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?
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.
The kbin server is massively overloaded right now so things like federation of messages are badly impacted. But once that is over you should see the the same content in a group no matter where you follow it from.