I read the rules for a bunch of US-based Lemmy instances, as I wanted one with low latency – if I’m going to be seeing the whole Fediverse through it, I want it to be peppy – and I’m in the US. Many kind of took what I’d call a censorship-heavy position from the get-go – like, creating a safe space for LGBT users or something was the highest priority.

There was one Dutch Lemmy instance that specifically mentioned free speech, but I was hunting for something with good latency, and pinging it with mtr had relatively-high latency.

There was a US Pleroma instance (IIRC freespeechextremist.com or something like that) that mentioned free speech. Pleroma, I understand, can federate with lemmy, and IIRC its default max comment size is longer. Unfortunately, browsing it without registering seemed that most of it seemed to be racist. I’d like a platform that doesn’t try, as a top priority, to shut down everyone who is racist or otherwise offensive instancewide, but also not to drop into stuff that’s just racism.

One thing that I did notice, skimming the content on said rather-racist server, was that they highlighted a Lemmy dev saying that he actively wanted to make it difficult for right-wingers to use the Lemmy platform. That didn’t sit well with me at all – I don’t want to try to be using a platform that is actively opposed to right-wingers, nor to be in conflict with the developers of the platform on the matter, as it could lead to friction down the line. I also wasn’t enthralled with the fact that Lemmy had a slur filter by default (though I’ll concede that I don’t know whether kbin does or not).

Kbin.social had rules that didn’t from the get-go heavily talk about trying to restrict users and also wasn’t purely serving up objectionable stuff. I tried it and discovered the fact that it had support for both Twitter-style microblogging and Reddit-style functionality, unlike Lemmy’s focus on just Reddit functionality. I am most interested in Reddit-style functionality, but if I could get integrated microblogging, that’d be even better. Hence, I stuck with kbin.social, and so far, it’s been unexpectedly good. There are a few UI quirks (e.g. the comment field is at the bottom of the page rather than the top), but people provided userscript fixes for that and other differences from Reddit within hours of me showing up. I’m broadly very happy with the UI – the decisions made are basically what I would have liked to see from Reddit. Has a dark mode, though I use Dark Reader, essentially making it unnecessary.

I don’t totally understand the kbin.social infrastructure – I have low latency to kbin.social with mtr, but I don’t know if that means that that’s just some kind of Cloudflare-based frontend server in the US and the backend is located in Poland, where the developer is, or what. He does have a note currently in the sidebar referring to a “server room”, which makes me think that he is physically near at least some of the infrastructure.