Kichae

You’re asking two questions here. One is about some kind of purity test, which… You gotta let that one go. The crowd isn’t here to pass judgement on you, and asking it to do so is a kind of psychological self harm.

The other is about whether using a particular Reddit front end supports Reddit. The answer to that is an unqualified “yes”.

The two together point to you wanting to use Reddit, but not wanting to be judged poorly for doing so, and that’s an anxiety state you don’t deserve to live in. You either believe strongly enough about not supporting Reddit for your own reasons to not use it, or you don’t. And that’s ok, because they’re your beliefs. You’re not some soldier in some holy war.

Disagree. Indeed, I couldn’t disagree more strongly.

Instances are not just abstract server nodes in some overly wasteful recreation of some other website. This is the world wide social web as it should have been.

You may as well argue that websites should be indistinguishable from each other.

This isn’t Reddit. Full stop. And it’s not a drop-in Reddit replacement, either. It’s not “Reddit, but different”. It’s a whole new paradigm in forums and content aggregation. It’s very different from centralized social media, and we need to stop dancing around or trying to hide that fact.

It will never get to reach its potential if we decide it needs to be nothing more than a simulacra of what came before it.

Here’s the thing, though: Whenever you have a position like “Person for Group”, that Group is being singled out for a reason.

And that reason is lack of representation.

To put it another way, so have a Minister for Women is a tacit acknowledgement that the others operate as if men are the default person. All of the other ministers are Ministers for Men.

the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account

I can’t stress highly enough how much this isn’t how it works.

You basically never directly interact with other servers. Instead, when someone on your host site first subscribes to a community hosted on a other site, your instance pulls in some recent posts from that remote site and then requests that all future content from that group be forwarded along to it. Then, people on your local site interact with that mirrored content, and your local site sends local additions back to the original host for syncing.

Your account only exists locally. You’re always reading locally, and you’re always acting locally. Everything else is servers mirroring and forwarding content.