Yeah, this site is in early stages and if someone just wants to be babysat… we literally don’t have the manpower for that yet! A smaller dedicated userbase is more important at this stage than mindless growth.

Agreed, I remember being shocked about a decade ago learning that there were services run in developing countries where you pay about $1 for 1000 CATPCHA solves for your spam bot to pass along and a person solving it.

I know a few Friendica users have replied to my posts here.

Disclaimer: I am not a dev, my technical understanding is limited, and I only discovered kbin today.

The difference is that they are running completely different software, despite speaking the same* language (‘protocol’). There may be some things one software does that another can’t. I wonder if it’s easier to answer what distinguishes it, or what makes them similar. They’re both link aggregators (the same kind of website as reddit, e.g. people post links to groups and they get voted up or down by subscribers), and they’re both able to process each other’s posts and see each other’s groups (kbin calls them magazines, apparently, while we call them communities. I don’t know if that’s purely semantic or if there is a profound difference). So as far as basic usage goes, both can make a post and unless they do something fancy, the other site can read and reply to it.

kbin has a different visual layout and appears to have more focus on also having microblogging and social media features within those groups, we don’t have that feature and integration with Mastodon can be a bit stranger here (such as them replying to replies, in my experience it doesn’t nest neatly like ours do, instead just showing as a reply to the original post, and maybe that’s unavoidable when a twitter-like thread without proper comment replying has to fit our comments layout). It seems Lemmy has stayed closer to what reddit is like, while kbin has strayed into a more experimental approach.

kbin says “This is a very early beta version, and a lot of features are currently broken or in active development, such as federation” (and I have noticed the federation doesn’t show some posts yet which would be expected to show). Lemmy doesn’t seem to have such disclaimers. It’s current version number suggests it is considered more mature, but still not particularly stable either.

kbin seems to have a mobile app under development, while Lemmy’s seem to be more mature. That said, I’ve never used one.

I’ve never used kbin, so I can’t give the answer for that. It claims it can, but I don’t know the details.

I’m not seeing the chart, did it not attach?

Hah, just a technicality. I like Matrix, but we won’t be seeing any Matrix<->Mastodon interaction any time soon ;)

Huh, that’s interesting that a chart included it, do you happen to remember which one?

PeerTube. I was getting really sick of Youtube, heard about it and went exploring.

By the way, Matrix, while it is a federated protocol, isn’t part of the “Fediverse” (a word for federated software using the ActivityPub protocol [edit: and some others, see reply] , which are aimed towards social media rather than instant messaging)

Well, I honestly haven’t come across anyone who uses it that way so I can’t really advise.

I just feel like it’s not so widespread to just assume we should accept that the “cat is out of the bag”. We can just focus on correcting people, like we do when they conflate Lemmy with lemmy.ml.

Why should we just accept that some naïve twitter refugees have misassociated the Fediverse as being just Mastodon? This isn’t branding, this is raising awareness of the interrelatedness of this federated network! Disassociating from the Fediverse just makes the problem worse, I’d say.

The Fediverse. There’s nothing inherently special about Lemmy or kbin or lotide being link aggregators. We get regular posters from Friendica and I’ve gotten replies from Mastodon accounts before.

The Fediverse is ALL of us. We should be interacting with PeerTube and Misskey and all the rest!

Hi, please consider editing the post title into something more meaningful, like “Which Fediverse software would you recommend for long-form blog posts or photo hosting?”. This will help people who know the answer to notice the question.

Definitely, especially last year where some persistent obsessed kiddo would keep finding each federated instance with open registration and making low-tier troll accounts on them.

The focused, exclusive communities and the open, chaotic communities both have their place. Those ones blocking the majority of instances to get rid of junk and harassment are perfectly valid, although I personally would definitely need accounts elsewhere.

Yep, one example was gtio.io, which occasionally had a decent topic or two, but about a third of the userbase was from lemmy.ml and another third from wolfballs.com (the former instance which attracted a political ‘right-wing’ userbase). Since lemmy.ml defederated from wolfballs.com, you wouldn’t even see most of the replies from a lemmy.ml account and have to get an extra account somewhere to reply.

Of course, those replies were almost always low-quality garbage, but I did want to see and reply to them!

haha, the paradoxical answer is to make your own personal instance for you to federate and post on all the other communities freely.

(yes, I know ‘just make ur own instance’ isn’t helpful advice because not everyone has the time/money/tech-familiarity to do so, I’m more just pointing out that’s how some people approach the issue of having to pick a community)

I’ve seen a lot of websites (not so much in the Fediverse, but small forums and spin-off forums) and the kinds of basis they have does affect whether people want to post there, and how the place grows. (I’ll just call them instances, because they technically are but I’m not just talking about Fediverse instances, so the dynamics of cross-visibility between sites aren’t really being considered)

Topic-based instances and goal-oriented instances seems like the best bet for a high-quality discussion community. I mean broad topics as well, consider mander.xyz or the former gtio.io, not just more specific ones like slrpnk.net. It can be limiting, but so long as you’re secure enough with your ego that you don’t need to chase high numbers to know you’re stable and active, then I’d recommend it. The tough part is that you may not get as much casual exposure to start off with, by being on the same site as larger communities, you might need to be active (without being annoying) in crossposting good topics to make people aware your community exists.

National-based instances are also popular, probably because of shared language, cultural elements and local issues. But they are otherwise pretty compatible to general instances. They do have a place, I’ve enjoyed a couple on occasion, they have a place, but I do prefer the topic-based communities. There’s no point limiting every topic arbitrarily by nation or state.

General instances (either topicless copy-cats or freely user-defined communities) are hit-or-miss, I personally don’t like them in a federated space unless they are specifically solving an issue.

lemmy.ml is somewhere between topic-based and general. It is explicitly “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers” (I notice that broadened a bit, surprising although no complaints), and you can see that bias in the communities list, but the mods aren’t aggressive with enforcing the topic. There are random sports, country and interest communities here. Whether that’s out of inactivity (volunteer time and effort is limited!) or lax policy (the more the merrier!), it makes this feel more like a general site despite the tagline. I remember last time I checked (admittedly a year ago) the staff were explicit and purposeful that this is not an official instance and was not trying to cater to everyone as a general instance, encouraging people to make more granular instances for things which weren’t meant to go here.

If that is the case (again, policy could be different) then maybe some extra messaging on the Create Community and Register pages could help prevent the regular issue we had when someone fundamentally against the community (like someone kicked from reddit because of racist comments) would show up and be surprised when they were herded out of here too.

I do think it’s important for a site to be willing and able to kick moderators who are abusive, especially in a major community. But as for a formal system for reclaiming a community, it would be up to in individual instance’s staff.

There are struggles with a voting system in a pseudonymous environment like this site: how do you enforce identity? How can you detect if 5 accounts are actually just me and my sockpuppets? And how can you do that without making life horrible for people who want to stay private with tools like proxies and anti-trackers? It’s possible to mitigate some of these problems but it’s not an easy task once a community grows, and can involve compromise.

In a smaller site like this, raising complaints to the instance staff or on a /c/meta like community is a good first step and can be very effective if the case is strong.

In that (rare) situation, you can just say ‘picture of the bird’ to avoid being redundant!

When I ask the strident twits this, I generally get vague homilies and blocks.

Unfortunately, I believe you. Some people take counterpoints very badly, it’s notorious with twitter (and therefore ex-twitter) users.

My response is that demand, in that redundant situation, is insulting to people with visually-imparement and can be disregarded.

Torvalds is the kind who doesn’t get into the religious wars, like FOSS vs proprietary and such. So I’m not at all surprised by their post.