I don’t think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on “Lemmy” or “kbin” is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer.
We should be referring to it as…
- I saw it on the fediverse.
- Hey fediverse users …
- A thread on the fediverse…
New terms may emerge but referring to the platform seems weird, almost ignorant.
edit: A better example is email. You wouldn’t assume everyone is on Hotmail because that is the email provider you use. You say I’m sendingan eamail, not I’m sending a Hotmail.
No, “forums” are old style message boards from back when the internet was good, that people stopped using for some reason. If KBin/Lemmy can one day be half as good as real forums I’d consider that to be a success.
What feature is missing from KBin or Lemmy to make them forums? KBin superficially looks like a forum, but I only just got here. My next step is to find out whether Lemmy devs are tenable people to work with on forum software development. They are Marxist-Leninists and run a M-L instance or two, it seems. I’m a socialist but not M-L and I’ve got run out of plenty of “tankie” subs on Reddit, so I’m worried about that. I don’t enjoy being called liberal or a bootlicker.
I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my nostalgia there, with some truth to it as well, but if anything it’s something intangible. KBin and Lemmy haven’t developed a culture yet, in my opinion a lot of damage has been done to online culture by the big centralised social media networks, and it remains to be seen if something good emerges here or whether the toxicity of modern social media creeps back in.
I personally wouldn’t worry about the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers, it’s open source software, anyone can use it and run an instance. Each instance sets its own content and moderation policies and decides who it federates with. There are over 1000 instances. The developers have made it clear that they don’t want their instance to be seen as the default one and discouraged people from registering there during the influx from Reddit.
My own personal interest was beyond running a server. It was getting features / policies into the software. I’m actually starting to think that developer’s politics aren’t the real issue. Might be open source dynamics are the real issue. Saw a lot of things in the bug tracker of someone saying, “Oh yeah that’s a good idea” and I thought whatever feature it was, might pull people into more chaos in various ways. Chaos meaning, people don’t stick with communities they want to continue to be in. It may be an inherent problem with writing software that uses the Fediverse. People may have rather different ideas about what the Fediverse is “for”. Like I’m not trying to look at thousands of GIFs a day. I think that’s what’s basically wrong with social media. Big groups, big volumes of shallow posts, that mainly works towards advertizing business models and reducing the “user’s” participation mainly to the act of “watching the new TV”.