Unless, of course, one blocks them. It’s not perfect of course, but I think federation brings about an unique opportunity to decide how many fools one is willing to suffer. And the tools will only get better with time. :)

They’re also not holding anyone hostage. I can see how people are tired of the whole “if you don’t like it, fork it” argument, but Kbin, mbin, and Piefed are all perfectly viable and interoperable alternatives that are available already.

Looks promising.

I’m setting it up now, was close to give up when it continuously refused to work after setting up an account. Turns out the passwords randomly generated by Firefox is a bit too hardcore for it, I changed to something with fewer special characters and now all is good. :)

Edit: It worked for setting up the interface and my profile, but I still cannot sign in from within it. Seems like a promising project though.

Edit edit: Moved it from a subdomain to a normal folder, now I can sign in, but it still acts a little broken, and doesn’t federate. Oh well, I’ll see if I’ll tinker more later.

I landed on it being a red flag, but nothing so bad that I’ll stop supporting them for now. But given that it’s a paid service, part of what I am paying for is for them to provide a better and more ethical alternative to known free engines. In turn, this means that I hold them to very high standards.

I’m guessing after the backlash over this they will be even more careful going forwards. It’s impossible not to make mistakes now and then, and though I agree with @poVoq that Kagi’s response here reflected that they had not thought certain issues through enough, I choose to be patient with them for now. At least they are making an effort to communicate rather than just giving empty corporate responses that mean nothing.

Yeah, I think it became a bit of an impossible solution the second Ernest’s proof of concept suddenly attracted a whole bunch of users and attention after the Reddit exodus. Kbin was clearly not ready, and I admire him for staying on course with the development after that despite pressures.

That said, users are not wrong to want easy to implement features asap. So I personally think the fork makes a lot of sense, though everyone could do without the occasional bad faith from some of the people involved.

My understanding of the situation is that Ernest, the main developer behind Kbin, thinks of the current Kbin as a proof of concept, and he is doing profound rewriting of the codebase to better fit his vision of how it should be working.

Meanwhile, other people wanted to contribute to Kevin directly, developing a better product on top of what Ernest considers to be too shaky foundations. So he’s not all that interested in pursuing that part of the development before he is happy with the core.

This also leads to a dynamic where he still has his own vision for the project and it goes through him, whereas other contributors want to make it their own more and develop something different.

It’s hard to see how to make everyone happy here without forking. Hopefully both projects can still gain from each other in the future: Mbin can benefit from the rewritten codebase of Kbin, and Kbin can implement features from Mbin after seeing that they are good and work well. In either case, the continued development as separate projects is probably not all that bad.

There is the very promising @Interledger Foundation, which aims to produce a defederated “open and inclusive payments network that puts humanity first”. It could eventually prove useful for money flow on federated platforms.

I’m intuitively critical of all online financial services like this one, but then you realize it was not only funded by the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons, but it’s actively support by the w3 consortium. Furthermore, it doesn’t use blockchain.

“e.g.” is short for “exempli gratia”, which is latin for “for example”.

It hasn’t been announced that they’re getting rid of it, but it’s a good example of what Reddit could do to fuck up.

In my experience it is very much focused around photography, similar to Instagram when it was still good. The lack of algorithms pushing bullshit makes the feed feel much more organic, showing the people you follow - and there are already, in my experience, a healthy amount of talented people sharing interesting content.

Then again, I appreciate nature photography, so I’m not hard to satisfy.

Honestly, decentralized social media are probably bad news for the current state of the art of disinformation campaigns. The bullshit that has been thriving on Facebook and Twitter is not only a chorus of bigoted aunts and uncles, but (perhaps more importantly) a coordinated attack from state sponsored troll farms seeking, among other things, to destabilise Western democracies.

The fediverse is, by design, less vulnerable to these attacks. Your trolls can generate activity around your disinformation content all they want: if nobody I follow boosts it, it’s not going to show up in my Mastodon feed. And you can feel free to recreate r/conservative or whatever in the fediverse, but if it becomes a cesspool like on Reddit you’ll be stuck with your trolls talking to each other on a defederated instance with no-one listening. Disinformation strategies currently employed successfully on centralized social media platforms are likely to fail here, causing a problem for bad actors.

It is probably paranoid to think there’s any geopolitical actor behind the current attack, but I fully expect the fediverse to become under attack from Russian troll farms as soon as they realize they’re no longer reaching out to people on Twitter, Reddit or Facebook.