tojikomori

I guess that clinches it. I’m AFK right now but later today I’ll be checking out PowerDeleteSuite (thanks to @solidgrue for mentioning it in this thread).

The linked article summarizes the problems in the paragraph starting “I’ve been aware of Lemmy for a long time”. For an alternative view: the Fedi.Tips account on Mastodon – typically a cheerleader for all apps of the FediVerse – shared some more pointed words about them in this thread and reiterated the warning just yesterday after noticing the Lemmy team’s successful recruitment campaign on Reddit.

I was one of the people they recruited, and ran into problems myself only after signing up at lemmy.ml and being surprised by the amount of CCP propaganda posted there. At first I thought it was strange that I was being downvoted for pointing it out, and that the devs (also admins of that instance) ignored/downvoted me when I flagged the issue for their attention. After researching a bit, I found that Lemmy’s basically developed and maintained by two people, both of whom seem to be westerners fetishizing Mao Zedong Thought – literally to the point of writing lengthy apologetics for the CCP’s human rights abuses including the Uyghur genocide.

They’re clearly skilled engineers, but I can’t trust or support them, and relying on instance of Lemmy means I’d have to do both.

Because they’re both part of the Fediverse, Lemmy and Kbin do federate with each other. You can follow Lemmy “communities” in Kbin, and Kbin “magazines” in Lemmy, and I believe other Fediverse groups (like Frendica groups) also federate.

I’ve been leaning into this from Kbin, as a way of dipping into communities on Beehaw and other Lemmy instances while keeping my distance from Lemmy’s devs.

I have one concern. As we’re seeing with Reddit, it’s a huge effort to move internet communities. If Lemmy-the-app becomes untenable even for more reasonably admin’d instances, then the most obvious solution won’t be to fork Lemmy (a huge undertaking) but rather to move to an app that’s maintained by more reasonable people. That’s probably going to involve a messy migration, some data loss, some loss of community, and some dead links.

I’ll keep using Kbin as a way of tapping into existing communities, but when it comes to building new ones I’d much rather see it done on kbin.social or other Fediverse instances where there’s no long-term dependency on Lemmy’s devs.