this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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To be fair...
There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I'd argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)
I don't like the Lemmy maintainers, and that was a big jump propelling me onto Kbin. It just made me feel squicky knowing that I was tacitly endorsing their software by using it when there was an alternative available that did exactly the same things. I also don't like using communities on Lemmy.ml because the admins there have a history of removing stuff that doesn't suit their political views.
I don't think these two situations are equivalent, mind, but I do think there is more weight behind "avoid using Lemmy" than "avoid using Calckey/Firefish".
Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called "karab.in" (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn't like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.
But the kicker is: right now, we're discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.
So as for endorsing one or another:
Using any of these without giving back, is not "endorsing" it, it's mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more... why not mooch off of that one? 😛
I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.
BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The "tankie" one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from... except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to "subscribed" or "local" and you'll be fine.
I try to use both equally, because I'm always on the hook for picking the "doomed" standard in any 50/50 contest. It's easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on "All/Active" or "All/Hot", frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.
I can relate to that. It usually isn't a coin flip for me though. I'll align with some technology over another because I truly can see an advantage. That technology might be the underdog from the beginning. Consider that we're evaluating Firefish vs. Lemmy vs. Kbin whereas all of them combined are the underdog for certain more well established social forums. I engage with all three (and others still), because I don't know the future.
There's a third one I didn't know about?
That's gonna be the one to take off. Put your chips on Firefish. It's always the one I'm not using.