I really Lemmy and Kbin. Both provide solid desktop experiences and app development is only accelerating.
One thing in particular I am having a hard time with is discovering communities. I know there are a couple websites dedicated to this but discovery on both Lemmy and Kbin is not very easy. This becomes compounded by the fact that some communities have fractured across numerous communities or magazines. Referencing different communities/magazines is also was more annoying than doing /r/dancing or whatever.
I haven't had a problem ftmp. I sort by all>new/top day/hot/active and subscribe to what interests me on a whim.
Then if there is something specific, say poetry, I type "poetry" or "poet" in to the search and I get all the communities with that in the name. Subscribe. All of em.
Over time I naturally have a feed of my own making.
But right now, I am just sorting all and collecting communities and talking to people, and when finally there is more people, I will sort by subscribed.
I think the issue is just early stage social media being built ground up, and we're all still figuring out what this place is even gonna be.
This is what I am doing too and think it is the way to go.
You wouldn't catch me dead sorting by r/all on Reddit, but I have been doing so on kbin to just see what is out there and subbing to what is interesting. I also have been searching for various magazines/communities and subbing to a bunch of them since I don't know which one will take off. Eventually I have hope i'll have an active enough feed like I did on my homepage on Reddit, but I'm cool waiting it out and just seeing what sticks on the fediverse.
Give it time. People are obviously gonna want to talk about how bad the place they just left is in the short term; it'll die off as time goes on, flaring up occasionally when Reddit makes another blunder.
Yup, the same thing happened when we moved from Digg to reddit.
There were 2-3 weeks where the death of digg was every other thread but then it tapered off quickly.
That being said, I think this whole reddit fiasco will drag out longer.
It will never be a safe space as long as spez is around
period. Centralized systems like Reddit are inherently beholden to the views of the people who own the central hub. Even if the people at Reddit now were “cool”, eventually a piece of shit would end up in a position of power and compromise the site. As we have seen time and time again, both recently and throughout history, we cannot allow our systems to be contingent on the assumed goodwill of the people who run it. Said differently, we need to assume that bastards will take control at some point in the future, and intentionally design our systems to be robust in the face of disturbances caused by bad actors.
Eeh let me go against the grain here a bit: Personally I'd rather have my account on somewhere that doesn't police my access. IMO one of the major boons to the Internet that it being decentralized and not particularly easy to police by any one authority. I've lived a big part of my life in an authoritarian country, and censorship gradually builds up. I have no interest in granting this kind of power even governments rarely get to exercise, to some random people.
I firmly believe that the best kind of content moderation is to use the small "X" button right next to the browser tab. I would understand and completely support not wanting to see certain content, communities or users yourself, but unless illegal [1] I don't see any reason why you should be able to prevent others.
[1] even then, question of in what jurisdiction comes to kind
Anyway, I know that nowadays vouching for information freedom doesn't win much favours. Cool thing about ActivityPub is that barring future potential scaling issues, I can run my own instance and enjoy the Internet as it once was.
edit: I have to say that there's a level of irony in asking for bans and central controls on content on a platform that in its very nature decentralized and supposed to be empowering.
I have to say that there's a level of irony in asking for bans and central controls on content on a platform that in its very nature decentralized and supposed to be empowering.
There isn't any irony. That's the whole point of the decentralization - it empowers everybody to be part of the communities they wish to be in, and not participate in those they disagree with. We have the power to leave any instance where we disagree with the admins and move to a new one.
Is kbin a community, or a platform for communities to run on? I'm subbed to maybe 20 magazines now, and I can't even tell you which one comes from which server.
I think of magazines as communities, and servers as enablers of the platform they run on. Sure there are purpose-built servers around a topic, but as a data point of 1, I haven't joined kbin to be a part of kbin community, I joined because it seemed to be the most reliable provider for me to reach communities across fediverse.
Most instances also defederated from lemmygrad (commies) so its not generally politically left either.
Also there is the problem of liability, if a instance hosts stuff that is legal where their server stands, but isn't where yours is, you basically need to do it. (Burggit.moe for example, also LemmyNSFW)
Porn in general is also defederated by many because its problematic to moderate.
And then there are instances that just brigade a lot or make bots on mass that spam. They usually get blocked as well.
Last but not least, if your instance defederated nothing it will be defederated because its seen as unmoderated (wich could potentially result in illegal activities)
Most instances also defederated from lemmygrad (commies) so its not generally politically left either.
IMO, Stalinists aren't exactly tolerant either. You're still talking about a totalitarian and authoritarian viewpoint, even if they're on the left on economic matters.
IMO, if your point is to make a community welcoming, then you have to get rid of intolerant voices. That--broadly speaking--means that you have to remove people advocating for any kind of absolutist, authoritarian rules. It's easy to see at a macro level, but it's all fuzzy at a micro level.
A lot of people in the Fediverse don't seem to appreciate the concept that the political left is just as capable of intolerance and extremism as the political right.
I'm not talking about parties, I'm talking about the political spectrum. There is no "Right-Wing Party", nor is there a "Left-Wing Party". Conservatives and liberals can be found in both of the actual dominant American parties.
Anyone that is familiar with the ways that communism has existed in Warsaw-pact countries, in China, in southeast Asia in general, etc., should be able to see that. LGBTQ+ people were, if anything, even more fucked in most communist countries. There certainly wasn't any meaningful religious tolerance, since religion was banned in at least some communist countries (or wholly controlled by the gov't).
I'm in favor of communism in principle, but not in practice. I'd love to live in a commune, but I don't think I'd want to live in a communist country.
Does the Fediverse have a similar feature, where communities/magazines can be private and only allow users to view/subscribe to them with mod approval?
I know this is possible with instances, but that seems impractical since the account would be defederated from the entire Fediverse to maintain privacy.
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