[Resolved] Should Pawb.Social continue running Lemmy, or swap to an alternative?

@crashdoom We're not on pawb.social, have been considering signing up (waves paw from Mastodon), but I like the idea of a fork.

It sounds like Kbin federates upvotes as microblog /boosts/, of all things, which makes absolutely no sense (i.e. upvoting there comes across as boosting to people on Masto and vice versa), while Lemmy does it as stars/"favorites", which is much more in line with the concept of an upvote.

And there's precedent for forking – the Pleroma devs were shitty, though I can't remember how, and now there's the Akkoma fork.

Sorry for the late-ish response, but: I'm in favor of sticking this out for now.

1. I'm still wrapping my head around "fedi-reddit" as it stands now, and if I, an individual in the webtech industry, is still trying to grok the thing, I can only imagine the confusion of the masses. Having an instance of the most well-known, stable software available at the moment will be helpful for anyone looking to jump ship from Reddit.
2. While the Lemmy devs situation is unfortunate, thanks to the nature of FOSS, what we use is under our control, not theirs. Defederating and moderating the problem instances is always an option, as you've already done. Even updating this instance to a super minor fork (removing donate links/references to old Lemmy, using a different software name, and that's it), could easily be enough to distance them, if that's the goal. As others have already pointed out, this feels very similar to a Pleroma/Akkoma deal. (Side note: Until something bigger and better appears, I'm happy to help develop forks! My strength is in UI/UX, not backend. Maybe not much to do on that front, but ¯(ツ)_/¯ )
3. This instance is pretty new so it wouldn't be the worst thing to replace this with something else before it gets bigger. But, especially when running a platform for others, there is something to be said for not being swept about too much by discoveries and events like this. ex. Just because a navy has a reputation doesn't mean that the ships are inherently bad. What matters is what those ships get up to and what flag they're flying.

Hey there! This is something I've come across myself as well.

In my case I decided to go with lemmy for the time being, but only because Kbin seems to need a bit more development. I tried to get it to post to Mastodon, but it simply won't... and posts from Mastodon to Kbin didn't work either (they were all classified as microblog).

I'm pretty sure that eventually there'll be a fork, like there has been for Pleroma / Akkoma, Mastodon / Glitch Social or Misskey / Calckey.

Since this is the month of reddit's exodus, it's probably worth it to have something setup to take in refugees and stay afloat until there's a fork with better and much needed features. It's only a matter of time.

Since it's open source, using lemmy at the moment does not mean I agree with the dev's political viewpoints, nor do they have access to our user's data. But regardless I do agree that it would feel better to jump on a fork at some point. But right now I would focus on building the community / instance first.

I don't see why this should be an issue at all, can't we just use the tech and just defederate lemmy.ml, i see them as two separate things

Perhaps a fork would be a good idea. I feel like it has the best overall experience of any federated Reddit alternative.

Edit: After re-reading some of the content in the links, I’m ok with moving to Kbin as well. Either a fork or Kbin is ok with me. :)

I can't really comment on what alternatives would be best, because I'm not knowledgeable enough about the options and the technical aspects of this, though I have heard nothing but good things on reddit about kbin except for it being a bit early in development.

I am however incredibly relieved to see this post, I learned about Lemmy the other day, decided to go for it for my reddit alternative as I like the idea of the fediverse in general but tend not to use my Mastodon much as I don't really like microblogging and heavily prefer a reddit like system more reminiscent of web forums, and came here as it was the only furry instance I could find- but then today have been starting to have some regrets after really starting to look at the largest communies here and realizing that the largest and developer-created instance is full of, well, that... Since there's not really the same kind of political discussion here to make such things visible, I was kinda anxiously trying to figure out if I had made a mistake coming here/ if this place held the same kind of views.

I would love to help out on this fork if needed !

Very disappointed to hear this about the Lemmy developers. I had already guessed Lemmygrad was tankie based on the logo alone but I didn't know how deep it went. Defederating from genocide-denialists has my full support. I'd feel more comfortable dropping lemmy.ml also if they're run by the same people, but I can think of good reasons why that might be impractical at the moment.

Making a fork that removes references to the original devs sounds good. Maybe there are other instances that feel similarly and would be interested in collaborating on it?

"EDIT, Update: We’re going to be setting up a fork to maintain some separation, add additional features, and remove references due to raised concerns."

I would be interested to help with the fork of lemmy once everything is forked.

I'd looked over Lemmy in the past and was initially turned off from it by the UI feeling too much like new Reddit. That alone has me interested in trying something else, but doubly, even triply so knowing the Lemmy devs are kinda funky in the not good way

I'm still new to all this, coming from reddit, but I do have some questions. (Still trying to wrap my head around lemmy, kpub, and the whole "fediverse")

Would migrating still allow access to other communities (beehaw being one example), or is kpub a completely separated "system" from it? Or is Kpub more of another backend to the same? (Please excuse any mistaken terms, I'm trying my best to articulate)

What would be lost in migrating, if anything?

@crashdoom I was just thinking of looking into Lemmy as a Reddit alternative and maybe joining pawb.social, and am sad to see there's already controversy. :(

Unpopular opinion: I personally don't really see a problem with how they handled this. Moderating such a large instance for effectively free on top of developing the software is a huge undertaking, and the rules they define need to be ones that they can legitimately enforce. If they make rules (that, frankly, don't actually matter a ton) that they don't have the time to enforce, then they effectively have no rules at all.

This isn't like reddit. They don't make one community and moderate that. Instances can host hundreds of thousands of communities. At some point you have to rely on communities to self-regulate and only close down those that are egregiously bad.

By not regulating speech that isn't, let's say, "blatantly evil," they have more time to put towards more important moderation of content that actually harms people. This is why the reddit admins rarely get involved, too: because moderating every community is impossible. And they're paid to do it!

That said, I haven't looked deeply into all that they've supposedly done, so my opinion could change, haha

• Does forking interfere with federation at all?
• One of the linked articles mentions that mod actions are federated - does that mean that if somebody is banned on any lemmy host, they're banned everywhere? Or only that the log of it is federated?

It seems like if Lemmy is forkable in a way that doesn't break federation, and if pawb.social can 'own' their own moderation in the same way a mastodon instance does, that would be the ideal path. I think something like Lemmy loses a ton (most, really) of its value without federation. It's basically a small community forum without that. But at the same time, yeah, that second article about people being banned for being critical of China is veeeeery offputting.

I know in reddit threads today about the API / 3rd party app shutdown fallout, there were some highly-placed comments recommending Lemmy. It would be nice to have a fallback after reddit.

We’re going to be setting up a fork to maintain some separation, add additional features, and remove references due to raised concerns.

For the additional features that will be added, how well would the additional features work with 3rd party mobile client (which I hope lemmy won't shut down ahem) such as Jerboa for Lemmy?

Would this means that this instance will vlose down in the future

@crashdoom Yes, switch to Kbin and try to port some QOL greasyfork scripts into the source.