• DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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    10 months ago

    Kbin, on the other hand, has too many issues.

    No offense to Kbin’s developer Ernest, who is working hard, but Kbin is still in alpha stage, and it often has server errors (in fact, kbin.social is down right now, and it has been for the whole day), and the userbase and engagement are far behind Lemmy. There are also federation problems between Kbin and Lemmy sometimes. Kbin is also trying to be a more all-in-one product, with both microblogging and forums, and the users there like to have both, which is fine, but Reddit users are mostly forum users and they seem to prefer Lemmy more.

    It was not fully down and this completely ignores the issues that Lemmy had when they updated to the next version a while back. Really unnecessary bashing.

    But I realized later that this was a misunderstanding on my part, and that this is not an issue as long as the project is open source, with an open development, and as long as you avoid instances like lemmygrad.

    Totally not suspicious, but at the minimum a bit ignorant on how open source software development typically goes. And it isn’t just Lemmygrad, but even their allegedly more moderate main instance Lemmy.ml, which is really just more of the same as far as users and moderation issues go. More problematic is the fact though that you’re still supporting the devs and their problematic views simply by supporting their software and its development by directly using it, and this won’t change until a proper fork from actually decent people is going to become the main used Lemmy software.

    And overall, no one won this, because the whole protest was a failure as way too many people just remained on Reddit.

    • TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Hello I was the one who wrote this write up on r/RedditAlternatives, just to clarify regarding my Kbin remarks, yesterday on January 3rd, kbin was indeed not working properly for the whole day yesterday with errors almost everywhere, even Ernest, the developer behind Kbin acknowledged this and put an announcement even on Mastodon.

      But a one day error is not the only reason, in-fact I’ve made several huge and massive contributions to the Kbin community with the creations of m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration and so on activaly moderating and contributing when it comes to engagement and so on (I even created multiple guides that had huge reach such as “The Redditor’s guide to Kbin” and even published the guide to a website), I spent tons of months solely as a Kbin user - but I was reaching a point where the unstability and immaturity of Kbin was really pushing me to put it down and come to lemmy, especially considering how mature lemmy has become and is surely much more stable than kbin at the moment and has been so in the forseeable past. So maybe it came of as bashing, but to me as someone who actually gave Kbin a chance, it was the hard reality and I had to say it.

      Regarding the open source part, I would like to agree to disagree with you there, sure you are still using Lemmy regardless of the instance and the development is still done by the same devs that led to such concerns, this was exactly my reason to stay away from lemmy and go to Kbin, but now I’ve realized that open source actually helps keep the developers in check as in that they will obviously know that if they do something against the users here and let’s say, push some of their idealogoies in some way hypothetically, there will be a huge chance someone will fork Lemmy and use that as an opportunity to take away the users, this is the advantage of open source, the possibility of forking a project helps keep the original project in check and when it comes to moderation or censorship, this instance is not moderated by the same people behind lemmy.ml or lemmygrad either.

      • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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        10 months ago

        Well, Reddit was open source once as well. Neither going closed source nor all the various scandals, including the last big protest, did a whole lot in changing anything at all.

        • TheArstaInventor@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I think comparing that era and this era is a mistake, besides if Lemmy lets say goes closed source which is EXTREMELY unlikely to happen, someone will not make the mistake again to not fork it to keep an open source version going.

          besides it’s not just open source, it is also the FEDIVERSE, this is the most important, this platform is federated and decentralized unlike Reddit ever was as it has always been centralized by design. Both Lemmy and Reddit are very different from design here.