"This is a real quote, because nobody would ever pretend to be a famous person just to lie on the Internet." - Margot Robbie, Internet forum moderator and occasional actress
I would say take a moment to think through the site design philosophy and focus on clarity instead of rushing to add features, since I feel that kbin is trying to do more, but it is still rather confusing to navigate.
Doesn't really matter if they open sourced, since many reddit alternative over the years have been open source: Voat, Ruqqus, Raddle, doesn't really make.a difference since they all failed one way or another. They either never hit that critical self sustaining mass of users, or they attracted the exact wrong type of users who drove out any reasonable users there.
Federation seems to be the only way to create that critical mass of users, and Lemmy is the only alternative that really succeeded (kbin is kinda...hanging on for dear life for various reasons but is alive only due to federation) precisely because it is not a website, but a platform inside of a greater ecosystem.
All Discuit really have is a pretty UI, as it is nowhere even near feature parity with a current defederated Lemmy instance, and Lemmy also has like a dozen different desktop and mobile UIs already.
What this shows us is that more people are joining lemmy, but even more people are either leaving or going into lurker mode, as Lemmy only counts people who have commented or posted in that time period as active users, whereas most social media counts any activity while logged in as active. You have to realize that people who use reddit as Google search results don't usually interact with the content there and most won't even make an account.
On the upside, with fewer people, it's easy to get noticed here just by contributing good content since you don't really get drowned out here because of the democratic upvote based sorting instead of black box personalized recommendation algorithms. So with relatively low amount of effort, you can make sure your content is being seen instead of relying on analytics and metrics.
The last thing to in mind that Lemmy is only one aspect of ActivityPub, and Mastodon's growth is currently the highest right now because of the ecosystem created by the whale fall of Twitter, which indirectly grows Lemmy as Mastodon users can post directly to federated Lemmy communities.
The year of the beginning of the AI revolution, of the end of social media, of rising labor movements, of fallen titans orlf industries, of Barbies, and of Oppenheimers, and of rediscovering sincerity in a world full of absurdities.
You can't trust anyone to be who they say they are in Hollywood nowadays: One minute you think you're talking to Minnie Mouse, the next minute she takes her head off and turns out to be an old man pretending to be a character to make a living.
This is why it is so important for the world to have a celebrity who is exactly who they say they are and would never pretend to be somebody else on camera for a paycheck (I can't remember what that job is called right now), like yours truly, Lemmy's only real celebrity, esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie.
After a decade and an astronomical amount of money spent, this thing is still in pre-alpha. People have left school, got married, have kids, played and forgotten No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, and now Starfield, and there is still no Star Citizen.
It's time to accept that Star Citizen will NEVER be released, because what Chris Roberts is selling is "dream as a service" which can be anything you want it to be, and one that never has to end for as long as the "game" is still in development.
The moment an actual product is released is the moment the flow of money will stop.
Social media is really no different than traditional media: you play a character that appeals to your specific audience to sell something, in this case, the tradwife lifestyle, because that's what their audience wants to see, a kind of fantastical parallel universe like Barbieland, a fantastical parody of the media's depiction of 1950s Americana to make money. Don't get too angry at that, because fictional persona are just that, fictions, and the second the camera stopped rolling these characters cease to exist, because these characters cannot step into the real world.
In reality, how many women would actually put on cute pink sweaters and nice stainless farm dress and a full face of makeup to cook and clean? Trust me, nobody looks this good when they are doing housework.
I understand why these kind of video became popular, because they are ultimately is a reactionary movement in response to some of the more extreme and vitriolic voices within the feminists movement, but again, a broken system that is inherently unfair is still broken even if the sides are switched, and it's still not the equality and fairness we should all be striving toward.
Reddit users have no idea, and no control, over whether their posts are mirrored.
I can't believe that I actually had to say this, but what these bot instances are doing is EXTREMELY ILLEGAL.
Reddit comments are COPYRIGHTED materials, and when reddit users sign up, they agree to a ToS that grants reddit essentially a permanent license to do with the contributed content as reddit pleases. However, anyone else mirroring these reddit comment would not have permission to do so, and theoretically reddit, or any reddit user whose comments are being mirrored, can start issuing DMCA takedowns against any instance that host these comments by federating with these bot instances.
I'm not a lawyer, but @rgullis@communick.news, instead of saying they are archivers or frontends that explicit do not host contents, you are ACTUALLY dumb enough to admit that you are illegally scraping, mirroring, and rehosting reddit's content for the explicit purpose of making a competitor and harming their commercial interest so you can't even claim fair use. You better pray that reddit's lawyers don't find out about your little projects, they'll find you through your domain registrar or your cloud host, and you, and any instance that federates with yours would be in a world of pain.
Any instance owner should defederate from these bot instances immediately.
"This is a real quote, because nobody would ever pretend to be a famous person just to lie on the Internet." - Margot Robbie, Internet forum moderator and occasional actress