I’m a AAA game dev and a number of former co-workers are at Netflix nowadays. Like, a suspiciously high number.

They can’t tell me anything (of course), but I can put two and two together.

It’s written in PHP, which a lot of devs dislike.

It is drowning in pull requests: 83 open as of right now. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/pulls

Ernest (the lead dev) wasn’t really expecting it to blow up yet. Kbin was created in January of this year, and the first “major” instance was launched in May. It blew up basically instantly due to Reddit imploding, and Ernest has been playing catch-up.

But it still has rough edges - no API means no mobile apps. Lots of bugs and such from being a new project. It’s improving every week (including an API in code review), but Lemmy is more polished and has an relatively mature API.

You can see a list of instances here: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin

As far as I know, there isn’t specifically a privacy-focused instance like what Lemmy has. But I also didn’t browse that list of instances too closely.

This is sort of the mission statement of Kbin. Kbin supports Lemmy, Mastodon, FireFish, and Pixelfed already. It’s planned to support PeerTube (this used to work but broke) and Mobilizon.

That’s the main reason why I have a Kbin account. :)

There’s still a lot of people who will always stick to Reddit as well (as evidenced by a good amount of hostility in the comment section of the Reddit discussion on /r/rust).

Yet another reason why I prefer Kbin.

The developers of Lemmy have been questionable for some time. See their post announcing Lemmy: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

https://web.archive.org/web/20230626055233/https://old.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/cqgztr/fuck_the_white_supremacist_reddit_admins_want_me/

Hey all, longtime Marxist-leninist, recorder of left audiobooks, and megathread shitposter here.

Posting this in light of a recent one week Reddit ban I earned for shitting on US police, as I’m sure many of us have gotten in recent weeks.

So I’ve spent the past few months working on a self hostable, federated, Reddit alternative called Lemmy, and it’s pretty much ready to go. Unlike here we’d have ultimate control over all content, and would never have to self censor.

Obviously as communists, we agitate where the people are, so we should never abandon Reddit entirely, but it’s been clear to all of us from day one, that communities like this stand on unsteady ground, and could be banned or quarantined at any moment by the white supremacist Reddit admins. This would be both a backup and a potentially better alternative. Moderation abilities are there, as well as a slur filter.

Raddle isn’t an option obviously since it’s run by this arch anti tankie scum, ziq.

I wanted to ask ppl here if they’d like me to host an instance, and mod all the current mods here.

The instance that post mentions at the end became Lemmygrad. Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad are the same people. This was their first post announcing Lemmy as a real thing you could go use. (It’s also why a good chunk of the Threadiverse is absolutely infested with tankies.)

I never agitated for a fork because generally the Lemmy devs do an okay job at keeping their politics separate from their software. But the more I look at their attitudes and (frankly) the hazing they do towards contributors, the more I’m thinking that it may be better to push for an outright fork of Lemmy, give it a better name, a saner dev team, and excise the original devs entirely. Even if we ignore their politics (which is hard to do, but can be done), they’ve simply not been the best stewards of the project - it’s succeeded in spite of them, not because of them.

That said, I think Lemmy as a piece of software is generally okay. Kbin has more long-term promise, I feel, but Kbin has its own issues and is much rougher around the edges. A lot of the issues Kbin has have already been sorted out by Lemmy, so I think it might be best to make a Lemmy fork and bring in features from Kbin into it (alongside performance fixes and whatnot that the Lemmy devs refuse to action on).

If you follow a Kbin community on Mastodon, the top-level post is the only thing shared to the community’s “profile”. If you click on the post, then the comments section is the Kbin comments section.

Here’s an example of a Kbin post I made displaying on Mastodon. I replied to this post, and my reply shows up as a reply to the top-level post.

Kbin’s federation with Mastodon works as you’d expect it to work.

I don’t know why Lemmy insists on such bad integration with Mastodon. Last I checked, the Lemmy devs were insisting on not having smooth integration with Mastodon.

Doesnt make much sense when you can create a second account on Mastodon or one of many other platforms which already implement user following much better.

It’s one reason why I jumped to Kbin and have been using it for the past few months. Kbin does indeed support user following much better -and it supports threads showing up in Mastodon much better too.

There is a distinction between Communists and tankies.

Tankies are a subset of Communists. Specifically, tankies have rejected Marx in favor of authoritarianism, power for power’s sake. “Everyone is equal, and some people are more equal than others” sort of thinking. They want to show anyone who doesn’t agree with them the barrel of a gun.

The term came from when the Soviets invaded Hungary in order to prevent popular reforms. But I think a better example of what tankies are like (and how they differ from communists) is looking at Czechoslovakia.

Czechoslovakia was a communist country already, but they were doing reforms that would help the average worker and promote equality within the country. The plan was to transition away from a single-party state within Czechoslovakia and towards a form of democratic socialism, where the parties still held core communist ideas but no one figure could wield influence (in line with what Marx expected).

The Soviets saw this as a threat. Their model of a one-party authoritarian state where the secret police dominate everything and the proletariat have no rights is the one they wanted to push everywhere. So they invaded Czechoslovakia and sent tanks into the country.

Later, the Chinese Communist Party sent tanks in to crush peaceful protestors who were asking for human rights and democracy within the proletariat. The protesters were literally turned into jelly by the tanks and washed down into the gutters.

Tankies support these atrocities. They say that a one-party authoritarian state is the only way to do things. Don’t let them trick you into thinking they’re the only true Communists - tankies want an upper class and a lower class, just like capitalists do. The distinction is that to tankies, the upper class are the party elite, the ones who do and say what they’re told. The lower class are the people they don’t like, or those who are unlucky enough not to have friends in high places.

Tankies are absolute scum. Lemmy’s founders are tankies, Lemmygrad and Lemmy.ml both push tankie politics (Lemmy.ml is more subtle about it, but does enforce it via their moderation policy), and now Hexbear is coming over to Lemmy in order to complete the tankie trifecta.

I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I don’t mind communists - I’m pretty left-leaning myself - but tankies are not true communists, and they never can be unless they fundamentally rethink their views about equality and freedom.

Agreed. Fuck tankies.

https://www.wikihow.com/Test-Dopamine-Levels

!Disneyvacation

Neon FTW. Been my daily driver for a while now with zero problems.

Tankies have really been doubling down the last few days. I hate that this place is infested with them - and it seems to be growing as they start to scare sane people away.

Louder for the people in the back!

Tankies 👏 are 👏 not 👏 true 👏 communists 👏.

God, I hate that this place is infested with tankies. I didn’t realize Lemmy.world still federated with Lemmygrad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Party

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP),[3] officially the Communist Party of China (CPC),[4] is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)

CCP is a valid name for it in English, and in fact is the way that it’s referred to most of the time in English (which we are speaking currently). You can also see that Wikipedia uses CCP throughout.

Not surprised I’ve pissed off half of Lemmygrad considering you guys are so misinformed you don’t even recognize a common English acronym for the ruling party of the country you adore so much. Stay mad, tankies.

I love how I literally trotted out a source, and you still clamed it was “unsourced”. I also love “You have not made an argument that they are factually similar” after I just explained how they are in practice, factually similar. Here is a Wikipedia page about the genocide China is committing, btw - how is this different than Auschwitz?

But those claims are “western” and therefore automatically incorrect. Because we know China has a free press and open reporting! Their 1982 constitution protects freedom of speech, which is why they arrest people who talk about Tibet!

So here’s a non-western source: Al-Jazeera stating that China has internment camps where they are committing genocide.

You’re not going to listen to any of this, because you’ve completely missed the point. My point is modern communism has not gotten anywhere near the ideals espoused by Marx, and has outright rejected them (paying them lip service at best). It has been replaced by something pretty much identical to fascism, and tankies love it. Since evidently you need a reminder as to what fascism is:

Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

Everything other than “far-right” can apply to the CCP in its modern form. (And even saying China isn’t far-right is debatable… gay marriage is illegal in China still. Hardly “socially left”.)

• Authoritarian: Elections in the People’s Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people’s congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP.

• Ultranationalist: Using Chinese nationalism, the CCP began to suppress separatism and secessionist attitudes in Tibet, Inner Mongolia, and among the Uyghurs, a Turkic minority in the far-west province of Xinjiang, an issue that persists. (Also: Taiwan.)

• Dictatorial leader: China’s Xi allowed to remain ‘president for life’ as term limits removed

• Centralized autocracy: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), officially the Communist Party of China (CPC), is the founding and sole ruling party of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

• Militarism: Chinese coastguard and navy ships intruded into Malaysian waters in the disputed South China Sea 89 times between 2016 to 2019, and often remained in the area even after being turned away by the Malaysian navy. (See also: Taiwan.)

• Forcible suppression of opposition: The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, during 1989. The protests started on 15 April and lasted until 4 June, at which point Chinese government troops carried out a crackdown on the demonstrators around the city and the Square in what is often referred to as the Tiananmen Square massacre. (Better scrub your history for that one before the CCP sees that link)

• Belief in a natural social hierarchy: Han nationalism is a form of ethnic nationalism asserting ethnically Han people as the exclusive constituents of the Chinese nation. (See also: Genocides against non-Han, as mentioned above)

• Subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation and race: Chinese workers allege forced labor, abuses in Xi’s ‘Belt and Road’ program.

• Strong regimentation of society and the economy: While the Chinese economy maintains a large state sector, the state-owned enterprises operate like private-sector firms and retain all profits without remitting them to the government to benefit the entire population.

But go on. Tell me that’s not fascism.

Conveniently ignores the genocide and organ-harvesting happening today in the largest communist country on the planet

I’m a leftist myself, but tankies are a bridge too far. The moment a movement starts oppressing the proletariat is when they lose all legitimacy. Stalin, Mao, and everyone else the tankies idolize were oppressive to the common people they tried to protect. Modern-day China is oppressive to the point where they set up secret police in other countries to monitor citizens abroad.

How on earth is that protecting the workers? Now there’s just a new class of bourgeoise, the party leadership who enshrine themselves in perpetual power while they exploit the workers in the sweatshops making cheap goods. The party takes their labor, exports it to the West, and lines their own pockets.

That’s what tankies want? How on earth is that any different than fascism, in practice?

Tankies, fascists. Close enough to the same thing tbh.

Any platform which supports tankies is in itself tankie. If they want “unity,” they wouldn’t associate themselves with people who don’t believe in the core fundamentals of freedom. Otherwise they’re just like PCM where the worst elements will take over.

I daily drive KDE Neon.

Sometimes install scripts don’t work as expected, since things check if you’re on Ubuntu or Mint or whatever specifically and “Neon” doesn’t match their regex. It’s usually not a big deal and fairly trivial to solve.

Regardless, I’ve actually started to get away from the command line and have embraced the app store. Discover is actually pretty darn good and has lots of the things I want to install. I can choose if I want to install from Discover via Apt, Flatpak, or Snap.

I usually install Flatpak stuff. The Steam Deck has taught me that Flatpak is generally as good or better than actually installing via apt - you don’t need to wait on your distro to update sources, and you aren’t adding random PPAs. Sometimes you need to fudge the permissions with Flatseal, but it’s a one-and-done thing.

I use Microsoft Edge as my browser (yes, really - the Chromium version is just as good as Chrome, it has nifty vertical tabs, I get news on my “new tab” page, and all my settings are saved there). I use Thunderbird for mail, plus Steam, Zoom, Discord, etc. Surprisingly few KDE apps are preinstalled, to be honest - the only KDE apps installed are the ones I want anyway.

Have you ever moderated somewhere of any significant size?

I was once a mod on a 500k+ user subreddit on Reddit. Without AutoMod, the place would go to shit within a month. AutoMod caught so many things that would otherwise disrupt the community.

It’s not “authoritarian” to automatically remove posts of people spamming the N-word, especially when you can easily tell the users are trolls. Nor is it “authoritarian” to remove spammers trying to shill their T-shirts or sending links to scam websites. Or those annoying bots that would copy user comments and then try to pose as “real” users so they could build up karma and get around spam filters easier.

At a certain point, it is impossible to keep up with everything happening in your community. While reports are important, mods do have to sleep. We do have lives, and we don’t pay attention to the communities we help run for every waking moment of our days.

If I wanted to ban every person who used the letter “e”, I could do that without a bot. A modbot makes it easier, but simply having a tool available doesn’t make the person using that tool more or less authoritarian. Not to mention both Kbin and Lemmy have open moderation logs, so you can easily see if a place has a moderation style you disagree with.