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.
I agree on this, too. Kbin is a weird name for masses to adapt, for example. We're back in the Wild West regarding this form of social media, and the result of that will hopefully be innovation and reiteration of established standards.
Hard agree on the American soft power, too. I was surprised there were so many German instances on the fediverse already. I don't really want to interact with Dutch posts though, so if those pop up that's a hard filter from me.
With eyes on the future of the fediverse, I would prefer not ending up with another Facebook-like situation where 'one place' is the 'default' place - where the 'default' place is run by people less trustworthy than Mark Zuckerberg.
Do weird names really matter? People stop paying attention to them and accept them with enough time. "Reddit" is just a funny mispelling
@luna @kjr @SpacemanSpiff
Reddit made sense. 'Read it'. Digg? I 'dig' that. 'Lemmy' look at the meme. Even TikTok is a decent name for a social media platform.
Most folks here are tech savvy and don't mind the kbin name, but I don't expect some of my friends to 'get' it. Which is not inherently a bad thing, because it also prevents engagement from certain types of user who are looking for the next place to spam.
*Formatting edit.
I guess names making sense matters more to English speakers, but for the vast majority of the world these English names are just nonsensical, so it doesn't matter that much. Especially since the wider fediverse is largely European, and this service is inspired by the polish Wykop.pl, unlike Reddit, which aimed for a US audience.
Wykop.pl is a direct translation of "Dig out" because it was the local Digg clone, but polish doesn't have a translation of "I dig that", for example