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Kbin, FUD, and Tribalism - Where do we go from here?

It finally happened: many Reddit 3rd party apps have officially shut down. With it comes an influx of users looking for a new place.
With the influx come new points of view, new kinds of users with different expectations. This change is already visible, with obvious trolls and attention seekers throwing out bait. What if there is more to it however?

Browsing casually I noticed more and more kbin posts critical of its development, its functioning, and the speed at which @ernest is able to implement updates.

I find it odd that, while denouncing kbin for its current flaws in deployment (despite being clearly stated to be in alpha) the owner of that instance proceeds to praise Lemmy and wave away concerns regarding its devs who

(Lemmy devs) are willing to create a product that makes the entire internet better, and share it with everyone, for free, regardless of your beliefs.

despite having proven that their politics do affect their product.

"Just defederate" in my opinion also is not an argument. It's closing your eyes to a problem propagated by those who benefit from influence from the shadows - on both sides of the political spectrum.

Hence my mention of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) and Tribalism.
Pushing users towards a preferred platform (in this case, Lemmy) by seeding threadiverse posts with statements such as

  • kbin isn't ready
  • kbin won't have the same engagement as Lemmy
  • the single kbin dev @ernest doesn't have enough time/skill
  • it will never be as good as Reddit

will just lead to Reddit 2.0 painted in red and yellow. As kbin users, we should combat this kind of behavior.

We're all here for a better threadiverse, and a singular means of interacting will not be beneficial to its growth. The reason we're here is because we want a Reddit-like environment, not a single 'frontpage of the internet'. Tribalism in the threadiverse will get us nowhere fast.

Perhaps it was unintentional that kbin was not federating properly with Lemmy instances. What I am afraid of is, knowing the track record of Lemmy devs, it follows a scary trajectory, reminiscent of a few tried and true tactics Reddit and others have used before.

I'd like to state that I am not unbiased. I am helping out with Artemis, a kbin app currently in development.
I do not want to support or make use of Lemmy for many reasons. However, I could not care less if someone is from a Lemmy instance, or if I interact with them in that same space. If I see Lemmy.ml/Lemmygrad.ml behind their name, I will be cautious of their intentions however.

Let's hope we, not as 'rexxiters', 'kbinauts' or 'lemmings', but as fediverse users can actually create a product that makes the entire internet better, and share it with everyone, for free, regardless of our beliefs.

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  • The Lemmy devs are actively asking for donations and every Lemmy instance - apollo.town and vlemmy.net included links to the join-lemmy.org landing page with donation links, so I'm a bit more wary of the whole construct. Perhaps the instance admins mean well - but at the end of the day, they and their instances are soliciting links that finance tankies. That's a no-go for me personally. But each to their own.

    Some of the Kbin criticism in those posts is valid, though.

    Kbin is not "production ready" software and it's missing a lot of Quality of Life features for instance admins.
    It's hard to deploy, hard to to troubleshoot, operate and update. It's not packaged. We users are missing moderation and migration tools necessary to deal with the federated nature of the content (moving instances, content filtering etc)

    But such is life on the bleeding edge.

    I fully understand if fedi-admins don't want to spend all their free time fiddling with the instance. Many of them are volunteers. It's their choice and no one can fault them for installing Lemmy instead.

    Ernest has stated multiple times the project is just a prototype and it very clearly is. People are working on it though. The tracker isn't exploding with issues anymore and Ernest seems to be back working on pull requests instead of battling with the server load, There's 53 of them currently - and they're from multiple contributors. It's going to take some time, but seems there's good work being done - by multiple devs.

    Starting a software flamewar between Lemmy and Kbin seems incredibly silly and unproductive though, so I'll just say this - the fediverse puts lot of decision making power into the hands of users. There is choice. So use the stuff that works for you personally. No need to build walls, throw FUD or talk down the other software product or act as a knight in shining white armor for the one you happen to use and prefer.

    There's space for everyone and there's space for multiple software projects and products. There's no division.

    • Your last line is what I am trying to establish here, however I have noticed hostility from Lemmy supporters. This is what I mean with ‘as kbin users we should prevent this’. Such bad faith posting should be deflated or best nipped in the bud.

      The points regarding kbin’s present state I do understand, but in that case I think it’s a matter of managing expectations for new users.

      • One of the things that really seemed to spook new Mastodon users late last year was the fact that there were multiple microblogging platforms on the Fediverse. Telling someone who lamented the lack of quote-tweets, for instance, that Calckey and Misskey had quotes, and they could use those instead, brought people out of the woodwork to argue somewhat vigorously that people should kind of shut up about both the missing features and the alternative piecds of software.

        They wanted Mastodon to win.

        I partially wonder if it's the centralized, disconnected social web that's to blame. You can't read Facebook posts from Twitter, so the idea that there was no meaningful different to Mastodon users if people they followed used Calckey maybe just wasn't something they groked, and they saw the suggestion of options as a threat?

        I'm really not sure, but that kind of behaviour went away with time.

        My worry is that Lemmy does as Mastodon does, and doesn't display the instance type of other users. Most microblogs other than Mastodon show what kind of service a post came from. It keeps people aware of what the Fediverse really is - people using many different bits of kit to talk to each other. Meanwhile, on Mastodon it just looks like everyone is using Mastodon, and that the Fediverse is Mastodon, and discussion of anything else is an attack on the Fediverse.

        I would like to see instance signifies on other users in kbin and in Lemmy, but if the Lemmy Devs are financially motivated to hide that they're usersaare interacting eith other services... Well, I don't like that.

        • QRD on Calckey and Misskey? I'm afraid I missed that whole conversation.

          Tribalism is a big issue in the social media space, and I hoped the whole 'connected platforms' thing would kind of alleviate that. Still, everyone wants to be part of the 'winning' team, and folks are less likely to socially invest in a platform without good reason.

          As stated, I am glad kbin denotes instance origins. Some folks are just too set in the 'my team has to win' mindset, and will dismiss or disrupt any other information received from elsewhere.

          • During the Twitter migration waves late last year, many new arrivals were rather disappointed, or even irritated, to find that search was hampered and that quote-posts didn't exist. I had many, often lengthy, discussions with such folks trying to inform them that literally everything they were asking for was already available, just... "Over there" * points off to the side *

            These users didn't really get it, despite my best efforts. Obviously, my best explanations were not up to the job of helping these folks grok the situation, which is fine. Sometimes when things feel intuitive to you, you lose sight of the parts that really throw people off. I expected such communication blocks. What I didn't expect was people who were in no way associated with the discussion to start interjecting with rather strong words and feelings about, well, anything but Mastodon existing.

            They behaved as if discussions of other Fedivese microblogs themselves were some sort of existential threat to the Fediverse. The people arriving were struggling to understand that they could use something other than Mastodon to interact with people and content on Mastodon, and these folks were popping up in their DMs to accuse people trying to show them other possibilities of, well, basically "stealing users" from Mastodon.

            As if it were a competition.

            It was very, very weird, and I strongly suspect that those users were also new and didn't understand the relationship between Mastodon, *key, and the Fediverse at large. And that this kind of boosterism led to a not insignificant number of users going back to Twitter because Mastodon just didn't work "how things are supposed to work".

            Incidentally, where in kbin does it show what type of service other users are using? I'm not seeing anything like that in the UI. The best I've found is being able to see the user's full username@host name, which... Well, let's just say that if I spun up "kbin.fun" using lemmy, knowing that I was using kbin.fun would in no way inform you that it was actually a lemmy-based website.

            • They behaved as if discussions of other Fedivese microblogs themselves were some sort of existential threat to the Fediverse.

              The web keeps evolving, and honestly in the end usability and accessibility will be key. We're waiting for a project that can lower the bar for the 'common' user who wants to click a button and yell into the void. Probably Meta's intended audience. I expect that this future project will in turn become more of a containment zone than an actual place for discussion, but hey at least the folks who want more than Twitter/Reddit 2.0 will have an entry point to the rest of the fediverse without having to deal with the semantics of it.

              Incidentally, where in kbin does it show what type of service other users are using?

              Ah, I meant the hostname, not the specific type/kind of instance. Still, to at least be able to differentiate on source rather than claiming everything as its own content, is something I do appreciate. It would either teach me to ignore or value certain contributions more or less, given their origins - i.e. an instance ran by propaganda machines or big business.

    • Give it time to settle down. Mastodon vs. Pleroma vs. Misskey, and recently Akkoma vs. Calckey, etc etc etc. all of this stuff isn't really new. Use this. No use that.
      Just use what you like. I prefer /kbin. Likely will always. If someone judges me for using a software they don't, then I probably didn't want to talk to them anyway.
      Also keep in mind that /kbin was in very, very slow development for a very long time before a lot of things all happened at once. Very much a passion project. Like this is someone building a shed in their garage for their garden except somehow now suddenly 50 thousand people are in your garden and they all want in.

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