Figures that Techdirt is the first (and only so far) place that I've seen to mention Lemmy/Kbin, and also not do a mess of it!

Well duh. "PC" means "Windows", obviously.

sigh

The problem with AI is the problem with capitalism.

Hiper-capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz, who had been pushing cryptocurrencies for a long while and still seems to be doing so, have vested interests in generating the AI-hype.

This Tech Won't Save Us podcast episode makes a very important point: any movement that does not have a structure and some form of leadership can easily be taken over by anyone willing and able to fill that kind of power vacuum.

Fediverse currently does not have a structure nor a form of leadership other than perhaps "whatever Mastodon is doing". That's problematic. I hope that we recognize this and do something to fix it, before that power vacuum gets filled by… someone we might not like.

I do see that the researchers involved in the OP link are Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi. That's fantastic. They are truly fedi old guard, deeply engaged, very knowledgeable, and generally wonderful human beings.

Yes! 🥳

Same! But the beauty of it is that this effectively creates a competitive advantage for Fairphone. Fairphone is already compliant, while all other smartphone companies will have to develop this from ~scratch.

I think throwing around vague but scary-sounding terms like "compromised" is a very bad idea.

Or by random dice throws.

Actually, if we're nit-picking, it means "Personal Computer", but the colloquial meaning has shifted somewhat since the good old IBM times to first mean desktop computers (as opposed to laptops), and then to mean non-Apple computers (including laptops), which for most people means "a computer that runs Windows."

Which is the basis of my heavy sigh.

Updated with a new link from EBU.

Will we get tabbed/grouped windows finally again? Been waiting for this for half more than a decade.

fixed again. jeebus.

Meanwhile, Threadiverse is on the verge of reaching 100k active monthly accounts.

Of course, the numbers are incomparable. But this whole thing made Threadiverse into a viable space for a lot of people. Reddit app developers are starting to develop apps for Lemmy/Kbin. Dozens of new instances got set up. The whole space is bigger, more resilient, and leaps and bounds more vibrant than it was in May and before (I've been here for years).

A lot of people will come back to Reddit. But a lot of people will also remain here. And this space will be there the next time Reddit craps the bed, better prepared to take the influx.

I can certainly tell you that Lemmy wont blindly follow what Mastodon is doing.

Good to hear.

They arent doing a good job for the Fediverse, for example they make zero effort to improve compatibility with other projects. Instead others are left to reverse engineer their federation logic.

Yeah. Plus, the sheer size of mastodon.social and the monoculture of Mastodon-based instances is just unhealthy. I wrote about it at length.

Fair point. They're also pretty solid and tech-savvy in general.

Yup. You're thinking of Tay.

:p

I did not say "lemmy = tankie", I said Lemmy has certain tankie baggage, and that is in fact true. The developers are pretty clearly tankies, they also run a strictly tankie instance (Lemmygrad; many Lemmy instances do not federate with it).

Pretending this is not the case is not going to help in the long run. It might slow down the "unreddit" movement now, but I'd wager a bet it will make it more long-term viable and resilient, if people understand that choice of instance is important (there are quite a few great Lemmy instances that I would recommend wholeheartidly, like BeeHaw), and that there are alternative, independent implementations on Threadiverse (like Kbin).

In what sense? Kbin is struggling with the wave of new subscriptions just as Lemmy is, and since it's a smaller project with fewer resources, it's having a harder time doing so.

That does not make the fact that at some point Kbin was ahead of Lemmy in terms of active accounts any less notable. I would even argue it makes it more notable.

Oh no! The browser that forked the browser that a browser made by the largest ad vendor in the world is based on in order to be able to serve different ads is legally threatening a browser that forked it in order to remove said ads?

Did I get this right?

Yes. Check out the biggest currently active instance of Kbin, https://fedia.io/ — plenty of stuff from Lemmy instances.

Same! I use a Lemmy instance myself. I'm just happy to see there is diversity in terms of software projects in the Threadiverse.

KBin is dealing with the onslaught of new users, and as it is a newer project, it's not handling it as well as Lemmy.

Also, you are looking at user accounts, I was talking about monthly active users.
Also also, biggest instance of KBin is currently out of federation (so does not show up in these stats), but it is still growing and is pretty damn huge now: https://kbin.social/stats

We shall see what happens when kbin.social re-joins federation. But also: this is not a competition. What matters is that there are independent software projects in this space.

Try magazines from https://fedia.io, which is also a Kbin instance. The "main" Kbin instance, kbin.social, currently does not federate due to the load.

e.g. Mastadon

*Mastodon

Yup. The problem is that these users will have trouble understanding how can it be "Mastodon" without being Mastodon, if you get my drift. Plus, ideally this would also be done by Mastodon-the-software project — "if you want functionality X, check out instances of this compatible-but-different software project."

But absolutely, doing so yourself in such cases makes perfect sense.

I don't think it is anymore.

Fair point, edited.

I am still hoping beyond hope they do revive it, there seems to be others that do as well.

What absolute bull. 🤦

competition can be a good thing in this space.

Absolutely, that's why I am celebrating Kbin existing and being used.

I don't think you need to worry about it. It's up to a given community whether or not that baggage affects it or not, I think. Building communities that are very explicitly not tankie is a great way of helping overcome that baggage for the whole project.

A whole different level of "blood money". 👀

also inb4 "playing chicken" 👀

Wonderful!

I do indeed use a Lemmy instance that is not aligned with tankie politics. That being said, I am also acutely aware that technology is political and developers of a given piece of software make decisions based on their personal politics, sometimes even without knowing it. So it is important, I feel, to be aware of that.

Absolutely not. Cryptobros showed that the whole cryptocurrency scene is either in on the scams or at least not bothered by them. Just consider Web3 Is Doing Great: for every promise "web3"/DAO people make, there is at least one story there how "web3"/DAO does not deliver and cannot deliver.

Here are some additional resources about why any suggestions of cryptocurrency/NFT/web3/DAO-related actions need to be pushed back on with full force:

• https://doctorow.medium.com/moneylike-d20f8279a72e
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g
• https://strangematters.coop/web3-vs-fediverse-decentralized-internet/ (full disclosure, I wrote this one)

Cryptobros had all the time to build sustainable, equitable, decentralized communities, and failed to do so. Instead, they scammed a lot of people out of their money, and a lot of artists out of their work.

Letting them in on the federated social networking action is letting in foxes into the hen house.

Donations, Liberapay, etc are the right way to support these federated social spaces. DAOs and other cryptocurrency scams are absolutely, positively not the right way to support them. Relying on them will let cryptobros benefit financially from it, while destroying the movement.

This will help:

The source is well-worth visiting and taking the time to read, plenty of additional info!

I do not believe there is a migration tool for Lemmy-KBin migrations.

Oooh, I like the idea!

Yup. But I do see it as potentially enabling people to migrate towards fedi, off of Meta instances, more smoothly than now. Some fedi instances will probably federate with Meta's instances, so one could have an account on a non-Meta instance (thus having access also to fedi instances that block Meta), but stay in touch with contacts on Meta instances.

That just might be enough to pull people towards greener pastures over here. 🙂
I am pretty sure that people who already migrated to fedi will mostly not want to migrate back to Meta-owned instances. So it seems to me like it might be a one-way street. Which would be good!

What I really worry about is two things:

• Meta slurping data from fedi — but they can do that already even without running any instances, as far as public content is concerned;
• additional, potentially insanely huge, load on the moderators of fedi instances that choose to federate with Meta instances.