There are a few topics about which the Based Count admin team would like to hear your thoughts as our community, before we take action. Instad of making various different posts we decided to condensate them into a single big announcement, feel free to speak your mind on any of the following topics. We encourage all Based Count users to participate, but we also welcome feedback from users of other instances.

Lemmy update

Earlier today we have updated our instance to the new 0.19.0 version, recently released by the lemmy developers.

Because of a previously undetected bug in the code of Kaleidoscope, our custom frontend, we had to temporarily disable user flairs and replace our user interface with the latest version of the legacy lemmy-ui. Kaleidoscope and user flairs will be re-activated in the next few days, as soon as we can solve the current problem.

Furthermore, according to some feedback we have received from administrators of other instances, there might still be some bugs in the new Lemmy release and it's possible that the server will feel a bit slower, due to some changes with how federation is handled. If you encounter any errors or issues, please use this thread to report them.

Threads.net

A few days ago, Meta's threads.net app launched in the European Union. Simultaneously, they also started testing integration with the Fediverse through ActivityPub. This reignited old talks about whether smaller instances like ours should federate with them or not. It should be noted that threads is pursuing a closer integration with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, rather than link aggregators like Lemmy. Also, it appears that Threads posts will at first be read only to federated servers. In other words, the Fediverse will be able to read content from Threads, but not the other way around.

Arguments FOR federation

• More content

Arguments AGAINST federation

• Privacy NIGHTMARE (it's literally Meta)
• Possible increased storage costs due to having to host additional content
• Risk of Meta pursuing an Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy, despite having denied such plans in the past.

We are currently defederated from threads.net due to privacy concerns, but we'd be open to reconsider this stance depending on community feedback.

Reddit reposting bots and alien.top

Another hot topic in the last few weeks was the alien.top instance and the Fediverser project. Its aim is pretty simple: creating digital bridges between Lemmy and Reddit to favour a migration of Reddit users to the Fediverse. This is mostly done by reposting Reddit posts to Lemmy lemmy communities through bots. An examples of this would be a bot reposting all content from r/PCM to our !pcm community.

Advantages

• This would solve the content drought that has caused many users to give up on Lemmy and move back to Reddit

Disadvantages

• Some percieve this as bot spam and have lamented the excessive amounts of bot posts in their feeds

Various instances have already defederated alien.top, including big players such as lemmy.world and feddit.de. What should our stance be? Would you like to see more posts in !pcm even if those posts were made by bots?

Example

Alternative frontends

We would like to enrich our instance by adding support for different user interfaces. Because our current UI features some changes from the OG Lemmy UI, adopting new frontends would require quite a lot of work on our end, to ensure features such as our very own user flairs work seamlessly on the new design.

Because of this, for the time being only one other client would support our custom features. Vote to decide your favourite

• Photon or its improved Tesseract variant (these are the two most complete UIs out there)
• An old Reddit-like design
• Alexandrite
• The Apple-like Voyager