Helping people pick an instance is not as straight-forward task as many people claim. e.g. if you love programming, then perhaps programm.dev is right for you, except right now they are having enormous federation difficulties - e.g. https://programming.dev/post/20692281. They are far from the only ones doing so though - https://feddit.org/post/3524876 - and yet they do have more difficulties than most.

Any instance that is not Lemmy.World itself is going to suffer right now, until the deployment of 0.19.6 - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4623. And yet people piling on top of the already too-large pile of Lemmy.World will only make the future problems worse. This whole "federation" concept is still experimental, compared to a single-server model like Reddit had.

Blaze often tells people to go by default to lemm.ee. Which is one of the rare instances that defederates from none of hexbear.net, lemmy.ml, or even lemmygrad.ml. So if someone comes across this advice and follows it... BTW, Lemmy.cafe likewise defederates from almost nothing, except it DOES defederate from those big 3 (caveat: it seems run by only a single administrator, so is therefore far less stable than e.g. lemm.ee, and could disappear at any time - though there are so many other things about that instance that are so welcoming and friendly, and btw it is one of the very select few that are already running 0.19.6-beta! so a single admin yes, but one who seems VERY on the ball!).

But ultimately you are correct: they control the sourcecode, so it is YOU who are using THEIR platform - and they WILL do it THEIR way, regardless.

Until and unless more people switch to Mbin, PieFed, or eventually Sublinks. Admiral Patrick who developed Tesseract for dubvee.org and who has blocked lemmy.ml users has pledged to switch to Sublinks whenever it will come out. In the meantime you can view a demo, but I haven't heard of any developments for it for like half a year. So I switched to PieFed, and am posting several bug reports to help make it better. I advise people to check all of these options out just to see what's out there, though definitely more is yet to come due to the hard work from these very helpful developers!

And credit where it's due: Dessalines is helping in his own way, to reduce people's dependency upon Reddit, and offering that codebase completely free of charge - that's not nothing. Though administering a server instance is an entirely different skillset... and if we want to see the Fediverse grow rather than shrink with time, I think that better fences are going to be necessary (or mere labels would be even better, except they seem to militantly refuse to do such - but could you imagine if "politically extremist" content had a label just like all the NSFW posts do? then we could all get along side-by-side in the same space).

Nobody enjoys being punched in the face, or to see their (or why not ANY?) nation mocked - especially normies who may have DEEP knowledge of their subject matter, yet happen to not use Arch Linux btw, or may not be actual full-on communists (yet?).

[–] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

You've convinced me to try mbin. I had a kbin account and I really liked it, but federation with lemmy was soooo slow.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Great! I don't really want the interlinking with Mastodon, but if you do... and like that interface, then that's wonderful. It's definitely quite polished. I don't think you can user-block lemmy.ml users there like you can from PieFed - and another plug for PieFed is future integration with PixelFed and Loops, though tbh I'm not sure I care about that either, like Mastodon:-). Though being able to block users from Lemmy.ml and especially Hexbear.net (my two previous instances after Kbin went defunct did not defederate from either of them) definitely I see cleans up the conversations considerably. Not everyone wants that ofc, but it's a VERY nice feature to have, to avoid so much of the gish gallop, reverse, didoing, the card says moops, and other "control the conversation" tactics that make me feel like I was reading content from a toddler... or a Trump supporter.

Hey, whether you want to use it personally or not, will you let me know if you see a way to block users of an instance? Someone said that Kbin used to have that, but I also saw a feature request for Mbin to add it, so it's not entirely clear to me, without creating an account to find out, whether Mbin provides that functionality or not?

[–] nictophilia@fedia.io 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Haha, I got it! It's not anywhere in the settings at all, lol. Like a hidden option. You have to go to the url "https://fedia.io/d/[instance domain name]", like "https://fedia.io/d/lemmy.ml". Then it will give you the ability to block, and that block will be reflected in your settings page.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago

Ah that makes sense then, why one highly technical person would recall (presumably correctly) that it used to work on Kbin, while another person submitted a request to add that feature for Mbin. It's nice to know that it is possible, even if not quite straightforward!:-)

I would strongly hope that the Mbin codebase is being worked on by more than just one person, who is also administering your instance. That was what caused the demise of both Kbin and Kbin.social with Ernst trying to "do it all" without letting others help. I would love to see that project succeed and provide a fully viable alternative to X and Reddit besides Mastodon and Lemmy:-).

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