Vibe check: What are your impressions and experiences of Lemmy, Kbin, Mbin, and Beehaw?

I only have experience with Lemmy, it’s kinda my daily driver for social media. It functions well, I enjoy my instance and the admins there.

The political rhetoric can be a little exhausting, especially with it being election year. The culture clashes between different instances can cause friction.

Example, this is on Lemmy.ml, and I think the admin and moderation policies on .ml are patently absurd. They also have a bot that auto edits comments to remove no no words, which is… well stupid. I would not be surprised if this comment gets removed for the above remarks.

But that’s what’s nice, Lemmy.ml admins can’t ban me from Lemmy, only .ml, and if I don’t want to deal with .ml anymore I can just block the instance. We surpassed them in MAU anyway. My instance doesn’t defederate on ideological or political lines so I have that option.

So, overall I’m enjoying myself. I’m concerned about the longevity of the platform and the extremity of political rhetoric that has to permeate every single post, but I’m hoping that dies down as Lemmy Balkanizes. That’s already started with hexbear defederating from lots of instances.

So several smaller lemmy instances (like sopuli, ani.social, reddthat, etc) are having some serious slowdown issues right now and are having delayed federation with lemmy.world. From what I understand, the suspected cause is a kbin bug, where it's glitching out and spamming the fediverse with infinitely repeating federation updates. Several lemmy instances have blocked kbin over it (including lemmy.world and sopuli), but it's still causing issues and slowdowns.

There have been multiple attempts to reach the admin for kbin about it, but his developer accounts seemingly went dark 4 months ago (according to his commit history) and he's not responding to any messages. Mbin has seemingly already patched it according to their resolved issues/pull requests, but it's looking like kbin may have to be cut off from the rest if the fediverse unless the dev resurfaces.

Lemmy - 99% positive. It has replaced reddit for me, except when I need to look up some obscure thing that only exists in a 10yr old thread

Kbin - heard of it and have seen some comments on lemmy saying they were there using Kbin (iirc)

Mbin - never heard of it

Beehaw - is it its own platform? I thought it was just another lemmy instance

kbin (at least kbin.social) has a nice little community, but we're holding on by a thread over there since we've been overrun with spammers and nothing is really being done to combat it. A good chunk of people have jumped ship because of it, but we're still trying to fight where we can.

I made an mbin alt, but I haven't really hung out enough here to get a proper feel of it. Honestly it feels like looking through a window to the rest of the fediverse. If there's any chill mbin (edit) instances magazines, I'd love to know!

Beehaw seems to have the most positive vibes, and I really like that. It seems small, but they're pretty active. I mainly enjoy their gaming community.

I think I interact the most with Lemmy, but that's probably because that's where most active instances are. You'll get a lot more different takes on there than anywhere else, some great, some not so great, but that comes with any site where you bring a bunch of people together.

Of course, these are from my experience and opinion. I'm interested to see others' takes.

Beehaw isn’t exactly a separate platform yet— it’s still Lemmy, but they’re starting to sequester themselves and will soon spin off. Until then, they’re just a somewhat isolated Lemmy instance that’s focused on being a generally-positive safe-space. I think it’s nice, but there’s a lot of more frank and sometimes not-so-nice discussions that obviously can’t happen there.

In general, I like the vibe here, which is more laid back and relax than reddit, with people being in general nicer, less in a karma farming/troll mode.

I have an alt account on fedia (mbin) that I use when my main instance is down, following the same communities. But the more I use it, the nicer I find mbin, I might do a full switch at a point.

However, it's not yet the endless stream of new content we get on reddit and other big social media. Which is great for our mental health but sucks when you look for a fun stuff to do during your commute

Beehaw is still Lemmy (unless anything has changed recently), but the instance is run a particular way. There should be a link somewhere about their philosophy and what the differences are.

In terms of vibe / community, I would think that there are more differences between the individual instances than the software that they run. That's something which is easier to get an idea of as you use it more.

When I was starting out, Kbin didn't have as much third party support, so there wasn't a good way to use it on mobile. That may have changed since then

Positive on Lemme. Will celebrate one year here on the anniversary of the blackout of the old site. I think that's in June?

Reminds me of Reddit from before they went insanely corporate. More leftists than Reddit though. Right wingers usually get challenged whenever I see them. Overall pretty good, but the authoritarian presence is still higher than I'd like, but it's mostly ignorable.

The disproportionate representation of hyper-reactive, hive-mind edgelords is vomitous, but overall entertaining and cool.

I don't really know. I don't really make it a point to look at what the origin point of the posts are. Even when I look at the name for whatever reason I don't think in terms of this is a lemmy experience or this is a kbin. I am straight outa kbin though.

I've only used Kbin, but it seems fairly decent as a commenter aside from some federation/stability/spam issues. I really like the idea of having access to the Mastodon side of things on top of the rest of the fediverse, even though it's hit-or-miss.

Thread wise, I suppose I haven't posted enough to be statistically solid though it seems like it's dead on the Kbin side of things and federation is even worse. I've thought about posting to lemmy.world (because 1 of my threads to a kbin community just got 2 LW commenters) but haven't made new content to do so.

I probably should join another instance but I think there is a balancing act between instance popularity and desiring conversation-of/help-with my niche interests, and it seems like that is one probably isn't going to be resolved for a while.