cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin/t/313215

So obviously a lot of us are partial to kbin/Lemmy but have any of you explored the other alternatives like Raddle, Squabbles.io, and Tildes?

I made an account on Raddle because r/egg_irl and r/ennnnbyyy moved there and I also made one on Squabbles.io because some of the subreddits I joined had an analogous one on Squabbles.io. I haven’t use either enough to form a good opinion on them. Raddle seems to be predominantly political, and I’m trying to limit my exposure to politics and prevent doomscrolling.

What are your thoughts on these alternatives?

  •  Ada   ( @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 
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    391 year ago

    I haven’t used any of them, and I doubt I will ever bother with centralised social media again. Some places I’ll keep a presence on, but I won’t ever meaningfully engage or invest with centralised stuff. The combination of lack of will to protect minorities and the ability to just lose everything at once, just isn’t something I want to deal with anymore.

    • Yea … this! It’s the big picture here. The multiple platforms that are FOSS, with each of their instances being completely separate … it’s a non-trivial amount of freedom you can’t get anywhere else, not to mention the potential for it (or its idea) to continue to grow and evolve.

  • I haven’t spent much time with Tildes, but I noticed that they have least tried to address the problems with Reddit, rather than just be clone.

    One example is putting the ‘Add Comment’ button at the very bottom of the screen, encouraging you to read existing comments before you make your own. Another is the use of labels, included ‘noise’ and ‘malice’, so that comments can be hidden from other users with a bit more nuance than a downvote, and ‘exemplary’ - which, if enough people use it - will promote a particularly insightful comment.

    It does intrigue me, because I don’t think the only issues with Reddit were ads and the actions of a pesky CEO.

  • Centralized communities all turn into what Twitter and Reddit became eventually. They benefits for the owners (money, control) are too great to ignore forever once you’re big enough. Decentralized communities have more resilience, provided no individual server gets too big.

    • This is a problem that can arise with Lemmy. If everybody signs up to lemmy.world, it can become so big that everybody will sign up to that instance and they can break the federation at any time.

  • When i was in squabbles, it was flooded by people making self posts that were obnoxious and super cringe, where they mainly talked about how they are the first people there and part of greatness. Or some girls who needed so much attention that they made 5 posts an hour, that was heavily upvoted, because girls. It was basically a worse version of facebook

    • Every single week they have some stupid bullshit drama I just can’t get interested in. Last week I logged in and posted saying something about how every single time I check the site there’s drama, and one of the people who replied to me was exactly the kind of person you described trying to tell me that there’s not that much drama.

      I almost pulled a “this you” because less than an hour ago they’d posted that they were soooo depressed over the drama, but… not worth it. Also they posted five times that hour so you nailed the estimate exactly.

      I’d say it’s worse than Facebook at this point.

    • Squabbl(es|r) : Personally found UI ugly , had bit obnoxious branding IMHO , apparently there was weird drama on there . As of writing this it got renamed Squabblr . Removing “e” from “(.*)er” ? sooooo 2007 ‼️
    • Raddle : Not anarchist, so just not for me (am leftist but don’t identify with it specificly)
    • Tildes : Extremely basic UI, otherwise know nothing and don’t care to
  • I’m partial to the fediverse, I don’t want to be the product. I moved away from Google for that reason. And when it became obvious that Reddit was more akin to Google than say Wikipedia then my hand was forced.

  • I enjoyed squabblr at first but the dev has already made terrible choices so I’m not into it. The community is good though, so that’s a bummer. Raddle is insane. They are leftist fascists. I’m super left, but a bunch of teenagers pining for anarchy is absurd. Its so clear that most of them don’t know what they are talking about in the slightest. I noped out of there quickly.

    • The “teenagers pining for anarchy” bit had me laughing. Teenagers may say they want anarchy, but they don’t want REAL anarchy. They’re just tired of adults telling them what to do. Teenagers aren’t stupid, either. They should know the difference, and I bet a lot of them do.

      Considering how awful people can be, I don’t want real anarchy, either, but at least I’m not some edgelord who pretends he does. Squabblr doesn’t sound like a community I could stomach for long. Noping out probably saved your sanity.

      • There were a few small ones along the way, but the biggest issue is they failed to squash some alt-right posts/communities under the guise of “free speech”. Translation: the dev is a capitalist above all else. There was a big blow back last week and they seemed to have back pedaled a little bit. However, the initial response doesn’t give me very much faith. I expect it to go the way of facebook, and I have a hunch the devs don’t mind that.