@Cryst

Hm. Generally, yes. I'm on kbin.social. tl;dr: Fantastic and excellent social media alternative, but as someone that's worked years in ITSec, I have some huge concerns.

Things I found surprising:

• Registration was intuitive and easy.
• There's already a huge volume of good content readily available without having to "find it" (I had imagined it being more like ""the dark web"", i.e. you have to know what site you're looking for
• Voting transparency omg holy shit. I remember when Reddit introduced vote fuzzing and it was the dumbest thing. At least on kbin, who upvotes/downvotes something is publicly viewable. So rather than "let's fuzz the votes to throw off the bots", simply showing who voted allows you to easily find the troll downvoting everything or a flood of bots or so on. I imagine there's probably not much tooling around this yet, but there inevitably will be.

Things I've found confusing, concerning, or have questions about (feel free to point me in the direction of a good magazine or FAQ as well):

• WTF is boost vs upvote?
• Are usernames unique across the fediverse, or only across instances? (Is there anything preventing me from registering e.g. Cryst@kbin.social , then jumping on this thread and pretending to be you, or vice versa?)
• What happens if an instance closes up shop? Is there any way to migrate everyone's data over to another instance?
• What happens if I decide I hate kbin.social admins, or you decide you hate lemmy.ca admins - are either of us able to fairly seamlessly move our identities from one server to another? Or would it be "nope, create a new account and start over"?
• On reddit, a lot of good things happen around flairing (users, posts). Does fediverse have an equivalent?
• Sometimes as I'm browsing I find myself on a different server (I think) and the language of the GUI is entirely switched to Arabic or similar. I still haven't figured out how to fix that or even what's doing it.

I still need to set up my own instance and play with that too.