Interesting project! Can you explain the vision a bit more - I understand that every instance can have their own version of an article, but how would a user know which version of an article is most relevant to them to read (and maybe even contribute to)?
Sorry if you were just making a joke, my sarcasm detector is not really working anymore (/s at the end would help). But if not, this comment really perfectly captures the entitlement in open source.
Now imagine you spend months (or even years) of your free time to build something for people to use freely, and the result is that you get endless comments from random strangers, telling you that you work for them and that you need to respect and be grateful to them. I honestly am impressed that open source still exists at all at this point.
I just want to add a counter-point to the argument that Lemmy devs are somehow opposed to contributions. In my experience, there has been no resistance to contributing any type of change (I have personally added niche features for running Lemmy in a distributed manner, optimizations, bug fixes, etc). In fact I would claim the complete opposite - I have received plenty of support and good code reviews from maintainers whenever I have wanted to contribute anything.
I think there is truth to the claim that Lemmy maintainers don’t have a lot of patience for people making demands and snarky comments, but that is very different from being opposed to contributions. Also, after running a big instance for a while now, I completely understand this lack of patience - when some of your users just keep being rude to you, it wears down your patience. It’s easy to patiently and kindly respond to the first 100 rude users, but at some point after that, it just becomes gradually more mentally exhausting, to the point where it’s basically impossible.
Even the example provided in the blog post: I don’t think snowe had bad intentions, but I do think they had clearly misinterpreted the situation with that issue, and their comments were needlessly condescending.
Good luck with the upgrade!
This is just pure speculation, but there was a recent DDOS against some Lemmy instances. Perhaps whoever was doing the DDOS was using “kbinbot” as their useragent, and this block was just a mitigation?
Probably not replace, but certainly it could be a viable and thriving part of the picture. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having options.
You can check the federated/defederated instances for any instance on the /instances page. For example:
https://sh.itjust.works/instances
https://beehaw.org/instances