse!

Basically what we already know. Reddit is restoring comments that have been deleted by users possibly in violation of data privacy laws.

Louis goes a little farther by sharing the story of one particular user who tried multiple ways to delete their content including manually deleting every single comment one by one. Then to answer Reddit's response that user data is "anonomized" by disassociating it with the user account when the user deletes their account, the user points out that at least one of their posts has their full name in it, and by restoring that post against the user's wishes, they've violated California's data privacy laws.

He then goes into his typical cynical rant which I personally find entertaining but I know he rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

I think that's the issue. People really need to remember just how early Kbin is in it's development. Ernest is working on the main features and keeping the insurance alive (and doing a fantastic job of it). Tutorials usually come much later in the development cycle one the product is ready for the masses.

Kbin got super accelerated adoption because of the reddit drama. It's missing a lot of polish and even some core features. It is also a different platform from reddit with different goals and design concepts.

People coming here expecting a 1:1 replacement for reddit are frankly in the wrong place. There are plenty of reddit alternatives out there that are much more complete and are much closer to the reddit experience. If people are here, they need to be okay with using a different platform that is in active development and doesn't have all the kinks worked out yet.

change community rules to apply retroactively that in order to maintain freshness and improve visibility of smaller posts, anything over x days old or over x karma will be removed.

well, yes and no. It's an attempt to force the sub open and give the "option" to no longer moderate. They're perfectly willing to part ways with you as a moderator as long as it gets the sub open. Their view is that everyone is replaceable.

depends on the desires of the majority of the community I would say. If the majority of the community says they want to change the community, then who are we to disagree? I'd vote for the change. Unfortunately for that vote, I haven't been on Reddit since before the blackout. The only reason I'll be going back will be to delete some/all of my posts.

His broader point is that he thinks mods should have stuck to their guns and kept subs private which would include their historic posts. By even reopening, they're allowing traffic to return to the site even if a few large communities are memeing hard. For the most part, subs that have reopened are going to return to business as usual. All because the mods of those communities didn't want to sacrifice their control. Spez called their bluff.

While thousands of users have been driven away, there are still more than enough who will remain and continue to engage with the site. The only lesson Reddit will have learned is that they can just wait it out no matter how unpopular of a decision they make.

I'm very curious to see if there will be any meaningful drop in traffic at this time next month.

I'm really curious to see if we start to see separate instances dedicated to separate topics like that. Imagine that forum you used to participate in on its own instance with all the same subforums/categories. The difference now is that you can federate that niche forum with the wider fediverse if you want to engage with a larger audience.

People are used to that singular reddit feel. I never started new posts on reddit because I would rarely get a response. If nobody catches your post in the new section of a semi-popular sub within an hour or so, it's gone. Or on a large sub, I had a post removed for being too similar to other posts even though a search didn't yield any results. When I asked which post it was similar to, I get a snarky comment from a power tripping mod about "not being a librarian" and muted for a week so that I can't respond as punishment for daring to question them. Come to think of it, reddit is kind of a shitty place with the exception of a few niche subs.

Now, I'm feeling much more inclined to start new threads since I feel I'd actually be able to have a conversation here.

Plot twist: The AI can detect pirate speak and uses these posts to write dialogue for a pirate character based on a prompt.

Can't wait for the pirate bluebeard to speak about where his buried API is.

Lots of people take issue with the political leanings of the Lemmy developers which may be why it's lower on the list, although I agree that it is more established.

In any case, that's the beauty of the fediverse. Create an account on both, or choose just one and cross-subscribe to communities you like.