Looks like KBin has an edge over Lemmy now in terms of monthly active users.
It's obviously a pretty silly thing, and is not in any way indicative of which project is "better" or more "long-term viable" or anything — instances of both federate with one another, and with the rest of fedi, so it's all one happy family.
That said, it's notable. KBin is a relative newcomer to the "Reddit-like fedi instance" game, and also does not have the tankie baggage.
Anyway, the more, the merrier!
KBin: https://the-federation.info/platform/184
Lemmy: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
Discussion on fedi: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/110527049024028986
I don't think you need to worry about it. It's up to a given community whether or not that baggage affects it or not, I think. Building communities that are very explicitly not tankie is a great way of helping overcome that baggage for the whole project.
How do you build a community that's explicitly not tankie without being just as insufferable?
When we started ours, we wanted a place to discuss technology and whatever else. We didn't say "no politics" but we made an early decision to not be a primarily political instance. We don't to define our instance by what it isn't, in other words.
By being aware that there will be things you might not want to tolerate in your community and reacting to them when they show up. Communities differ. Their values differ. And that's okay.
That's true of any online forum, site, community, etc.
But it doesn't exactly broadcast that we're explicitly anything.
But you don't have to broadcast anything if you don't want to — maybe with the exception of things like "racism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia, and bigotry are not welcome", to make sure people who need that kind of safety can see that they can at least expect some basic moderation. 😉
Fair enough. I guess when you said,
I sort of thought to myself, "how do you make a community explicitly non-tankie without making it also a political instance?"
We actually decided against listing inappropriate behaviors and instead distilled it down to just one simple rule: if you couldn't get away with saying it at a bar, you can't say it on our instance. If you went on a public, bigoted rant at a bar, you'd get kicked out (maybe with a warning, probably not). Same applies here.
And a bar doesn't need to post that as a rule; everyone should already know it.
Brand new to fediverse and this is the second comment I've seen saying lemmy has tankie issues. Is this a term specific to fediverse or is it referring to the category of communists that are called tankies? If the second, I didn't realize tankies were big here