Skip Navigation
Reddit @lemmy.ml notmyredditusername @lemmy.ml

lemmy Vs kbin?

mstdn.social Fedi.Tips (@[email protected])

Content warning: Please don't use Lemmy :( Human rights, oppression

I'm a bit confused with my options here. I am looking at Reddit alternatives and see a lot of people flocking to lemmy but it seemed like kbin was the more centrist option?

Apparently lemmy was set up by a tankie and has some CCP propaganda and other problematic background?

https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

I have accounts with both and definitely seems like kbin is struggling compared to lemmy but that could just be because lemmy is better established? What are people's thoughts?

20

You're viewing a single thread.

20 comments
  • I'll paste here what I wrote on reddit a few days ago about the same topic

    I think it's important to distinguish Lemmy as a software from Lemmy as an implementation (servers).

    The software is opensource, noone "owns" that kind of software, many people contribute to it, anyone can fork it, modify it, and setup their own servers with it, regardless of the belief of the one who started the project.

    Now, telling people to avoid the "main server"/"grad whatever" is fine, because those are the servers in which those "political views" are expressed.

    But any instance of it? It doesn't make sense, many new Lemmy servers are popping up because of redditors trying the platform, and surely people setting them up now have nothing to do with what the main devs believe.

    You can't put everyone in the same basket, it would be like saying that anyone having an iPhone is in favor of child labor, or that anyone eating Nutella is in favor of destroying the Amazon forest, or whatever other example you can think of products we consume daily that are detrimental to the health of our planet.

    Heck even Reddit got investments from Tencent, a Chinese company, and we all know what the Chinese government thinks of human rights, yet we're here using the product.

    Where to draw the line is of course a personal matter, but again, it doesn't do any good to "categorize" everyone based on the views of a few.

    adding

    Not to mention that kbin and lemmy are federated, they "talk" to each other, so if your only reason to choose kbin over lemmy is to avoid lemmy communities, you're out of luck, you'll see them all on kbin too.

    • Thanks this does make sense obviously and you seem to know what your talking about so I'll ask this:

      Am I right that searching for a kbin community/magazine on Lemmy, or vice versa, will only pull in new posts on that community as well?

      For example I just searched for the home assistant community on kbin and found nothing local, so it pulled up the lemmy home assistant community, "great!" I thought, but when I go to look at the posts it shows a number of posts,but not the actual posts, instead directing me to go to the original source to view old posts. In that instance then I am taken directly to lemmy from kbin and can't post using my kbin account. This seems like a bit of a limitation of the federated community if you want to take part in historical/existing threads on another server.

    • Thanks, that's sober and very reasonable. One objection though ...

      it would be like saying that anyone having an iPhone is in favor of child labor, or that anyone eating Nutella is in favor of destroying the Amazon forest, or whatever other example you can think of products we consume daily that are detrimental to the health of our planet.

      This is not a fair comparison. Ultimately, the only way of combating bad corporate behaviour is sincerely having one's awareness follow consequence, and that means not to buy from such companies. Else that's cognitive dissonance. In the case of free and open stuff however, we do not "buy" it in that same sense, but we own it if we wish. Therefore, the only responsibility we have lies in what we do with the product, ourselves. If we use it for doing bad things, then there is no-one else to blame.

      • It's true that we need to be aware of corporate behavior and do out best to avoid products, my point is our life is so full of bad things that if we had to avoid them all, we'd end up living as hermits completely cut out from the rest of the world.

        It's not feasible, we all need to make some compromises, tho where to draw the line is a personal matter, as I said.

        My point is also that we should be coherent as much as possible, so if you use Reddit that's part owned by Chinese investors, you can't be so against everything about Lemmy because of political reasons, it's not coherent.

        The purpose of my comparison is to explain those points, it doesn't matter if you don't "buy" opensource, some people are not familiar at all with how opensource works, but I believe my comparisons can still be understandable to them.

        • I get it. If one isn't aware or if there are really no viable alternatives. It's just that those examples you took are just not in that category. If one goes like, "I really dislike tha company for how it operates but i like the product they make in that way, so i will support that company by buying the product" -- that's called a cognitive dissonance. The world is not going to get any better by our indolence.

          btw. fun fact, this man here is living half of his time in a cave. :-D

20 comments