some guy sharing his thoughts

kbin userstyles
kbin userscripts

pretty cool places that I moderate:

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I think there are a few culprits here.

    • Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn’t mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it’s important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit’s style of media), they shouldn’t be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I’ve heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn’t need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn’t have to do it all.

    • Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I’ve heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn’t, software development takes time—a lot of it.

    • Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don’t think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we’ll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).













  • I see where you’re coming from, though having the instance be related to the underlying software helps a lot with clarity. I still have trouble remembering whether programming.dev is a Lemmy or Mastodon instance, whereas lemmy.ca causes no such issues.

    Also, with Kbin and Mbin, I don’t think it’s much of an issue. Kbin.run uses Mbin, and I’ve never seen that as odd. The differences between the two aren’t very significant anyway (i.e., it’s clear that they’re both versions of the same general thing). I could see it being a problem if you wanted to switch your instance from Kbin to Lemmy, but that seems like an unlikely scenario that isn’t worth the sacrifice in clarity.


  • I prefer Kbin. It has the latest features (magazine collections, an aggregate view that combines threads and microblog posts, more options, etc.) , and I really like the developer @ernest. Aside from just being cool, he posts frequent updates over on @kbinDevlog.

    Something worth noting is that Kbin doesn’t have many instances. Kbin.social is the main one, and the only other decently up-to-date one I know of is kbin.earth, run by the creator of the Interstellar app for Kbin. On the other hand, Mbin has more instances, as most established Kbin instances switched to it at the time it was created (during which Kbin development had been inactive for about a month). Also, Mbin has a more community-oriented development system tmk, whereas Kbin development is closely managed by Ernest.