That's the same theme of a reply I made yesterday. I read the article and might have even boosted it myself because as a fediverse citizen, I'm concerned about any government agency seizing an instance like this. The "well known racist" claim is demonstrably false, because I still don't know who they are talking about nor would I know the person behind a username.

Kbin started as a Lemmy fork called "karab.in" (carbine in Polish). Not sure about the story behind that, but I didn't like the sound of it. Now Kbin has been reimplemented in PHP, which is arguably a much worse choice for server software than Rust. Those two kept me away from it.

But the kicker is: right now, we're discussing this in a community hosted by Beehaw, which is running Lemmy, even if you can interact with it from your instance which is running Kbin.

So as for endorsing one or another:

• None of these instances have ads, so our content (for now) is about worthless.
• Both instances have donation links... but if you haven't donated, then you aren't supporting either.
• The devs for Lemmy and Kbin also have donation links, and you can support them by filing bugs, or better yet fixing some. If you haven't... well, still not supporting either 🙂

Using any of these without giving back, is not "endorsing" it, it's mooching off of it! So if you dislike Lemmy more... why not mooch off of that one? 😛

I think the case with Calckey is equivalent: whatever their ideology, as long as their work is OpenSource, just take it and use it for your own purpose. It does seem to be much weaker, though.

BTW Lemmy.ml is a very weakly political instance, focused more on Lemmy development. The "tankie" one is Lemmygrad, which most sane instances have defederated from... except Lemmy.ml itself, but just stick to "subscribed" or "local" and you'll be fine.

There are alternatives to Lemmy. Kbin, I’d argue, is superior in most respects. (Kbin is still obviously young and rough around the edges at times, though.)

I try to use both equally, because I'm always on the hook for picking the "doomed" standard in any 50/50 contest. It's easier to read stuff from other instances in kbin, and that gives it the appearance of more frequent and more current activity; lemmy, even on "All/Active" or "All/Hot", frequently drops 30 threads from one dude at the top of my feed, or I have three pages of threads with no comments and 6 upvotes. So even though I hate how kbin handles viewing pictures thumbnails (click on the post, wait for everything to load, click on the thumbnail, wait for it to load, chuckle, then x out of the picture to read the comments), I end up spending more time there.