If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end.
“Simply by joining it” is not an accurate representation of what will happen in the slightest. Meta is not some scrappy little Lemmy instance operator relying on donations to keep the lights on, they’re one of the biggest companies in the world who simply do not care about fair competition or open standards, and they have a proven track record of using that position to either buy out or destroy competition.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end? You can make a project as resistant to corporate overreach as you like, infrastructure to run it still costs money and there is no fediverse operator on the face of the earth that is going to be able to outspend Meta when it comes to infrastructure and R&D. How is defederation not an appropriate response when smaller instances are crippled under the inevitable load stemming from Metas users?
Corporations have been embracing, extending and extinguishing FOSS projects in the tech space for decades now, and their demise has rarely been because of a fatal flaw in the projects themselves. It’s been an intentional play by Microsoft, Google et al to ensure that there is no viable open alternative to their walled gardens.
Echoing this, please read the linked post. There is a big difference between technology and it's implementation vs the community of users of it and what they are using to do so.
When Meta have so much money that they can simply outspend any other fediverse platform and become dominant that way, how is that a design flaw on our end?
It's a design flaw when simply "outspending" other fediverse platforms allows you to dominate them. There are ways to design a system where that's not possible.
The fact that those other fediverse platforms can defederate from the "big money instance" if they don't like what it's doing, for example, is a part of the design of the fediverse that can help counter influence like that. You can't force other instances to federate with you even if you have an enormous amount of money, and even if you did manage it in specific cases other people without that vulnerability can just spin up new instances.
We'll see whether this sort of thing is "enough", I guess, because Meta is coming one way or the other. If it turns out that stronger defenses are needed then there are other technical methods that could be used to strengthen the decentralized nature of the fediverse.
I think defederation is not really that useful in this case, because then your users will just leave and sign up for the platform where they can view where the most content is. Although I do agree with your general premise.
The situation I'm thinking of is one where Meta creates Threads (or whatever it will be called), and then a bunch of people defederate. In that scenario, there will of course be big servers who choose to federate with Threads. Given Meta's reach and influence, they will undoubtedly have one of the bigger instances, so a lot of politicians, journalists and everyday people will go there.
Making it so people can't see that content will just make the fediverse become more centralized, because people will just go to the bigger instances that will allow for them to see that content, or just go sign up for threads. I think that's bad because it creates further centralization, even if they're providing the content that people want.
Even though I know a lot of people disagree, we need all types of content in order for this place to grow. I'm not talking about any far-right nonsense, but even garbage like tabloid fodder and stupid meme bullshit will keep our networks alive and users engaging. The easier it is for the average person to use the better. If the point is not profit, then it must be to allow people to come together and talk about almost whatever with almost whoever, and wherever.
Making it so people can't see that content will just make the fediverse become more centralized, because people will just go to the bigger instances that will allow for them to see that content, or just go sign up for threads.
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but it sounds to me like you're still saying "if Meta is providing the content that people want and it's not available elsewhere then people will go to Meta for it."
And that seems fine by me, in that case they're competing by providing the content that people want. However, not everyone wants the same thing. I have no interest in "following" politicians or celebrities. A lot of the sorts of conversations I'm interested in do not benefit from having a huge number of people in them. So even if Meta is some kind of juggernaut there's going to be people (like me) who don't want to participate in a juggernaut. The smaller defederated instances will still be attractive.
Then it's no different than them just jumping back to Facebook or other corporate owned social media like the current situation. That's not a lost. The lost is if they are allowed to federate in the first place and people get used to it. But even then as the concept of enshittification becomes more well known more users will also be resistant to the idea.
When this was linked a previous time, I wrote up a reply to it which I think applies here as well, so I'm gonna shamelessly copy and paste myself 🙂
I think the big thing to take away from that article is... XMPP developers cared so much about retaining federation with Google Talk that they "became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers" as it is put there. Google came in and said "this is our house now, adapt or die."
For our current fediverse, it's important I think, as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say "no, this is our house. If you don't adapt to us, we don't federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that." We cannot become the Meta watchers.
ActivityPub is just a protocol and they can use it. It doesn't mean they have to be compatible with us. Let them have their Twitter/Instagram hybrid application. Do we care that much whether we can or cannot see their posts?
To your point, many of us will defederate, either out of politics or financial necessity. There's rumors milling around that Meta / Threads will only initially federate with a few trusted larger instances and be monetarily compensated for it (aka those who will make a deal with the devil to moderate - more on my thoughts on that here).
It may come to the point where a lot of us are running on our own smaller "Fediverse", intentionally divorced from Meta and those instances which have federated with Meta and taken their advertisements and paid posts. If this is the case, we must take the bad with the good - we will always be smaller and niche, and our less techno-idealistic friends will not join our tiny Fediverse because the barrier to entry will remain high.
Why will Meta care? To their large user base, they are on the “federation” and we’ll be the odd ones out. Their users won’t care either. They’ll just use it. And Meta can spin up any number of servers they want. Any company can.
They might not, and frankly that would be the ideal solution, wouldn't it? They fork Mastodon, have their own isolated little universe, and we have our own little Fediverse over here. But the rumors swirling indicate that they do want to federate with larger instances that will be willing to follow their moderation standards and optionally take advertisements - I explain over here why that is likely the preferable approach for Meta.
It will follow the EEE flow along with their normal anti-competition tactics. First, they embrace: their interest in federation is only to give them the access to content that will make their platform not look empty, allowing them to put their coffers to work on drawing the majority share of users. Then they will extend: they will make sure their platform is compatible with ingesting other server content but others will be unable to federate their content (they will become "incompatible" later, due to "features"). Then they will extinguish competition: they'll cut off what little engagement is left with those (inbound only) federated servers because they no longer need them and the majority of the remaining users will move to their platform because that is where the activity is.
Then Kbin/lemmy will be just like all the other random phpbb instances that no one really uses. Being naive won't make things any less likely, yet there will always be gullible people who argue that "of course they will embrace the technology" and that everything else is just non-sense/wouldn't have worked anyway/blah.
It doesn't take long for the largest servers to have operating costs that they will happily allow Meta to burden in exchange for nearly any concession. The main problem is that, while Kbin/Lemmy is federated, it is federated in a manner that still places content in silos and allows single servers to "own" those spaces. It hasn't really fixed the problem yet, it just spreads the problem out over a few more servers. Until spaces are universal (every server owns a slice of that community, spreading out the community instead of just the users), it will remain ripe for EEE.
Completely agreed on the concept of needing to federate out entire spaces (magazines / communities) - this is a huge gap currently, especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on @kbin.social .
My thought is that Lemmy and kbin, after fixing and updating core functionality (easier said than done), need to jump on the idea of instances having magazines/communities that pull from multiple other sources, rather than federating each community independently - e.g. I could have an @android which is pulling from @android , @android , etc, and the experience is relatively seamless - if someone drops out, yes we lose a lot of content, but others pick up the slack.
This would require more overhead from admins and instance owners to manage which other communities their own communities are pulling from, but I think it would be worthwhile for a better overall user experience and to help decentralize these communities in general.
I can't edit and have my edits federated out (edits federate if someone is following you, not if you are following them) so I want to point out that those links are somehow pointing to users instead of communities, whoops. I was referring to e.g. https://the.coolest.zone/m/android being a collection including contents on that magazine, contents from https://kbin.social/m/android , contents from https://lemmy.world/c/android , etc.
... so I could host an instance with a magazine that is essentially a digest of federated instances, and I can add/remove based on whatever aligns with my principles?
I don't think I have that right, sorry but if you could explain it a little differently, I'm still trying to understand how the fediverse is.
So, as an example. I am on the.coolest.zone which is where my account is registered. I have a magazine on it called fediverse@kbin.social, which is where I am viewing this thread. In fact, you will be able to view it here: https://the.coolest.zone/m/fediverse@kbin.social
I have only three actual magazines on my own instance - random (this is necessary for all kbin instances to collect uncategorized posts), BestOfBlind, and Android (which was my attempt to create a magazine that collects threads based on hashtag, but it's not working right). Everything else is a magazine which is actually a federated version of either a kbin magazine from another kbin community or a Lemmy community from a Lemmy instance.
The couple of things that seem to be missing or broken right now:
As stated, trying to get a magazine going based on hashtag does not seem to be working.
There's no way to collect up multiple communities into one, so I have separate magazines for android (kbin.social) and android (lemmy.world). That's a little annoying!
As far as I can tell, you can't delete a magazine yet. If I federate a magazine / community and decide I actually don't want it on my instance anymore (or I created m/android to test the hashtag and found it doesn't work right), tough luck it seems - I'm stuck with it.
Hosting costs - Of my 80GB VPS, I appear to have used about 60GB so far just in federating other content to me. This is going to become a problem within this week! I don't know what to do about that or whether there's a way to prune old content or what! (I don't want to re-host everyone's memes, as dank as they are!)
kbin and Lemmy are both very new applications, so these will likely shake themselves out over time, but it's a bit of a rough experience right now. 😅
especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on @kbin.social .
But kbin.social is fully compatible with Lemmy with almost the same number of users and many more communities (dozen of them has more subscribers than most-subscribed /kbin magazine). Maybe /kbin as a platform is much centralised. Threadiverse, not so much.
as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.”
I'm afraid we will lose if we accept them until they do something bad. Given their track record, that's just a matter of time. If we let them become important to the fediverse as long as they play nice, the final decision could be disastrous for the fediverse when they stop playing nice.
So the right thing to say seems for me: "No, this is our house. We don’t federate with you."
That is a completely valid take here. My partner who runs our Mastodon instance will be preemptively defederating with Threads (on my suggestion), so I do agree with you, but I realize not everyone in the Fediverse may share that take - it's a weighted scale where one end is "mass adoption of a Web 3.0 decentralized Fediverse" and the other end is "but adoption in which most people are on Threads will be centralization anyway, so we will have already failed."
I think in any case it may not matter, as I believe Meta / Threads will only federate with instances that agree to follow their moderation standards - after all, Meta likely doesn't want porn and Nazis federated to their communities because then they can't run advertisements. As a Fediverse community, we're pretty good at taking care of the Nazi thing, but Mastodon's got an awful lot of porn on it.
It will really depend on which admins take that deal to be beholden to Meta's standards, potentially opening themselves up not only to huge moderation concerns but to a future requirement of taking advertisements. I hope large instances will not. I would prefer to see the Fediverse operate separate from Threads, who will be using the ActivityPub protocol but not part of the larger Fediverse. Similar to how the conservative "truth.social" uses the Mastodon application and ActivityPub but is not part of the Fediverse because it is closed off.
A little off topic, but I was very surprised Reddit didn't pursue a similar approach of "we will lower greatly the costs of API but we will serve advertisements in the API as regular posts, so you must display them and can't strip them out."
I agree with OP's title on the social side of the problem, not the technical one. If we allow them to destroy the Fediverse, then it was already lost to begin with. It's not a matter of technology, it's a matter of whether the key people are able to keep it out of the corporate control in the long run. If they can't, then it was all just a matter of time.
EDIT: I don't imply it's a particularly useful thought. It might help with coping though if it would ever happen. Let's enjoy it while it lasts and hope for the best!
Hard disagree with to see sentiment that people who use the fediverse want freedom, alot of the people I see on here instead look for choice. 'Freedom' may be a side effect of that, so is many of the positives of choice.
The idea of 'freedom' is inheritly flawed if your relying on someone else.
I have many accounts with instances I trust, and my own instances.
That is choice, not freedom.
To have 'freedom' on the internet means a P2P model where everyone directly communicates with each other.
You either haven't been on the internet long enough to recognize this very common slippery slope, or you do recognize it - and you're rooting for the slope.
Way back in the way back we used to call comments like that “flame baiting”. It’s trying to start a fight, nothing more. Forums and BBs I moderated used to technically ban it, but generally the rule has always just been “don’t feed the trolls”. Meaning: don’t comment, don’t downvote, don’t bother reporting. They just want attention, the only thing that hurts them is realizing that this board will ignore them just as completely as their parents already do in real life.
Yes. Back then there wasn't any upvoting or downvoting, so the only way you interacted with a troll is either engage them or ignore them...preferably the latter.
better yet - create whole sections of lemmy devoted to trolls and their fun times. this is the best answer. it also helps ensure that lemmy can never be sold or made profitable. thus avoiding the horrible dying mess that is reddit.
Harassment, hate speech, or any other form of harmful behavior will not be tolerated.
Now, I can't read ernest's mind to determine what he meant by this line exactly, but this kind of mean spirited, bad-faith jab falls under "harmful behaviour" in my book.
i think it's dangerous to be too broad with this definition
harmful in my mind is saying explicitly racist, homophobic, promoting violent, etc type of stuff
i think freedom of expression is something we should not give up easily. in actually harmful speech, i think the pros outweigh the cons. but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
but him saying the word "triggered" is not harmful
It implies that being against hate speech and harassment is a wrong opinion and while completely isolated and out of context it might not seem harmful, it's part of a cultural shift towards normalizing those things, and implies that anyone who cares is wrong. Seeing that go unchallenged just emboldens buttholes like that.
If you want to be neck deep in that bullshit, you're more than welcome to join exploding-heads.com. Can we have ONE space online that isn't infiltrated by assholes?
You don't have to be a dick to others on the Internet. You can make that choice. Just because you CAN post hateful shit anonymously and not have to face real life consequences doesn't mean you HAVE to.
Some people literally would prefer to see the world burn. No idea what’s up with that form of psychological gratification from destruction, but fuck them.
You’ve got it. Its out-groups are highly isolated, through a combination of downvoting and en masse automatic sub-bans based on guilt-by-association. Naturally they’re nowhere to be seen on the front page either.
Mistifying / Mistification works if you like Anglo-German puns. Emmerdification for an Anglo-French equivalent.
If you're against anything to do with faeces at all, I'm not sure there's as short and easy a neologism that as fully captures the meaning and, importantly, disdain without being a mouthful.
You need an en- of some sort because it's clear that something is changing and then the action is the attempt to squeeze as much profit out of an enterprise with the expectation that nothing much will, er, change. This inevitably ruins or destroys the nature of the enterprise from the users' point of view.
Then the CEO immediately has cognitive dissonance between their own ego and self-belief of infallibility versus the fact the enterprise isn't working or has changed far more than their expectations. Their ego, and desire for profit, inevitably wins.
Much like badly managed corporate take-overs, all the smart people leave as soon as they can assuming they haven't already been fired and replaced by an inferior of some sort.
Thus, the whole thing turns to... well. Is there a better word?
Meta has already expressed interest in the fediverse. It's going to be up to everyone who likes it to defederate from every corporate instance.
There are no good corporate actors
I don’t know it off the top of my head, but I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere that over on Mastodon, a large number of instances have banded together to collectively block all Meta owned instances, and publish a list of them and so on.
I think convenient-to-add, publicly viewable blocklists will be a thing on here sooner rather than later.
The likes of Spez were just not that intelligent enough to figure out how to make Reddit pay before the VCs called in the investments. Not that it's an easy problem to solve, but if you're going to take on money like Reddit did you sure as hell needed a better plan then leaving it up to later to figure out. Amazon had a plan clearly, Reddit did not.
Also, what Reddit is now doing mimics a little of what Facebook did too, the enshitification of your feeds (just look at the app). They're just hoping Reddit is as addictive as Facebook is and you'll stick around regardless. I wonder if they recent;y hired some new advisers that told them to make these recent changes too?
Here's the play, charge a reasonable amount for API calls and people will either pay with money or with data, some will even do both.
Instead you and I are having this conversation on kbin.
After the way shithead acted and talked, well I waste less time on the internet, and yeah, it's a little harder to find results on google, but that is just making me realize how much I relied on Reddit.
I need to find another search engine too, I rely too much on too few providers.
A better option might be to require third party developers to use a Reddit based advertising API with the benefit of free API usage and revenue sharing. Everyone's happy. Third party developers would get paid for ads, they can show more ads and use other ad providers along side Reddit if they want to, the API gets paid for by advertising revenue for all of the third party apps, Reddit gets to track it's users by requiring API Ad calls to send a user id, etc., etc..
I was on Reddit for over 10 years and it only became a place for niche communities when they got rid of defaults. Kbin/Fediverse will get there in a few years.
On top of that, we can't expect communities to POOF into existence.
We have to be part of them to build them, which means making them if they don't exist yet as well as posting and commenting in the ones that do exist. I hope that people who are used to lurking on Reddit will go out of their comfort zone a bit and start to participate in fediverse communities so that we can build things up more quickly.
What is the consensus on the etiquette of creating new communities/magazines with the names of the still extant old subreddits (particularly when you're not a mod of the old subreddit)?
Reddit doesn’t own these communities. The members do. Inasmuch these mods are interested in helping or were complicit in making Reddit a toxic place should be for the new communities to decide.
I've seen some magazines put a note in their description that the owner is willing to hand it off to the mod team of the corresponding subreddit. I think that's a decent compromise in order to welcome the old subreddit to migrate over and maintain continuity, while also not waiting around for other people to act.
I would suggest using great care in accepting new mods coming from Reddit. Do look at their history with their community and what they shaped the community into.
I'm not really sure... but the way I see it it's probably fair game.
Communities aren't something that somebody (reddit, specific moderators, etc.) owns, they are just concepts that people latch onto. And, for me at least, I would rather see popular communities exist here if people want them to, especially since you can have multiple communities under the exact same name on different servers in the fediverse.
In other words, if you want to bring over a specific reddit community I think you should just do it.
Yea I was a prolific commenter but I think I only created maybe 6-8 posts in 14 years on reddit, and certainly never created a community. So I might have to step up. Regardless of reddit, I absolutely love the idea of the fediverse and the decentralized nature of it, so I really would like to see it succeed. It really does have to be the way forward on the internet to avoid corporate interests.
Same. I think we need some way to coordinate the initial burst of content for some of the smaller subs. I hate to say it, but maybe we need to assign "homework" - Request (not require) new subscribers to contribute unique stories or info relevant to the mag/comm on some type of schedule.
Something like:
"As we try to grow this new community, we want to hear from you. We're asking (not requiring) all new subscribers to start a new post within their first week covering some aspect of the topic they find personally interesting or that they feel could help others. Just add "(1P)" to the title of the post. It doesn't matter if it's something you said elsewhere, if you're new to the entire topic and just want to post a bunch of questions, you have a funny story to tell, or have a super niche specialty.
Also, we should consider having more moderator-level users in subs to reduce the burden of moderation. It's more daunting if you're asked to be one of 3 mods than it is to be one of 15. We should also look into incentivizing moderation duties, but there's probably a much longer discussion to be had about that.
This sounds like a great tradition to encourage and support. On Reddit I was pretty danged chatty & responsive, but almost never started my own post. Maybe at most once a year. I hereby commit to upping my participation game to include some actual posts to some of the quiet magazines I've subbed to. Thanks for the push.
And YOUR exuberance has inspired me to commit to upping my post game. I was never a big poster on Reddit, but mostly because I just didn't want to deal with the contrarian and amateur professionals fallout. It might be best to focus on the niche communities, since that's where the real valuable stuff exists on Reddit.
The upvote button on kbin was originally mapped to boosts. People didn't care for they, and it was incongruent with how Lemmy does it. So, they changed the functionality, but didn't get around to updating the rest of the reputation system.
That said, kbin doesn't federated down votes, so the system is going to be weird no matter what.
I'm not sure if Lemmy federates downvotes. ernest has said that kbin doesn't, though. Maybe that's changed since he made that statement.
AFAIK, though, there's no need for changes to ActivityPub. It has everything it needs to propagate 'actions', which can be defined however a platform chooses. Other platforms just need to know how to interpret those actions in order to do anything with them, and I don't see sites that aren't aping Reddit's engagement model to care about downvotes in any way.
I hope the boost and upvote list don't get messed up. I've been using boost for things I want to comeback later on top of things I want more visibility on. I'd hate to lose that and have to manually sort them.
Yes, but you can boost your own comments to counteract the downvotes. The whole system is sketchy at best and shouldn't be relied on to determine anything about a user.
If you click on "more" you can also see everyone who up/downvoted and boosted a comment/post. So seeing that you upvoted/boosted yourself might be frowned upon by some. But who cares
The Lemmy devs are actively asking for donations and every Lemmy instance - apollo.town and vlemmy.net included links to the join-lemmy.org landing page with donation links, so I'm a bit more wary of the whole construct. Perhaps the instance admins mean well - but at the end of the day, they and their instances are soliciting links that finance tankies. That's a no-go for me personally. But each to their own.
Some of the Kbin criticism in those posts is valid, though.
Kbin is not "production ready" software and it's missing a lot of Quality of Life features for instance admins.
It's hard to deploy, hard to to troubleshoot, operate and update. It's not packaged. We users are missing moderation and migration tools necessary to deal with the federated nature of the content (moving instances, content filtering etc)
But such is life on the bleeding edge.
I fully understand if fedi-admins don't want to spend all their free time fiddling with the instance. Many of them are volunteers. It's their choice and no one can fault them for installing Lemmy instead.
Ernest has stated multiple times the project is just a prototype and it very clearly is. People are working on it though. The tracker isn't exploding with issues anymore and Ernest seems to be back working on pull requests instead of battling with the server load, There's 53 of them currently - and they're from multiple contributors. It's going to take some time, but seems there's good work being done - by multiple devs.
Starting a software flamewar between Lemmy and Kbin seems incredibly silly and unproductive though, so I'll just say this - the fediverse puts lot of decision making power into the hands of users. There is choice. So use the stuff that works for you personally. No need to build walls, throw FUD or talk down the other software product or act as a knight in shining white armor for the one you happen to use and prefer.
There's space for everyone and there's space for multiple software projects and products. There's no division.
Your last line is what I am trying to establish here, however I have noticed hostility from Lemmy supporters. This is what I mean with ‘as kbin users we should prevent this’. Such bad faith posting should be deflated or best nipped in the bud.
The points regarding kbin’s present state I do understand, but in that case I think it’s a matter of managing expectations for new users.
One of the things that really seemed to spook new Mastodon users late last year was the fact that there were multiple microblogging platforms on the Fediverse. Telling someone who lamented the lack of quote-tweets, for instance, that Calckey and Misskey had quotes, and they could use those instead, brought people out of the woodwork to argue somewhat vigorously that people should kind of shut up about both the missing features and the alternative piecds of software.
They wanted Mastodon to win.
I partially wonder if it's the centralized, disconnected social web that's to blame. You can't read Facebook posts from Twitter, so the idea that there was no meaningful different to Mastodon users if people they followed used Calckey maybe just wasn't something they groked, and they saw the suggestion of options as a threat?
I'm really not sure, but that kind of behaviour went away with time.
My worry is that Lemmy does as Mastodon does, and doesn't display the instance type of other users. Most microblogs other than Mastodon show what kind of service a post came from. It keeps people aware of what the Fediverse really is - people using many different bits of kit to talk to each other. Meanwhile, on Mastodon it just looks like everyone is using Mastodon, and that the Fediverse is Mastodon, and discussion of anything else is an attack on the Fediverse.
I would like to see instance signifies on other users in kbin and in Lemmy, but if the Lemmy Devs are financially motivated to hide that they're usersaare interacting eith other services... Well, I don't like that.
QRD on Calckey and Misskey? I'm afraid I missed that whole conversation.
Tribalism is a big issue in the social media space, and I hoped the whole 'connected platforms' thing would kind of alleviate that. Still, everyone wants to be part of the 'winning' team, and folks are less likely to socially invest in a platform without good reason.
During the Twitter migration waves late last year, many new arrivals were rather disappointed, or even irritated, to find that search was hampered and that quote-posts didn't exist. I had many, often lengthy, discussions with such folks trying to inform them that literally everything they were asking for was already available, just... "Over there" * points off to the side *
These users didn't really get it, despite my best efforts. Obviously, my best explanations were not up to the job of helping these folks grok the situation, which is fine. Sometimes when things feel intuitive to you, you lose sight of the parts that really throw people off. I expected such communication blocks. What I didn't expect was people who were in no way associated with the discussion to start interjecting with rather strong words and feelings about, well, anything but Mastodon existing.
They behaved as if discussions of other Fedivese microblogs themselves were some sort of existential threat to the Fediverse. The people arriving were struggling to understand that they could use something other than Mastodon to interact with people and content on Mastodon, and these folks were popping up in their DMs to accuse people trying to show them other possibilities of, well, basically "stealing users" from Mastodon.
As if it were a competition.
It was very, very weird, and I strongly suspect that those users were also new and didn't understand the relationship between Mastodon, *key, and the Fediverse at large. And that this kind of boosterism led to a not insignificant number of users going back to Twitter because Mastodon just didn't work "how things are supposed to work".
Incidentally, where in kbin does it show what type of service other users are using? I'm not seeing anything like that in the UI. The best I've found is being able to see the user's full username@host name, which... Well, let's just say that if I spun up "kbin.fun" using lemmy, knowing that I was using kbin.fun would in no way inform you that it was actually a lemmy-based website.
They behaved as if discussions of other Fedivese microblogs themselves were some sort of existential threat to the Fediverse.
The web keeps evolving, and honestly in the end usability and accessibility will be key. We're waiting for a project that can lower the bar for the 'common' user who wants to click a button and yell into the void. Probably Meta's intended audience. I expect that this future project will in turn become more of a containment zone than an actual place for discussion, but hey at least the folks who want more than Twitter/Reddit 2.0 will have an entry point to the rest of the fediverse without having to deal with the semantics of it.
Incidentally, where in kbin does it show what type of service other users are using?
Ah, I meant the hostname, not the specific type/kind of instance. Still, to at least be able to differentiate on source rather than claiming everything as its own content, is something I do appreciate. It would either teach me to ignore or value certain contributions more or less, given their origins - i.e. an instance ran by propaganda machines or big business.
We're waiting for a project that can lower the bar for the 'common' user who wants to click a button and yell into the void. Probably Meta's intended audience. I expect that this future project will in turn become more of a containment zone
Yeah, I can honestly say that I'm not waiting for that lower bar, and I'll be happy if those folks stay with Twitter and Reddit until they finally go bankrupt.
Which'll be a while.
It would be nice if Meta's AP-supporting Twitter competitor didn't turn out to be profitable, too, but this isn't a Metaverse gimmick, it's right in Meta's wheelhouse, and is right there with their core business. I'm sure it'll capture a lot of people from Twitter too impatient to wait for BlueSky, and will make money.
At least I can blacklist it if it starts being a problem.
Give it time to settle down. Mastodon vs. Pleroma vs. Misskey, and recently Akkoma vs. Calckey, etc etc etc. all of this stuff isn't really new. Use this. No use that.
Just use what you like. I prefer /kbin. Likely will always. If someone judges me for using a software they don't, then I probably didn't want to talk to them anyway.
Also keep in mind that /kbin was in very, very slow development for a very long time before a lot of things all happened at once. Very much a passion project. Like this is someone building a shed in their garage for their garden except somehow now suddenly 50 thousand people are in your garden and they all want in.
Oh I mean like... I do see posts saying hey if you used X instead of Y you could do Z. And I have been seeing them ever since I joined years ago. That's just how these things go. Sorry, didn't mean to imply some kind of drama and then disappoint you like that.
I use that exact metaphor. I picture ernest hammering the final board for the days work. He hoists the hammer onto his shoulder, wipes his brow, and see a sea of people running at him from a block away. A bunch are carrying signs that say, "We can't wait to live in ernest's palace," while others say, "We're good with just a roof. No big hurry. We'll make it work."
But I get it, without an official API, it's a lot of work to get one going. I just refuse to use Lemmy, so I'm committed on getting a Kbin app ASAP. We're just about to have alpha.1 build ready and it's pretty darn usable.
EDIT: me not going w Lemmy was due to devs. I still think it’s a viable platform for the fediverse, especially with all the instances out there besides theirs (and being open source). Kbin being completely separated just felt like the right choice for me when picking between the two.
I've seen that "problem" a lot, but they give away the source code for free as proper communists should do, and then it's out of their hands. Just don't go to lemmygrad.ml.
I signed up for kbin because it was easier to understand. Lemmy looked neat but figuring out which instance to join was hard. As for the developers supporting China… well, Lemmy is open source and the whole point is to make something where you don’t have to agree with the people running it.
Lemmy looked neat but figuring out which instance to join was hard
how about any lol, any major instance is ok
and yeah lemmy is open source, there's a lemmy instance for every point on the political spectrum, devs being commies makes no difference for the end result which is a very diverse (fe)diverse
There are alleged members of the communist party who are mods at lemmy.ml, or some kind of Chinese state apologists. Those who seek freedom of speech should be forewarned of this.
Gotta say, I'm really excited for the work you're doing on Artemis. Kbin's mobile site is really good especially considering how young it is, but I miss the smoothness of a real app. Thank you for jumping in on it so quickly and enthusiastically!!
Yeah, following along the active PR for the site’s API closely :)
Rn using homegrown one based on their DTOs. Using a scrapper. Just so we can run a small scale private beta. Has help us get a lot of the core functionality in place. Currently the app is looking pretty good.
While not mentioned in the list and no code was actually written towards Kbin yet, I do plan to support it and Mastodon if possible on Beyond when possible :)
Honestly, I'm sure that joke is going to get extremely old as time wears on, but right now I always chuckle. Creepy stories is c/lemmyscareyou now. Adorable.
I think it works the same way in the other direction. So in order to view kbinMeta@kbin.social from lemmy.world you would navigate to https://lemmy.world/c/kbinMeta@kbin.social
Commenting to save. Still hoping for some added functionality to the web and app support. For instance, I miss using Boost where I could quickly jump to top level comment trees.
This was an incredibly useful summary how shit just works here. Wish I had found it sooner or it was pinned somewhere more visible. Especially the examples. Thanks 🙏
Do you know the URL syntax to do the same from mastodon? Lemmy uses /c/ for community and Kbin /m/ for magazine, but I have no idea how to do similarly from a mastodon instance.
When I began exploring the #fediverse I must have made 5 accounts across various instances, but I really want to keep it all on one account (somehow).
As I see it Google and others are going to have a hard if not impossible time to incorporate the fediverse, and the fact that the same content can exist on multiple servers.
So I'm working on a search engine specifically build, for Lemmy at least. Where it'll take you to whatever your preferred instance is when tapping on a search result.
I hope to have a MVP up and running in a few more days.
IDK, isn't it the same for reddit? It also encourages crossposting, so the same content is on there several times. Maybe I don't understand the fediverse well enough yet, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
That is great. Thanks for the initiative. Have you considered contacting the people at DuckDuckGo so that that search engine can access Lemmy/Kbin content?
Interesting. I hadn't even thought about how the fact that instance1.[post] and instance2.[post@instance1] is essentially the same thing and how search engines would handle it. Interested in what you come up with!
Thanks. If you do some digging you can find the project on GitHub but note that it's a work in progress still. The UI is lacking and it's rough around the edges but it's "working". And I still need to do some optimizations on the crawler itself, etc....
It's also going to be completely self-hostable just like Lemmy, etc...
Yep and I'm one of them. Go look me up on Reddit and I think I have maybe 20 posts over the 14+ years I was on the site. ...joined Lemmy and immediately got frustrated that I couldn't find anything. So I figured I take a crack at it. Especially since I couldn't see how Google would ever be able to link me to my instance. Let alone make it easy to search the entire fediverse without having to write out every possible site, with new ones popping up every day.
I wonder if it's possible to have a sophisticated search engine similar to Google's, with BERT and kNN or vice versa. It would be the closest thing to Google search but specifically for Lemmy posts.
So sometime in the future an upvote will be used to score the post and get it on the "frontpage", and a Boost is just like a save feature to save posts to my microblog?
i wouldnt call boost a save feature per say, but since we arent on mastodon it pretty much looks like one so i guess you can call it that lol. yes, eventually the reputation will be fixed and upvotes will affect it as it should, its just not a priority for now
Lemmy very much tries to be "federated Reddit". It's Reddit as it was in 2010ish, and that's all it tries to be. And that's fine, but it limits the development of what the Fediverse is. You can use a Mastodon account to browse Lemmy, but you can't use a Lemmy account to browse Mastodon (and the devs aren't planning on adding it - I asked).
Kbin, however, looks at things from a different perspective. On Kbin, you have both threads and microblogs. This replicates modern Reddit's ability to post to your own profile, except instead of going to some user subreddit that nobody reads - it's treated like a post on Twitter or Tumblr and shared more widely. You can follow people on Mastodon from Kbin, and vice versa. There are plans in the future to support more things that make the Fediverse great - you can read the roadmap here.
Note Kbin as a project is less than a year old, and this "main" server only came online a month ago. Until very recently it was just ernest talking to himself... this amount of growth wasn't planned for!
Long-term, Kbin will be somewhere that connects the Fediverse platforms - you won't need a Mastodon account and a Pixelfed account and a PeerTube account. I really like that approach. Rather than trying to do one thing to the detriment of everything else, it goes beyond just a Reddit clone and is also its own thing. That's why I joined; it's a completely different approach to how the Fediverse should be interacted with.
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