Exactly what the title says.
What has your experience been on any of those platforms? Which captures more of your time? Why?
I’m relatively new here but I’ve read a little on the reddit-like platforms. I (mostly) understand what’s a fork of what or what some of the technical differences are, but I’m curious about the vibes and communities.
I only have experience with Lemmy, it’s kinda my daily driver for social media. It functions well, I enjoy my instance and the admins there.
The political rhetoric can be a little exhausting, especially with it being election year. The culture clashes between different instances can cause friction.
Example, this is on Lemmy.ml, and I think the admin and moderation policies on .ml are patently absurd. They also have a bot that auto edits comments to remove no no words, which is… well stupid. I would not be surprised if this comment gets removed for the above remarks.
But that’s what’s nice, Lemmy.ml admins can’t ban me from Lemmy, only .ml, and if I don’t want to deal with .ml anymore I can just block the instance. We surpassed them in MAU anyway. My instance doesn’t defederate on ideological or political lines so I have that option.
So, overall I’m enjoying myself. I’m concerned about the longevity of the platform and the extremity of political rhetoric that has to permeate every single post, but I’m hoping that dies down as Lemmy Balkanizes. That’s already started with hexbear defederating from lots of instances.
But that’s what’s nice, Lemmy.ml admins can’t ban me from Lemmy, only .ml
This is the one saving grace of Lemmy that saves it from just being a more overcomplicated reddit. I’ve probably caught the most bans on the entire federation because I don’t mince words and being openly left-of-hitler makes me a threat to people who don’t want to admit they’re fascists. All of that and I get to continue posting because the gaps are filled by more reasonable comms and instances who don’t do that.
For the first time on the internet I feel like I can just be myself and not get punished for it. I don’t have to pretend to be someone i’m not. It does have a bit of a cultural rot problem (don’t bring up pedophilia, Ukraine or veganism if you value your sanity) but I don’t see that as being a permanent thing, more a consequence of people coming in from reddit. Once the federation matures a bit that sorta thing should dip down.
Beehaw isn’t exactly a separate platform yet— it’s still Lemmy, but they’re starting to sequester themselves and will soon spin off. Until then, they’re just a somewhat isolated Lemmy instance that’s focused on being a generally-positive safe-space. I think it’s nice, but there’s a lot of more frank and sometimes not-so-nice discussions that obviously can’t happen there.
Beehaw‘s active users nosedived after they defederated and never really recovered. There’s less than 500 total users now. But they’re all very active.
I’m still getting activities from Beehaw on my instance, and seemingly I can still interact with them too.
Did they stop accepting new instances or something? Because it definitely still works fine for me.
I do, too. But they did defederate from a bunch of instances, including IIRC lemm.ml and lemmy.world, among others (I’m on lemm.ee, so I’m still federated with them).
But they didn’t upgrade past 0.18.5, don’t plan to, and are looking to migrate to another platform… eventually. I haven’t kept up on the latest over there.
Best of luck to them. They seem nice.
Hmm wonder why people would quit a circlejerk platform that bans people who call out when someone posts literal fascist propaganda.
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Yeah! I remember reading that Beehaw had defederated from a lot of servers; the people who talk about it genuinely have strong feelings one way or the other. It sounds like a planned housing community or gated community but online, and that generates some very polarizing opinions.
It’s also the one I have the least interest in exploring at the moment.
Edit: Tied with Hexbear
Lemmy - 99% positive. It has replaced reddit for me, except when I need to look up some obscure thing that only exists in a 10yr old thread
Kbin - heard of it and have seen some comments on lemmy saying they were there using Kbin (iirc)
Mbin - never heard of it
Beehaw - is it its own platform? I thought it was just another lemmy instance
So several smaller lemmy instances (like sopuli, ani.social, reddthat, etc) are having some serious slowdown issues right now and are having delayed federation with lemmy.world. From what I understand, the suspected cause is a kbin bug, where it’s glitching out and spamming the fediverse with infinitely repeating federation updates. Several lemmy instances have blocked kbin over it (including lemmy.world and sopuli), but it’s still causing issues and slowdowns.
There have been multiple attempts to reach the admin for kbin about it, but his developer accounts seemingly went dark 4 months ago (according to his commit history) and he’s not responding to any messages. Mbin has seemingly already patched it according to their resolved issues/pull requests, but it’s looking like kbin may have to be cut off from the rest if the fediverse unless the dev resurfaces.
rip kbin i guess
Yeah! I heard that MBin was started as a fork of Kbin when it’s main/only admin went dark. I made an account there to try it out actually.
I’m now considering making a new Lemmy account since I’m having trouble finding Lemmy communities from Mbin
I think lemmy.world is letting kbin interact with them again. It was on ‘read only’ about a week ago, where kbin could see stuff being posted from lemmy, but anything being posted or down/upvoted from kbin wasn’t going anywhere. But I noticed today that some kbin users were able to successfully post to lemmy again. Though, I don’t know if that means the problem is fixed or not.
kbin (at least kbin.social) has a nice little community, but we’re holding on by a thread over there since we’ve been overrun with spammers and nothing is really being done to combat it. A good chunk of people have jumped ship because of it, but we’re still trying to fight where we can.
I made an mbin alt, but I haven’t really hung out enough here to get a proper feel of it. Honestly it feels like looking through a window to the rest of the fediverse. If there’s any chill mbin (edit)
instancesmagazines, I’d love to know!Beehaw seems to have the most positive vibes, and I really like that. It seems small, but they’re pretty active. I mainly enjoy their gaming community.
I think I interact the most with Lemmy, but that’s probably because that’s where most active instances are. You’ll get a lot more different takes on there than anywhere else, some great, some not so great, but that comes with any site where you bring a bunch of people together.
Of course, these are from my experience and opinion. I’m interested to see others’ takes.
It’s because beehaw mandates its positivity. I once called out one of their posts as being fascist and they banned me for being rude about it.
I feel like any place that forces people to be positive in a world where there’s so much injustice is always going to passively side with evil.
That’s an interesting point, but I wonder - what happened to the post you called out?
Besides, they didn’t force people to be positive. That would be unrealistic. When I was a Beehaw regular, you could find lots of posts about negative, unjust things. That wasn’t a problem. They simply didn’t tolerate people who failed to express themselves in a respectful way.
There’s a difference. For example “are you feeling okay?” vs. “you look like shit.”
How do you respectfully say “this is nazi propaganda?” You can’t. That’s the point. That’s why they do it.
“To me, this reads like Nazi propaganda. What am I missing?”
All i’m trying to say is them defederating from lemmygrad tells you everything about that instance that you need to know. Hexbear I get, but grad holds themselves up to a way higher standard of comment quality and there was zero reason to defederate outside political. They literally only blocked the instance because they were communists who aren’t afraid to calmly debunk fascist propaganda with sources, and that’s an experience corroborated by literally anyone who has had the displeasure of interacting with their polite-fascist administration.
EDIT: the example you provided is not only completely useless as it guts the original intent of the message but is STILL too offensive for them, as bringing up fascism is already “killing the mood” more than enough for them to remove. Not only that they would accuse you of calling the OP a Nazi which is another way they can shut you down. Believe me I’ve dealt with liberal fascists my whole life i’ve heard it all.
I think they wanted to see people giving others the benefit of the doubt, instead of making snap judgments. It’s very easy to get into heated arguments online that could be avoided with simple clarification and communication.
If someone is simply bad at expressing themselves, the extra “room” can make all the difference in the world. If they really are a jerk, though, all you’re doing is giving them enough rope to hang themselves. Win/win!
Then again, you’re talking to someone who hasn’t visited Beehaw in almost a year. I don’t know how their moderation has changed.
You can make all the vague guesses you want, I’ve lived the experience and can say flat out the instance uses respectability politics to shut out criticism. Like it’s clear as day to anyone on the receiving end of that what they’re about.
You could say they force you, but I don’t really see it that way. Beehaw should be a forum you can go to and have decent, comfortable conversation without offensive and heated overtones. I became so utterly sick of that internet tone from reddit over the years, and it absolutely extends to every other part of the fediverse except for Beehaw, because it’s humanity that wants to be that way, not reddit specifically.
The only way to stop people from reacting with… that tone as you did is to moderate the shit out of it. You may not personally agree with it, but if you don’t there are tons of other instances that are all rampant with people running around accusing each other of being politically evil and being dicks besides. Beehaw is a breath of fresh air to me that way.
Would I trust their method to run a nation’s government? No, but a small internet forum where I might want to go to discuss things with people and retain a lower heart rate and faith in humanity? It’s much better than any alternative I’ve seen.
The mod history you posted definitely makes it look like they have a clear idea what kind of bikini/community they want and you don’t fit and neither of you were gonna change.
I’ve got negative interest in Beehaw. I’m not defending them or calling you a malcontent. They might be actual fascists for all i know. I’ve had 0 interactions with them.
Just saying that it’s clear who they want and it’s not you
I get you’re afraid of saying the quiet part out loud out of fear of backlash, thankfully i’m here to point that out so people don’t miss it.
Beehaw is still Lemmy (unless anything has changed recently), but the instance is run a particular way. There should be a link somewhere about their philosophy and what the differences are.
In terms of vibe / community, I would think that there are more differences between the individual instances than the software that they run. That’s something which is easier to get an idea of as you use it more.
When I was starting out, Kbin didn’t have as much third party support, so there wasn’t a good way to use it on mobile. That may have changed since then
Yeah, i think that’s a very helpful distinction. Something like Beehaw or Hexbear is defined more by its rules than its software.
I added Bee as a fourth item because people described it as a separate item/entity/community/experience than the others. Its limited federation somewhat corroberates this sentiment IMO.
In general, I like the vibe here, which is more laid back and relax than reddit, with people being in general nicer, less in a karma farming/troll mode.
I have an alt account on fedia (mbin) that I use when my main instance is down, following the same communities. But the more I use it, the nicer I find mbin, I might do a full switch at a point.
However, it’s not yet the endless stream of new content we get on reddit and other big social media. Which is great for our mental health but sucks when you look for a fun stuff to do during your commute
Positive on Lemme. Will celebrate one year here on the anniversary of the blackout of the old site. I think that’s in June?
Reminds me of Reddit from before they went insanely corporate. More leftists than Reddit though. Right wingers usually get challenged whenever I see them. Overall pretty good, but the authoritarian presence is still higher than I’d like, but it’s mostly ignorable.
Are you talking about Lemmy specifically or one of the others?
Mostly Lemmy because that’s most of the content I see. Lemmy.ml obviously has the biggest concentration of tankies but this is my experience with most of the instances I’m federated with. (Pawb.social defederates with clearly bigoted instances so that could be why I don’t see them much). Once in a while I see a kbin user.
The disproportionate representation of hyper-reactive, hive-mind edgelords is vomitous, but overall entertaining and cool.
I don’t really know. I don’t really make it a point to look at what the origin point of the posts are. Even when I look at the name for whatever reason I don’t think in terms of this is a lemmy experience or this is a kbin. I am straight outa kbin though.
Lemmy: Flawed but fun; doesn’t do enough about fascists on the platform but at least they’re really good about free speech.
Kbin: Boring. They don’t have downvotes and it’s just a stream of information with little context. Its users kind of suck.
Beehaw: Fascist, in a liberal way. They moderate like totalitarians and are so uber sensitive to any prospective outside their own.
Mastodon: Misses the mark. They tried to replace twitter and succeeded; not learning from any of its mistakes. As a result it’s all of the liberalism of twitter and none of the communists. Also little known fact is that Truth Social is a fork of mastodon, so good job on that one 👍
Thanks!
That Mastodon opinion is fascinating to me. Mastodon is the one i know he best by far, which is why i left it out.
Mastodon might function similarly, but as a user the community feels nothing like Twitter, for better and for worse, and its users and devs seem proud of that.
I also notice a strong communist/anarchist presence.
IMO Mastodon’s flaws are from trying to hard to not be Twitter the 2nd, not from being too similar to Twitter.
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Lol I woke up to 2 deleted comments, some vitriol directed at their writer, and your comment here.
What happened?
They bad mouthed obnoxious lemmygrad and hexbear users and expressed apathy towards communism, which gets ya banned apparently lol
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I find them to be positive in intent. Just hostile by nature. Again, like wasps. But a wasp who hopes to sting disparity.
I’ve only used Kbin, but it seems fairly decent as a commenter aside from some federation/stability/spam issues. I really like the idea of having access to the Mastodon side of things on top of the rest of the fediverse, even though it’s hit-or-miss.
Thread wise, I suppose I haven’t posted enough to be statistically solid though it seems like it’s dead on the Kbin side of things and federation is even worse. I’ve thought about posting to lemmy.world (because 1 of my threads to a kbin community just got 2 LW commenters) but haven’t made new content to do so.
I probably should join another instance but I think there is a balancing act between instance popularity and desiring conversation-of/help-with my niche interests, and it seems like that is one probably isn’t going to be resolved for a while.
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