I gave Lemmy, Kbin, and Beehaw a chance. I think I'll be sticking with Tildes.
This month, I have been exploring reddit alternatives due to the ongoing events currently going on the site. It resulted in me requesting to be invited to this site, but I also played around with Lemmy, Kbin, Beehaw, and other sites within the lemmy/mastodon network. The conclusion I have come to is that these federated sites shows a lot of potential into becoming something interesting if proper care is put into it by the community and the mods and admins. But as it is now, it is fundamentally broken, ill-equipped to handle the userbase it has inherited from the reddit fallout, and potentially dangerous if steps aren't taken to protect users and their communities.
The signature feature, greatest strength and biggest weakness of these sites all lie within the "fediverse" (which I hate the term. gives me "metaverse" vibes.) From how I understand it, There are several different instances of lemmy that acts as its own site, hosts it's own content and users, and can have its own rules, features, and restrictions. All the content of these instances can be featured on other instances, basically allowing you to see all the communities, users, and content within the fediverse without having to leave the instance you are on. The admins are also able to restict the content of other instances from being shown on their site, though how this works I don't completely understand, and I'll go into detail later.
Anyway, I figured all this out through a lot of trial and error. When I first tried to search for and join Lemmy, I ended up joining the Canadian instance by mistake, and my feed was mostly Canadian related news and communities. I eventually figured out there were several differences I could join. I ended up joining lemmy.world and kbin because they were the most popular, but I basically had to create sepperate accounts on each.
I started out spending most of my time on Kbin. I was mostly following gaming communities, hobby communities, a few tech communities, and the lgbtq community. one thing I noticed in the comments in some of the lgbtq posts were a lot of transphobic comments. Granted they were heavily downvoted, and there was a lot of pushback from the community members, but they were featured near or at the top of the comments, as if I were sorting by controversial on reddit.
I also noticed there were a lot of pro-Russian articles featured in the news, with the majority of the comments pushing Z-propaganda. Apparently a lot of these came from an instant called lemmygrad, which is a pro-China, pro-Russia instance of lemmy. To the fediverse's credit this particular instance is blocked by most other instances, but it didn't stop me from seeing many of these posts featured, or users from that instance commenting in other subs.
At this point I was starting to get a little skived out. It gave me the same vibes Voat gave me during the reddit migration of 2014. I decided to try lemmy. world instead, since it seemed a little more down to earth. Had a few of the same problems there, though I began to sort some of them out as I began to learn the site better. It was around this time when the news that Beehaw, one of the instances that hosted many of the lgbtq and other communities I followed basically unfederated lemmy.world and a few other popular instances due to harrassment from the instances. At this point I was getting fed up, but thought, maybe I'll stick it out, and just follow Beehaw and Lemmy. world separately. After joining beehaw, I posted some of my grievances on the chat community there. In the end, I ended up getting an inbox flooded with notifications, which I couldn't turn off, many of which were replies from the post ranging from supportive to accusational, to some harrassing DMs. This happened on beehaw, which was supposed to be one of the "safer" instances, but many of the replies came from off the instance, and even from instances defederated by beehaw. What's worse is I even posted one of the means spirited replies as an example, and many people accused me of making it up because they couldn't find the reply itself, which I guess you can or cannot see depending on the instance your on and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS AT THIS POINT!
I ended up deleting all my accounts on the fed instances I had accounts on, except for beehaw, because the interface would often keep infinitely loading. The gripes mentioned above aside, I would frequently have issues with the site breaking, up and downvotes not showing the proper numbers, replies disappearing into the ether, accidentally double posting, seeing infinite amounts of the same comment posted over and over again, infinite loading, and so one, no matter what instance I was on.
At this point I have given up on the fediverse. Maybe if all the bugs are ironed out, and the site(s) are better managed, maybe I might return to it. But as it is now there are just way to many fundamental flaws that get in the way of me getting any enjoyment out of it. And none of the communities ever felt like a replacement for the subreddits I left behind.
That all being said, I have enjoyed my time on Tildes so far, and I think it is due to the fact that it is a smaller and better managed site than anything on the fediverse. The discussions here feel a lot more down to earth, the communities safer. And hell even the disagreements actually worth engaging in. Granted, there are a lot of niche topics missing here because subs aren't community created, but it's nice being able to view a site, and not have to self filter half the site because anything and everything is overloading my feed.
Anyway, forgive me if this was hard to follow. I wrote this at 4am with not a lot of clear direction. Just wanted to get my thoughts on lemmy and the fediverse out there, and why I decided not to stick with it.
Still fairly new to Tildes and practically an infant in regards to kbin/Lemmy/general Fediverse so these are just my impressions from only the past few weeks after having been a Redditor for 13+ years and on message boards/usenet/irc/etc for years before that.
Reddit replaced pretty much all forums/etc for me in the time that I’d used it. The community is/was vast and strong both in total but also in diversity. The micro pockets of unique subreddits meant never feeling alone in whatever small interest or trait you held yourself. I love both.
When I wanted a constant feed of content (whether it was info I cared about or not), it was there in the main subreddits without effort with thousands of voices contributing. And much of that contribution could sometimes just be noise, but that noise was a white noise that brought its own connection to a community. And when I wondered “maybe this is just me?” about anything, I could find others just like me with minimal effort. Aching for philosophical discussion around a singular episode of Lost? The /r/lost community was standing around the watwr cooler waiting for you. When I was diagnosed with ADHD at nearly 40 and my world shattered a bit trying to reprocess what I thought I knew of myself, my past, and how to cope with moving forward? Multiple subreddits were there with others sharing similar stories. All unique but also deeply personal and overlapping so that I didn’t have to journey alone. /r/puppies was the first place where people acknowledged its a completely normal but not-openly discussed thing to truly hate your new puppy for a few weeks. These aren’t even great examples of the smaller communities of like minds/interest (who knew I was obsessed with discussing robot vacuums??).
On Reddit, though, I mostly felt like I was engaging with the community as a whole. On my regular message boards prior, I felt like I was engaging with individuals in a community. We knew each other, recognized usernames, would engage in long form discussions directly. Both are great; just different.
Tildes reminds me of those message boards and the smaller, specific subreddit communities. kbin/Lemmy reminds me of the broader Reddit way of connecting. When I hop on Tildes, I find myself reading more and getting to know people through their discussion. When I browse kbin, I’m sifting through content and reading responses.
Over time, I may find I’ve curated my kbin feed better so it’s more targeted to my interests, but so far I’m feeling more at home on Tildes in a way that I haven’t had since prior to Reddit.
Oh man, I relate to that SO MUCH :D I was pondering returning our dog for two months, except I felt responsible for him and my choice, it's not a toy. I'd never like another puppy again, if I get another dog I'd like to fast forward at least 1 year or better yet a couple years. Puppies are great when they belong to other people, you meet them and can pet the little energetic furball and then leave.
Yeah it's called the puppy blues for a reason :) my wife got hit by it hard, given it was her first dog. I come from a big dog family so I was better prepared. Was this your first puppy experience? Don't blame yourself, it's hard especially if you try your best to do everything "right".
Btw it's probably smarter to wait a bit after a puppy anyway so that the older dog truly has matured a bit before adding another pup.
Yes, it was. :) He's 4 now.
At least you'll be much more prepared now. Our brown lab is also 4, time flew wow.
On the other hand, my dog is about 4.5 years old and I got him as an 8 week old. I can't imagine us having bonded so strongly together had I not basically raised him.
I had to unsub from that /r/Puppy101 sub though. It eventually shifted from being mostly about puppy training tips and puppy blues to one post after another being sad about losing their puppies to parvo or something like that. I didn't need that daily dose of depression.
We have two dogs and one we got at 8 weeks and about 2.5 years later, we added the second boy who the rescue thought was a year but the vet was like, he's not a year yet and wasn't sure his age but maybe 9 or 10 months?
Both are so bonded to me and my family, but I feel the 2nd is a bit more because he can truly appreciate a warm, safe home after being found on his own in February.
Tildes is great. Squabbles is the other one I'm currently keeping an eye on. Between those two I think I'll have my needs met for both in depth discussion and lighter discussion with some meme and image posts and such. All I'm missing now is a solid app for NSFW stuff and I'll be pretty set on not going back to reddit hardly ever.
Is there a way to change the UI for squabbles? I briefly checked it out but the very new Reddit-feeling UI turned me off from wanting to stay on it.
I'm looking at Squabbles as well, but as you pointed out, it has a "new Reddit" kind of look which I loathe. That said, the design seems very up in the air right now as features are being added on the fly.
As for Tildes, I like how it reminds me of Reddit is Fun. @talklittle (RiF developer) has posted praise for Tildes' design and is also making an app. The site is easily navigable while also being minimalist. The people are friendly and helpful. My only complaint is people seem a bit too "one-minded" and without any disagreements.
I'm getting the feeling that the lack of disagreement has more to do with the fact that so many people are new here, and unused to being in a forum where discourse is valued.
There are also a few rumors that @Deimos is supposedly heavy with the banhammer, which has some folks walking on eggshells. if I were him and far more clever than I am, I probably would have started and nurtured those rumors myself.
That's odd, as we have the numbers there and of the thousands of new users, very few seem to be being banned. It feels more like there are people arriving, seeing that it's a tiny community that isn't reddit-sized, and going "this isn't a reddit replacement!" and running away.
It's not like we would notice people being banned. A user would suddenly just stop commenting. Silence is a lot harder to hear than shouting.
Deimos has specifically said that only 4 users had been banned so far out of the thousands of new invitees. Granted, that was 5 days ago, so I’m sure it’s gone up since then… but probably not by much.
Well, I know for sure that it went up by 1 in the past hour...
But, if that's true, then the rumours about Deimos being ban-happy are just that: rumours. Our god has feet of clay. :(
Yeah, I'm genuinely surprised and delighted that things have been going so smoothly here with all the new users. There have been a few teething problems, and a few bans, but overall everyone new has been well behaved and a delight to interact with. :)
Forgive me, El Guapo. I know that I, Jefe, do not have your superior intellect and education. But could it be that once again, you are angry at something else, and are looking to take it out on me?
As I said, they're rumors. I'm fairly certain they're bullshit, but as the saying goes, a lie will travel around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.
I have seen some users who were a little too solicitous and apologetic for the mildest conflict imaginable, so I wonder how far this legend of Big Daddy Deimos has gone, or whether it's just people being overcautious in a new environment.
Yeah that seems realistic. It's also possible that folks who ARE trolls, who want to start shit and get hit as it were, look at this community and go "...god they're not going to be any fun are they?" I mean we're not a terribly divisive or angry lot, and it does feel a little like this is a group of people who, regardless of other demographics, are broadly pretty mild and not interesting for trolls. So I wonder how many people wanted to target us and just decided we weren't worth the effort.
You have a more generous conception of trolls than I do. I'd think this kind of place would attract trolls, not repel them. They seem to exist for no other purpose than to torpedo civility, and this is about the most civil place you can find in the internet these days.
I think if anything, it's the invite system that's kept the pool clean, and possibly the hard work of Deimos and the Old Guard picking up after us children.
There's a concept in game design that splits players of MMOs into four categories. One of those categories is, essentially, trolls. They're the griefers and the PKers and the trolls and the people who look for MMOs that will specifically feed their desire to cause problems, be they legitimate suffering or mild annoyance, for other players. The thing is, the system is an ecosystem: you have trolls, but they need prey and they can't prey on each other because if they get PKed too hard then they'll just leave. They need targets, and in MMOs that's mostly PVEers, people who exist to explore the world and engage with it as a game.
In the social network ecosystems, you have trolls, and they prey on "normal users". People who aren't power-using, who aren't running crazy experiments, who aren't massively creating content. They specifically prey on people who authentically and boringly engage, and try to upset them or wind them up or otherwise engage with them.
The problem, in both MMOs and social networks, are the people who just do not give a shit about engaging with the trolls. In MMOs, that's players who use the game as a fashion and socialisation space, who hang out in the world just to... be present. In social networks, that's people who engage with complete civility at all times and either just ignore the trolls and keep talking around them as if they're not there, or simply walk away without doing anything and leave the conversation.
Trolls hate that. The latter might feed them for a bit, but it's so unbelievably boring when it's all that happens... and mostly that's what you get here. You get people who engage with this space as a social discussion space, and aren't interested in gamifying it. Lack of gamification is what kills trolls, since it incentivises users who are being trolled to simply not engage with the troll.
If you want to avoid trolls, don't allow them to win by doing what socialiser players in MMOs do: ignore the game completely. Don't treat it as a fight, or engage with the trolls even to tell them to stop. Hell, even to label Malice. Just flat-out do not respond and continue to talk to people who are engaging in good faith.
Remember old-school netiquette: don't feed the trolls. They don't exist to torpedo civility, they exist to get a reaction out of human beings. They aren't a force of nature, they're a group of arseholes who feed on your frustration. So... don't feed them. They'll starve to death very quickly.
Flashbacks to years of EVE: Online forum posts.
Just chiming in to say that if someone is being an obvious jerk or otherwise malicious, you should definitely label as malice. The user doesn’t get notified, just Deimos. The comment can be removed or the person banned, which is the most effective method to fight assholes in an invite-only community.
The difference from the MMO analogy is that in a game, trolls hide behind the game system — they aren’t doing anything ‘wrong’ other than pushing the system to its limits. Here, if someone is pushing into the limits of the rules deliberately, they’ll just get nuked.
I've long held a theory that an MMO can create PvEvP by allowing these people to control the mobs rather than play as normal characters - and then take over the world, because it will be glorious chaos. Spawn them in as an orc captain, add mechanics for putting together a posse out of nearby orcs, and reward them for going around wrecking player groups. Kill enough players, you spawn next time as a general, not a captain. Earn your way right up to controlling the raid bosses. Meanwhile, players get big rewards for whacking these guys, above and beyond the usual rewards. The catch is of course you can only play monsters on servers other than the ones where you have a character yourself.
I’m a trolls dream honestly. I’m argumentative to a fault as in I’ll want to just stop arguing and be sick of it but I’ll feel compelled to respond if I feel some one is wrong. Hell, I’ve had times when I know I’m being trolled and I still feel compelled to respond. One of the best ways I found to stop myself is to just not read a response but part of me feels disrespectful but I’ve learned I gotta get over that as it is the easiest way to get myself out of an argument that is going nowhere.
If they're truly trolls they don't deserve your respect.
yeah but I'm talking about just with anyone... not just trolls (I don't feel as bad with them). It feels a cop out to just not read their response but sometimes it is the only way to stop myself.
Yeah when I was arguing with people on Reddit more I realized I had basically made a game of it where I would try to respond to them with as few words and as little effort as possible while baiting them into spending as much time as they could to be verbose.
This happened because, so often, after a few back-and-forths all the argument becomes is other people shifting goal-posts and willfully reading things into your comments that weren't there. So I would just get sick of constantly restating the same point over and over in different terms and just keep telling them to scroll back or be like "Show me where I said this."
Then at some point I realized nobody actually reads a thread after, like, 5 comments deep. At that point it's only seen by the person you're arguing with. If it's getting any interaction at all (upvotes/downvotes) it's almost certainly because they're hitting it with their sock-puppets or it's gotten the attention of some drama-watching sub (often brought in by the person you're arguing with). Once I internalized this, the desire to continue engaging disappeared. I just edited in the best form of my argument in the last comment I expected anyone to see and then peaced. It ends up making the other person look like an idiot to keep harping on points you've already refuted.
It's Sturgeon's Law, which is just a nickname for a Pareto distribution. There just aren't very many trolls, they are a rare breed in the raw numbers. If you have 1000 users, only 100 will comment, and only 10 will submit new content. Only one of those people will become the 'moderator' class, and only one of those people will become a 'troll'. I'd say we are evenly matched. You'd just never notice it because trolls have the ability to temporarily turn other users into themselves with the right eleven words. If you let them get away with that, your forum succumbs to eternal september. If you don't, well, that's never been tried but perhaps we will find out soon.
Deimos banned four users out of this last wave for being outright jerks in various threads. Four. That's all it takes. At some point, it is not worth it sticking up for the 'free speech' rights of four individuals if it means the group goes to hell. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. Fuck the trolls, they have the rest of the internet to play with. Invite-only is their nemesis.
Someday when your average group here is literally half moderators, letting them in with open signup might not be the disaster it usually is, if they end up auto-banning themselves every time. I don't know if it's possible to get that far with mod tools. Time will tell.
Even when I first joined in 2019 or so, it was very clear very quickly that Tildes is the community of a traditional forum using the trappings of a Reddit style social news site. I've only been sporadically active since because it can't cover every niche at this scale (I'm sure I'd bore everyone if I started talking about optimal industry layouts in Anno 1800 for example). So I'd say that's probably a fair assessment for many.
For me at least, Tildes is more of a replacement for HN than a replacement for Reddit
"HN but the cryptofascists aren't allowed" is what I've wanted for years. I like HN when it has good discussions but I got so sick of running into 4channers that I just stopped using the site.
Yeah, it's a fair criticism of HN, and as time goes by it seems to get more so. Maybe it's just more mask off that by free speech some of them mean they personally want to hate on LGBT people, or maybe it's just undergoing a gradual shift that way and the last few years have just been boiling me too fast that I noticed. That and the common reply to criticising anything immoral but legal by clamiing "But it's legal, why are you complaining", and the idea that "it's just capitalism" is a rebuttal to any of its ill effects have really soured me on that site over the last couple of years (as someone who has an account over a decade old).
I think the culture in tech has just become intellectually lazy like that over the past decade or so. It's been a slow creep, but at this point the trend line has become clear. I don't know how much of it is driven by generational change (more people -> average quality of contributors goes down) and how much of it is the actual intellectual atrophy that comes from interacting on Twitter and Reddit too much (which I didn't even recognize had happened to me until I had enough hindsight after having quit those sites).
It's an inherent problem with letting nazis use your space at all. Decent people won't use your site or will use it less, and nazis will think they're in good company.
Eventually, they are.
Well, Deimos was the Greek god of dread and terror... It seems kind of fitting that he's developed this almost mythical reputation, elsewhere.
Lets put this to the test, @Deimos your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
What admin wielding a ban hammer could refuse such a horrific insult?
On a serious note, while I have concerns about the benevolent dictator position @Deimos holds, from my time here I have incredible respect for what they are trying to achieve and the actions they have taken in that regard, even if their father smells of elderberries.
That's never been the impression I've gotten of Deimos. What I do see is a very firm set of expectations of behaviour that are enforced from the top down, which often causes those who'd trash up the place to show themselves out.
It's something I'm struggling with as well - a lot of these "reddit alternatives" have the same kind of media focused card layouts with heavy emphasis on videos/gifs. A lot of the "old school" forum users (of which I'm definitely one) feel similarly - we're used to text heavy sites with a lot of information packed into the viewable space. This used to be a product of necessity as most users were on slower connections that would choke on the volume of data transferred by a media heavy site. With those restrictions mostly gone now, site designers are letting us have it with both barrels.
It’s especially frustrating when productivity software gets like this. I’m eyeing Jira sideways right now.
My only complaint about Tildes is that it's default css is set too narrow for a ultrawide screen, giving the "newspaper with just one column" effect.
But it's not anywhere nearly as bad as a lot of other websites are for that, the way the site is coded makes it a fairly easy fix and when I complained about it in my first post @cfabbro was nice enough to post a userscript that fixes it. Heck, I stopped using any of the Fediverse examples because I wasn't able to reliably make it less narrow and hate browsing websites like that.
The userscript for those who want it:
click to show
Change the 2000px to adjust the width. And you can add more addGlobalStyle lines if you want to, to tweak more elements.
Yeah, I saw some people posting that the dev has been furiously upgrading Squabbles, so I’ll be interested to see [edit: the progress]. I like it over there so far, in addition to Tildes. I miss a lot of the dumb stuff and bad jokes (especially puns) on Reddit, and those seem to be abundant!
I don’t miss the “And my axe,” pun, “Instructions unclear: dick stuck in toaster” (or whatever) threads. That stuff is so overdone, and I just can’t get any joy out of knowing what the thread will turn into right from the first reply to someone’s comment.
To each their own. That’s why I’m using squabbles and not asking for Tildes to change.
Yeah, I'm splitting my time between here for the conversation, and squabbles for the pun threads. I'm hoping some of the overdone reddit references will not make the transition to either platform.
I'll be honest, the main thing I'm liking about Squabbles is that it's not overrun by the alt right like most reddit refugee sites seem to be. I like the UI on desktop more than mobile currently, and I think an app is coming out for it. I'm hoping the app sees some customizability in terms of layouts.
Tildes is great. I know there are some people with further right ideas here but it isn't overrun like a lot of places are. And I never mind good faith discussion obviously, but so many places listed in /r/RedditAlternatives are just right wing echo chambers similar to what The Donald was.
So far there's only been a need for alt right folks to flee reddit and form alternate communities. Overall, I expect it'll greatly hinder adoption of those places by the current batch of people looking for alternatives.
Thank you. I couldn't quite put my finger on what I didn't like about squabbles and I think thats it. It kinda feels like new reddit and twitter had a baby.
There are a few third party apps being created for Squabbles that might be more of the UI you're looking for. None out for use, yet, but they have squabs on Squabble.
I'm using both Tildes and Squabbles. I find Squabbles more "fun" and Squabbles more discussive.
The beta for Pulse an iOS/Android app for browsing Squabbles has recently released on both platforms, the UI is similar to Apollo, you might enjoy that. Although it is currently read-only, but soon it will allow posting/commenting/liking, things are evolving very rapidly with Squabbles main-site and the 3rd party apps, it is quite exciting.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I have found after leaving Reddit, I'm missing it less with each day. However, if I get a hankering for lower effort content than here, I'm happy to know an app exists to give me an Apollo-like experience.
Have you seen lemmynsfw.com?
This one looks the most promising so far. Thank you!
Probably a stupid question, as many NSFW content wouldn’t generate meaningful discussions, but.. is there anything specifically against NSFW content here?
I can't remember if it's stated anywhere formally, but in general, I don't want to allow porn, but discussion of NSFW topics would probably be acceptable. An old comment I had posted about it:
Like you, I'm not opposed to porn per se, but a big part of why I wasn't comfortable with lemmy was the front page was overrun with explicit content, and I have very little faith that anyone's validating age or consent of the people being posted. If a grown adult wants to post their bits online, that's all good, but I have a major problem with viewing anything that's posted without consent (e.g.: The Fappening on reddit).
I think the monetization of amateur NSFW content has turned any sex-adjacent space on the internet into advertising spots for these sort of things. It might not sound that bad in the abstract but some gaming subs have gotten really bad to the point where a significant portion of their posts were low effort cosplay of girls trying to get their name out there, and I don't know if I want to be advertised porn at all everywhere on the internet. It gets worse with advertising agencies where people actually sign contracts and then they spam sites like twitter and reddit, I don't know if I can see them as any different from just professional porn companies at this point.
Yeah. Porn and gambling have a way of crowding out everything else. This is true both on the internet and in real life. As classes of content I think they have a tendency to attract a subgroup of people with somewhat addictive/compulsive personalities, which means they engage more, which promotes that kind of content, which skeeves out people who aren’t into it, which makes the place sleazier in general and promotes a feedback loop of sleazification.
This is part of why we added a rule on r/gaming that if your profile was NSFW, you couldn't post cosplay on the sub even if it was sfw. We have a lot of minors using the sub, and while I'm not naive enough to think I can stop them from viewing whatever they want on the internet, we don't have to provide a platform for it.
The OF spam is completely out of control on reddit, and I doubt they'll do anything to solve it anytime soon as it helps pump metrics.
Since they cut NSFW from the main popular page I had kind of lost track of just how overloaded with porn that site had gotten. Then when subreddits started going dark I looked at one of the subreddit tracker and it seemed like every third sub popping up was some niche fetish.
There's so many. I remember back before they filtered them out of the main feeds, I tried to block them all so they wouldn't clutter my feed. Whenever I found one, I'd add it to my RES filter list. It was unending.
Other issues that have popped up are the porn bot followers and the thinly veiled bait posts on SFW subs that are designed to get people clicking through to NSFW profiles. This is a technique that's recommended to drum up traffic to OF type sites.
That has happened, and it is sad to watch because it doesn't need to be that way. Communities can ban users with NSFW monetization platforms in their history.
That will do it for the most blatant ones, but most of them hide it by linking to a linktree or Instagram, and it's hard to automate checking those. Some of them are even sneakier where they get an unrelated "fan" recognize them and link to their socials directly. At this point I'm not sure if I'm paranoid and seeing things that aren't there, but I feel like everything on the internet these days is trying to astroturf you into spending money.
In the NSFW subreddits I mod on an alt, we have a bot that removes any submissions from people with a linktree or OF link in their history. The false positive rate is pretty low, and issues can generally be resolved via modmail. Comment links to OF get removed by automod.
Beyond not inspiring much discussion, the limits on image-only posts would do a lot to stop it from getting traction.
I really enjoy squabbles since it feels like a Facebook replacement which is half the reason I used reddit.
Tildes is great for actual discussion.
I am using both.
I feel less anxiety here. I’m loving it so far.
There are a few third party Squabbles apps in development
I think it's worth remembering that this is all still in very early stages. Lemmy still has a lot of growing pains that I think will need to be fixed by developers -- better UX for doing things on different instances, better SEO for making sure content gets crawled correctly, better moderator tools beyond full defederation... It's open source software, it will have some growing pains.
I also tried Lemmy, and outside of StarTrek.website wasn't enjoying the vibe too much, but I registered a few accounts on some instances in case things do improve.
Even Tildes is still technically in its own alpha development
I don't think any of the federated sites will ever become a Reddit "replacement". The way that a lot of users use Reddit is much too generic for that work. In the end, I'd wager most people on, say, /r/games or /r/nba couldn't name a single other user, or any of the mods. You don't really go there for a "community", you go there to talk to and read from a generic anonymous blob of a particular subarea.
With the federated replacements, you'll never get the concentration you need for that. There'll be a sub for games on each instance. It's basically required, since each instance can de-federate each other, and each instance has different moderation standards. So unless once instance simply dominates all the others to such an extent it's essentially not federated, you won't have that "frontpage of the internet" affect.
Secondly, I think federation will cause moderation issues to the extent that the "big" instances will by default de-federate all unknown instances, and only federate with a whitelist of instances they know.
Personally, I see this as "a feature, not a bug" of Lemmy. The Reddit equivalent in my mental model is that instances are akin to r/CasualConversation: A smaller community of users who self-administrate and self-moderate who are interested in discussing random topics with each other. The tools of Lemmy help to block other groups that your instance aren't interested in connecting with (i.e. defederation). If people aren't looking for that and are in search of that "generic anonymous blob" of discussion, then there are alternatives to Lemmy that centralize the community aspects (like Tildes here).
I will say though: The feeling of discussion here on Tildes, where a group of users who have shared interests to minimize asshole-like behaviour (e.g. here's a recent post where the general consensus is that maintaining an invite-only model will maintain the culture) is exactly what Lemmy was built for. It has shared principles, it's just different in implementation details. Yes, there's a steeper learning curve in order to get the tools to optimize that experience. Yes, there's a gap in federation-wide moderation. The rough edges can be smoothed over over time, just like how current Tildes groups aren't fully-baked either :)
I wonder if it would make sense for a UI to aggregate all those
gamescommunities into a single virtual community. E.g. Present all thegamesposts across fediverse, sorted by number of upvotes. That would create critical mass, while still allowing each of the underlying communities to moderate itself.Lemmy and the Fediverse still kinda confuse me. I thought I had a decent understanding until last night when I learned that Communities (?) can defederate themselves and cut off contact with other communities. Learning about that just made me more confused because now you have to join the right community to make sure you can see other communities, it makes my head hurt lol. I’ve been lurking on Tildes for about a week and a half and have loved it. This is my first post here but honestly I like it a lot more than Lemmy. Tildes is just easier and makes a lot more sense to me, everyone seems nicer here too.
The Fediverse is like email but posted publicly on a website. You probably have at least one email address on a specific email server, like Gmail. Many people have many accounts; work email, old addresses, etc. You can email pretty much anyone, anywhere, because all your servers speak the email protocol. Mail server operators can and do block other mailservers that send what they consider objectionable content like spam. The Fediverse takes this a step further in that many people can and do run their own servers to try to centralize discussion on specific topics. Depending on how old you are, mailing lists - specifically listservs with web archives - are the best metaphor, as they also hosted their content on web sites eventually, although it is very common for Fediverse communities to have conversations with one another while it was uncommon (frowned upon, even) to cross-post on listservs.
Defederation is an important feature for dealing with spam and bad actors in ActivityPub software (Lemmy, kbin, Mastodon, etc). When a whole instance is causing problems for another instance, it can be blocked completely. This doesn't just block access to its content, but also its users.
It's been really effective in Mastodon, where there are a lot of instances full of really unsavoury content. If you joined a well-managed Mastodon instance, you might not ever even notice - but if you join an unmoderated one and check the Federated Timeline (which shows all posts from all federated instances) it quickly becomes obvious how bad some of them are.
Not all administrators use defederation to tackle spam or bad actors though. Sometimes they use it because they don't like the politics of another instance, or simply for petty reasons. This can deny their users access to other instances that have nothing overtly wrong with them.
It looks like Lemmy and kbin instances are currently struggling to effectively moderate with the recent explosion in users. In particular, Beehaw recently defederated two big instances as an interim measure. I'm hoping this improves with time as the influx of users settles down and better moderation tools and strategies are developed.
I'm confused by the Fediverse as well. I signed up for sfba.social during the Twitter exodus and just find it hard to find content I actually want to see. Lemmy looks & feels more like Reddit and is easier to find your way around, but feels small right now (which is to be expected.)
I moved here from reddit. Lost my /r/ todayilearned subreddit after almost 16 years of maintaining growth. That was the last straw for me. Decided to move on to something that I personally feel has A LOT of growth potential.
reddit really digg'd themselves into a hole. Greed will eventually come back and bite you in the ass. So, here's to bigger and better things for us all! I'm REALLY happy to be here at the start of something new and great.
Just FYI. TIL has been posting on the Fediverse.
There is one community on Lemmy (@todayilearned@lemmy.ml) and one magazine on Kbin (@TodayILearned@kbin.social). The posts they are producing read just like the ones on Reddit to me.
Honestly? It's a mess. reddit has turned into a black hole and it will take time for the internet to recover.
Those who were able to escape its pull, have now found themselves in the vast space of nothingness. The threadiverse (meaning, all of these federated and threaded link aggregators) is still in its infancy, and I find it to be rather painful to browse these websites for now. There is simply too much noise. The communities, unsurprisingly, are not there yet.
I had been a reddit user more than a decade under different usernames, I deleted my last account right before the AMA after poisoning my past contributions with paragraphs of lorem ipsum. I had exactly 20 subreddits in which I participated. I put their RSS feeds into Feedbin and that's how I've been following them for the past week. Not ideal but at least there are no ads.
That said, I've always felt like a lurker on reddit, I really don't know why. My real internet home is MetaFilter, I've been a member of it for close to 15 years. I find Tildes to be more like MeFi than reddit, both in terms of culture and pace. It's slower and this is a wonderful thing. I hope more people will realise that we don't actually need centralised information highways.
There's some high praise. MeFi was one of our favorite topics when talking dev about this place, particularly how they've done their invite-only model for so long. The instant MeFi gets linked at the top of reddit, they close invites for weeks. It's only ever open when things are quiet. This is the way to keep the crap at bay. The people who have the patience to stick around a little while and get that invite are the ones you want.
I'm keeping both lemmy and tildes. I like tildes more curated content, but lemmy/kbin is way more active and easier to set up niche communities. The flip side of that is I have a lot more filters in place already on lemmy.
In case you haven't heard kbin federated with lemmy, so they are both accessible from each other.
This is a healthy approach in terms of Internet communities and balance. If we want thoughtful contributions to Tildes and not an echo chamber, it necessitates that people get information from multiple sources. Visit different websites, participate in different communities, use an RSS reader to get news and information from different sources. Form your own judgments and contribute your thoughts while respecting others'. Don't lock yourself in and be pulled along by the prevailing groupthink on any given website.
And our brains want downtime too. Memes and pictures and mindless scrolling—they serve a purpose, when consumed in moderation. Lemmy and Kbin are shaping up to be great for that part that Tildes (intentionally) lacks. I'm sure I'll form regular habits on all of these, and maybe others that appear down the line. It's not an either-or situation IMO.
Fully agreed - the lesson I learned from the reddit fiasco is that I shouldn't put all my eggs in one basket. That's why in addition to Tildes I created an account on Kbin and a smal Lemmy instance that theoretically should be at a very low risk of defederation from anything. Also experimenting with adding https://www.newsminimalist.com/ to the mix.
I think I like the way I have it set up - I downloaded Firefox Beta, so I can keep a separate instance of Firefox in addition to my main one on my phone, and have four tabs open and bookmarked there at all times: Tildes, Lemmy, Kbin and News Minimalist. I switch between them depending on what type of content I feel like checking at the time.
Now that I think about it, it does pretty closely mirror my reddit/RIF routine I had for over a decade - I would have a very limited list of subreddits I was subscribed to so that my homepage was mostly news, and then a list of starred subreddits I'd visit from the sidebar when I wanted to check something in particular: subreddits for the games I'm playing, my local subreddit, /r/animalsbeingderps, that sort of thing ;) Guess I just enjoy compartmentalized information, and I'm sure I'll establish something that I like even more further down the road (especially when new apps start popping up).
I hadn't heard of newsminimalist, but it's very interesting!
It's my most recent discovery - I quite like it since most news websites are ad-infested nightmares now, but this one looks clean both on mobile and on desktop. I wish the free version offered a bit more customization, but oh well...
Tried ground.news too, but the popups were annoying, so now this is the only news aggregator I use.
Thanks for sharing it. I'm impressed so far. It seems to have less of a west-centric bias than some of the other "world" feeds. Was impressed the Mali story made it in there, because it's important but hasn't shown up on anything for me except allafrica.
Wow, I love that site. Thank you for the link
You may also want to try squabbles. Its fine, has some promise. Kinda like someone mashed twitter and new reddit together in terms of design. I like it better than the fediverse, but not as much as here I don't think.
I just assumed they were instances of each other, though that would explain why kbin had more features than most of the other lemmy instances.
Never fully understsanded how the reputation feature worked. I apparently had -11 despite me never posting anything particularly controversial or downvoted.
I think kbin's reputation feature broke when Ernest switched boosts and favourites. It might be fixed now.
That on kbin? I've not noticed that on lemmy. I should probably create an account on kbin to try it out.
I think that's really the biggest problem with federated content sites.
Reddit thrives because it is easy to access for the layman which then allows for a greater amount of contribution from sheer numbers of users accessing the site. More contribution and content just turns into a snowball effect of gaining users and more contribution.
Ease of access really is such an important thing for the health of any content aggregator and Tildes seems to do it well so far!
That's the one thing that keeps pulling me back to Tildes, is the UI seems the most similar to how I used Reddit, nice and compact and I can scroll through a bunch of headlines. Lemmy is promising, but it's just had too many technical issues for me just trying to even get registered, and then everything else I've tried just seems like it's trying to look like Facebook. And Tildes discussion seems a bit more civil, so it's working out ok for me so far.
The way I've been approaching Reddit alternatives is not by looking for one website to replace Reddit. But multiple websites for different things.
I've always been nostalgic for the old internet anyway. I've been uncomfortable with users being consolidated to only a few big websites. The rest of the internet felt dead. With people dispersing to different platforms, this feels like there's hope that things are going closer to that again.
I love it here. It's what I've been looking for for a very long time. I'm glad that this place doesn't do low effort posts and memes. But I also do like brainless things sometimes so I'm also on Kbin for that. I also do know that that kind of fun junk content comes with having to ignore potentially toxic people and I've accepted that.
As long as it stays out of tildes, I'm happy with it.
I also have a Mastodon for art and the instance I'm in is pretty strict with people being terrible to each other. I think.
I'm all for different websites fostering different types of communities and wading through them depending on what I want at the time. Rather than sticking to just one.
I'm a big fan of the fediverse in general, but Lemmy and Kbin just aren't mature enough to be Reddit replacements yet. I think Mastodon is a pretty solid (though not perfect) Twitter substitute, but the Reddit-like platforms have a way to go before they're viable for the masses.
Hello! It’s great to see that you're part of the wave of people breaking free from the Reddit bubble and seeking alternative platforms. The emergence of platforms like Lemmy, Kbin, and Tildes shows that there’s an appetite for spaces that offer more meaningful discussions.
As you mentioned, the federated nature of these sites is intriguing but seemingly riddled with issues at the moment. I agree with your observation that the strength of these platforms lies in the decentralized “fediverse,” but at the same time, it's also their Achilles' heel due to content management and community fragmentation challenges.
Now, Tildes seems to have struck a chord with you, and that's encouraging! As you've experienced, it's not trying to be another Reddit but is carving its own niche. Each platform will have its unique strengths and weaknesses. I have just joined and I appreciate being able to engage in textual conversations, and it resembles the early days of the web.
I'd like to point out that the changing landscape of Reddit, especially the disconnect between its leadership and the user base, is something is driving the quest for alternatives by some of us. Capitalism has finally reached the door of that community.
Thanks for sharing your experiences and providing insights into these platforms. Keep exploring, and maybe you’ll find or even help shape the community that feels just right for you.
I had a failed attempt at doing a 365 photo project at the start of this year, and in prepping for I explored the Fediverse. I looked at several different instances of several different platforms. It's mostly a complicate ghost town. I did sign up for a PixelFed instance, their store brand version of Instagram, and there was no activity because even the largest instance had users in the four digit range.
The Fediverse (you are a right, a terrible name) is all hype with nothing backing it up. Kudos to Tilde for making an easy to use platform.
pixelfed, peertube, and other fediverse concepts have a hard time getting off the ground because hosting something for pictures or videos is expensive, so most instances tend to have very restricted signups, and as such have few users
it's not strange that reddit leaned on external image hosting, and only recently internalised that. especially in something federated, where it's usually volunteer run, and going (semi-)viral might mean your monthly hosting bill skyrockets.
and then there's the issue of having no algorithm. harder to discover stuff or get discovered. apparently tiktok does a really good job of artificially inflating views if you just make a new account, so that you get suckered into thinking you'll always do well on the platform.
(i think the most active photography fediverse project i've come across is photog.social btw, if you're still looking to try something out)
As a photography fan glass.photo seems like it would be great. I'm not enough of a photographer to justify the subscription fee, but if I did it would have been a no-brainer.
Tildes is very much a contender. Great, intelligent conversation, simple comfortable layout, and from what I understand, a pledge to try and keep it that way.
I don't, however, think that it is a Reddit replacement. For me, Reddit was a great place to discover and read about interesting things, but also a place to find experts in any specific area. Plumbing advice, metallurgy, music, local travel,knowledge, cooking, you name it.
I'm not saying that a goal here should be to emulate Reddit, but that was a lot of the value I found there.
It isn't a trope to search for "topic +site:Reddit.com" when you want good answers for no good reason.....
There is this counter-intuitive thing I'm having with tildes where people are too considered and rational in their comments. I know that sounds silly but let me explain.
I first came onto the internet in 1994, growing up during the Troubles in Northern Ireland seeing completely different views to myself was amazing. Later in life as an adult and going through uni, I found others with irrational views challenging me very important not just for myself, but for what limited wisdom I could impart upon others.
On reddit I'll have anti-vaxxers who are basically espousing disproven anti-science talking points. Yes the majority don't care what I have to say, but some of them are simply full of doubt and don't trust the media or modern society. I can chat to them, then share a Cochrane systematic review and try to understand why they came to this vaccine hesitancy.
Not only is there a chance that person revaluates their position of vaccines, but I also learn their background and what leads to so many people like them to hold anti-science views. That helps me in any future conversations I will have, instead of ignorantly assuming they are all idiots, I will have empathy for their family upbringing and social circles.
Likewise, I thought I'd miss Reddit far more than I do. Honestly, ever since the blackout, my mental health, stress levels and productivity have all improved. When I see someone has replied to me here, I'm not immediately worried that it's someone picking a fight or something.
I hope communities are able to rebuild themselves, and maybe one day I'll change my mind, but I think tildes is all I need in terms of social media now.
My phone tells me I'm on the phone 9.5 hours less this last week compared to previous averages. So far I'm happy not having visited all week
Mastodon is great! However, it's not a link aggregator. Different format.
Do you have a recommended instance? I was on Mastodon.technology but it shut down...
I like infosec.exchange. It’s an IT/cybersecurity focused one but well run and pretty welcoming.
The admin also runs Calckey, Lemmy, and Kbin
Nice, thanks. That's adjacent to my own work (developer). I'll give it a look. Appreciate your time.
I’m on the Mastodon instance and highly recommend it as well. A really cool community, the owner of it seems to be a great guy, and he tries to integrate everything together as much as possible. As an example, the Matrix instance he started authenticates against the Mastodon instance.
+1!
I didn't see the responses! Yes! I've run into many lovely people from there.
That sounds great and all, but is there an instance for scriptkiddies where I would feel more welcome? Or at least I can feel arrogant that everyone else is a scriptkiddie but me.
The relevant subreddits were inundated with BlackArch/Kali posts. While I absolutely loathe linux elitism and that part of the community that likes to ridicule others, I'd also rather be part of communities with experienced people that are not plagued by "hacking=cool" mindsets. I realise that makes me an elitist hypocrite.
It's not federated, but if you like the chill style here on Tildes, you might enjoy counter.social - it's been defederated for years due to some drama, but the community is healthy and it's around the same age as Tildes. :) There are lots of tech folks (work and hobby) on CoSo, too.
Specifically the drama was based on the CoSo guy blanket banning all IP addresses out of Iran, Russia, and a couple of other countries with major botnet presence. Mastodon’s BDFL decided this was racist and defederated them from Mastodon.Social and leaned on a bunch of other big instances to defederated too.
Jester, the admin of CoSo, seems to be some kind of white or gray hat cyber warrior guy. There’s some rumors CoSo is partly NSA backed, but I don’t think that’s well substantiated. The community seems decent there at least. Skews much older and seems more of a centrist, MSNBC watching Democrat kind of scene which I haven’t seen much of on the internet since the 2016 election.
I know a ton of folks on hachyderm.io. It's another huge instance. I'm a Trek nerd and really dig tenforward.social but we don't open invites often. I see a lot of good people on infosec.exchange too.
I definitely wish the best for the kbin, lemmy and the fediverse. (Also hoping a better name for it sticks :P)
Maybe when things are better sorted out, and when I have more patients to learn the ins and outs, I might give it another shot. I'm hoping they succeed because I want there to be more community spaces out there on the modern web besides just reddit and the other big social media networks.
Understand the fediverse is more than just Lemmy and kbin. There's pretty much a fediverse service for every major for profit web service—just many haven't gained traction yet due to not having Twitter/Facebook/Reddit level implosions... yet.
ActivityPub seems to be best suited for Instagram or Twitter-like feeds. A Redditesque feed, where comments are the main point, just seems like an awkward fit.
Yep, it's hard enough to wrap your head around when you're trying to look at posts from different instances and they don't always show up properly. Having "subreddits" within instances also communicating with people on other instances, all while dealing with the same inconsistent display of likes/replies/etc depending on what instance you're on, just makes it into an even more complicated mess. Federation is an interesting concept for new forms of social media, but I don't think adapting a social media platform to be the same setup but ✨federated✨ really helps anything.
I've read the spec. I don't see the spec limiting link aggregation with threaded comments.
Do you see specific problems?
I’ve been pretty sceptical of the fediverse due how complicated it is to both understand and use, which will significantly impact its growth for less technical people, as well the not great moderation currently and loads of duplicate communities.
But I was willing to overlook both of those and try it out until I realised that the instance you use can straight up block any other one you might want to see or vice versa. That straight up kills the entire point of having all these servers linked if they can be unlinked at any point, suddenly instead of needing one account to access all the communities you like you now need like 5 as they fracture further and further.
Also creating this toxic combative culture between servers forming schisms like has happened on Mastodon.
I think I’m much happier with a regular well moderated service but I still do hope that maybe they can sort a lot of these issues out and I’ll definitely keep half an eye on them to see how they develop.
It's a catch 22 because if you don't give instance owners a way to defederate then their instance can possibly interact with illegal and/or harmful content which is definitely not good. You don't want to forcefully expose your users to harm.
But at the same time this feature means if an admin just suddenly feels like blocking an instance they can.
Feels like there's no easy way to overcome this barrier.
I'm signed up on a very unrestricted misskey instance and even then they block a few instances that are either dedicated to harassment/spam or post stuff that's illegal in the county the instance is hosted in. The admin tries to just silence an instance whenever possible rather than complete defederation but some places are just hell holes.
Fair usage of defederation is definitely an ongoing issue. Instead of simply being used to deal with spam and bad actors, some instance administrators wield it as a weapon against other servers they simply don't like, or as a form of protest in attempt to force another instance to take action on something.
A lot of instances administrators are overly tribal, and lacking in maturity.
Interesting, thanks for the perspectives.
I'm finding Lemmy to be glitchy. Like, right now it's open in another tab, where it's been puzzling over my login attempt for ten minutes.
Of the several alternatives to Reddit I've tried, Tildes seems to have most of what I'm looking for — there's already plenty of interesting posts and comments, and the tech works, and the people behind the scenes aren't at all Spezlike.
Lemmy seems to have a few bugs around the login and signup processes right now:
This makes it really frustrating to try and sign up for some instances like Beehaw. When you can't sign into your account it's hard to figure it what's actually wrong because there are no error messages to explain anything.
Update 2023-06-22: It has now been 12 days since I signed up for a Beehaw account and I've finally been able to log in for the first time. Their FAQ for Reddit migrants said that they approve most signups within 24 hours. I had assumed my signup was rejected for some reason, but it must've been the login bug that I mentioned above.
The fact that a rejected signup is indistinguishable from the login bug and neither of them display an error message is a bad user experience. I wonder how many other people have encountered this, assumed their signup was rejected, and just moved on?
It's a problem with Lemmy itself, not just Beehaw. Hopefully it will be fixed soon with all the fresh eyes on Lemmy.
For me it breaks down like this:
Tildes has a slow growth. It's thoughtful, much like the people who make up the community. It will grow with me.
Lemmy instances don't really know what they want to be. It's chaos, sometimes good chaos, but it doesn't have a lot of discipline right now. It seems to be taking on a lot of the Reddit refuges, and fortunately those weren't the communities I was involved with. My Frontpage consisted of few of the default subs. A lot of those subs have tried to set up as quickly as possible. That's great for me. Tildes is like a buffered version of that and maintains a higher caliber of discussion for what we're the more popular subs.
Kbin is where I can still find a more managed and tamer social network for the small subs I had subscribed to. It has Frontpage content it gets from the Lemmy instances, but it is where I can still find smaller bespoke communities which have very narrow subjects.
So I hope Tildes can maintain its smaller concentration of good netizens. It would be welcome if smaller communities could also be set up here, but I don't think the time is right. Tildes is close knit and as such it encourages respect. I can come here to catch up on what matters more broadly, and slink off to another service to catch up on more specific and narrow topics of interest which don't need to have prominent placement for everyone to see.
I have had the same experiences with / impressions of Tildes, Kbin (where I have an account) and Lemmy (I get their content on my Kbin feed). Maybe Tildes could eventually introduce more small communities but it will have to be way, way after the next Reddit exodus (which will probably start around July 1). Too soon and those small communities won't be that small and it would starkly change the current Tildes atmosphere.
It strikes me a little as a young Yahoo! . When Yahoo! launched it was a curated directory of web pages. Every site listed on Yahoo! was categorized. It wasn't difficult to read all the categories as I recall. I don't think It was Google Page Rank which made Yahoo! change, it was the search engine, Alta Vista, because now the computers were categorizing sites without human intervention.
Tildes, like Reddit, is like those early Yahoo! days, except with Reddit the categories got out of control. The use of mods somewhat serves the same purpose of ensuring that content is classified correctly.
I wonder if the next evolution shouldn't be that posts automatically classify themselves. We can already apply ML to posts and extract summaries and emotion about the linked content. Would it make sense to lose the moderation, allow posts to dynamically align with these generated channels, and instead the way the users of the site react to content it trains the ML how things should be grouped?
I'm sticking with both tildes and Kbin. I enjoy both, and even if there's some content crossover, there's still enough difference between posts/users. After putting all my eggs in one basket after the twitter fiasco, and basically dropping that "basket" when reddit imploded, I want a bit of variety in my content/content delivery platforms again.
RSS Reader for the news, tildes for the social media and comments. I think that will be enough for me.
What RSS feeds do you like?
I made my own recently with a lot of german and english news agencies. It's pretty raw right now and focused on main news. I will definitely have to add a few more technique and science feeds.
If you have any good feeds in mind, I would appreciate anything you throw my way.
Xkcd and News Minimalist are RSS feeds I’ve discovered.
Thanks, I think I'm going to add it. It seems to catch the miscellaneous and global stuff my feed is missing right now. And having a few Xkdcs mixed in is kind of clever to lighten it up a bit.
I initially started out on Lemmy, I like Beehaw and Lemmy.World, and I joined a magic the gathering instance as well, but the posts have pretty much been the same things over and over and the quality of content posted just hasn't been as good as on here and Squabbles. I got my invite to here through Squabbles, shout out to the person who invited me, I used the same username for both sites.
I think in the long run I will probably be sticking to Squabbles and Tildes with Lemmy being an occasionally check up on to see how it progresses.
Still find Lemmy and Kbin really alpha state, I think the timing with the Reddit exodus did not give them a chance to mature little more.
Current political climate is different to what Digg and Reddit had back in the day. Some people might find Tildes perfect for their liking but other people may find their alternative elsewhere as ActivityPub.
Thank you for the helpful review about your experience.
I'm just starting to look for something to replace r/lgbt & related communities, if you or anyone has some suggestions.
How about ~lgbt, right here on Tildes?
Hey... that's a pretty good idea :)
I have them occasionally! :P
I used the Fediverse many years ago, back when it was still running on StatusNet. Ironically, the time it was best was when its community was mostly focused on on a single site: Identi.ca. It actually had quite a similar feel to Tildes: small and slow enough to feel cosy, high quality, with some name recognition. Many of the users were heavy FOSS advocates, since Twitter alternatives weren't really on the public radar at the time, and that informed a lot of the conversation. There was other good discussion, though; a friend referred to it as a 'punchline generator.'
Over time it became bigger and had a lot of problems with spam, that only grew as people actually tried to start using other instances more. StatusNet development dried up over a course of some years, with its original creator creating the Pump.IO framework from the ground up to try to overcome some of what he saw as the fundamental errors of StatusNet (many of which derived from feature creep and the fact that it was implemented in PHP). Pump.IO and its protocol eventually informed the ActivityPub protocol, upon which Mastodon and the Fediverse is now based.
Sadly, the original implementation of Pump.io itself's front-end was a bit of a disaster, and the original Identi.ca community pretty much entirely collapsed when it was migrated to Pump (although many of the folks who were around then are now involved in Mastodon development).
I have kbin.social account but I don't really use it. It just feels a bit too chaotic for me.
I tried other alternatives and didn't liked it.