Imagine if Christian converted Apollo over to kbin, that would be hilarious. Give it a few weeks a good 20% of Reddit could quite easily continue exactly moreorless as they were but without Reddit at all…
Edit - Christian if you see this, I would happily pay a few bucks for an Apollo/kbin app.
I think the problem was that those posts were created parallel to each other, so the discussion was split, which was undesirable. And at this point there isn't a way to merge two or more similar posts into one at Tildes. So there were two options, either keep the discussion split, or remove one of the posts.
Right? Tildes literally has a written rule "if the admins don't like you we'll permaban you". Only a matter of time before the admin team bans the wrong person and the users are faced with a similar situation with Reddit. But they can't just seamlessly escape to another federated site like we can - they'll have to give up everything again
Maybe it is because I am still very new to the federarion, but I still feel that the option to leave for a different instance is not as easy as everyone here makes it.
People will tend to join and use the most populated/active communities/magazines. What if that active community is on an instance you can no longer use, or don't want to use?
Same, maybe I'm missing something but I don't see how it's any easier/harder than it would be with a non-federated open-source site, or even just different subreddits on the same domain.
Agreed. I think if tightly-knit communities were starting instances and getting all their other interests outside their niche that it might be more like that. For instance (LOL, I crack me up), if kbin.rocknroll.social were an instance hosting a thousand refugees from /r/music, /r/classicrock, and /r/grunge, but they only really participated in a few local magazines/communities and tended to consume their news from lemmy.world, their dog pics from beehaw, and their basketball news from some other instance, they'd have less on the line if their instance crashed or was overrun by people they didn't want to associate with. It would be even more pronounced the other way around, with the people visiting kbin.rocknroll.social only losing some music content if they felt a need to block or their instance felt a need to defederate.
It could also work, as with the tankies' instances on Lemmy, if an instance, however broad-based, had a cohesive ideology and the "residents" and visitors alike knew what they were in for and what they'd be giving up if they avoided it or were banned/defederated.
But I don't think that's what is happening, at least right now. As it is, people are more just signing up wherever there seems to be inertia at the moment they're ready to try something knew, and either trying to build something local or just using their new home as a window onto the most popular instances.
On the other hand, I guess in the end, it is what it is and you can certainly have a wonderful experience on a federated site, even if the integration is exaggerated. The need to leave for another instance would still be a giant pain and much could be lost, but to a refugee (or an outlaw) there is value to having a someplace halfway familiar to go, and the barriers to entry are lower if a popular instance goes bad.
I am a rexxitor. I heard about Lemmy first and tried to figure out how to join. It was too busy there. I couldn't get anything to work. So I looked some more and found kbin. Since then I have learned some more. I think I will be happier here.
I think as it exists today- that is the case. But if "multireddits" are implemented, and any single community is actually the sum of federated communities aggregated together, we are in a much better position if a single community goes down.
But even with aggregation, if the most active community is taken away, either by defederation or just by you blocking it, you lose majority of the content in that community. Or maybe I am just missing something.
As I understand it, there is no system short of being fully decentralized that could guarantee access in such a way (federated being a pit stop in between centralized and true decentralization). In order for communities to not be under the control of any one server owner, it would mean communities would have to be fully P2P, which raises additional problems with how moderation would work. Would you cryptographically assign moderation permissions to an individual? Or have no centralized moderation and make each user moderate their own view of communities? You could decouple moderation from communities so communities can be fully P2P and permissionless, and have users subscribe separately to moderation entities (users or groups), but given that finding communities on other instances is too complicated for many people, I suspect that having to also search across a fully decentralized network to find a moderation group(s) that you can subscribe to, and making sure that all your moderation groups combined give 100% coverage to all the communities you follow would make usability for the layperson even worse.
Imo the federated model is a good middle-ground between giving a CEO 100% control over all users/content/moderation and having no centralized control over any of that. Just enough decentralization where instances cannot exert absolute control over the network, cannot force users to leave the fediverse as a whole or lock people out of API access across the board, but just enough centralization where curated spaces can exist and abuse can be handled in a few places instead of duplicating work everywhere. The remaining issues with the remaining amount of control that instance owners have can be addressed by asserting our ability to switch instances and access the same content. The threat to badly behaving instance owners is much greater when users can switch instances and still access the same communities and use the same apps.
Imagine what the reddit blackout would look like on the fediverse - users would register on new instances and pick up where they left off. Any communities on the problematic instance would already have their content federated to other servers, preventing the content from disappearing - a simple script could update the community address to reflect a new location. The original instance would have 0 leverage over the community, and everyone would be able to use the same apps they are already used to.
But the content is hosted on the instance and is federated in a sense that you can interact with it from a different instance, but if the instance hosting the content is defederated or something, the content stops being available in every other instance. Or is it not?
I understand the goal of spreading the power over several entities, I just feel like this is an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" situation with current implementation and mindset.
I think the idea with aggregation is that there is no "most active community". There is no reason for users to all flock to one community if all posts in the fediverse, on a given topic, are viewable in one place.
Right. If you have a sort of automagic multireddit aggregation, then losing 80% of your aggregated content still leaves the 20% cohesive, and that becomes all the more important with the 80% being gone. If instances aren't coalescing around interests or ideologies, but instead around availability and bandwidth, then I think it makes a lot of sense to aggregate more elegantly.
The software is open source. The instance that everyone has been talking about is centralized and privately managed by the dev. They're basically creating a carefully curated space, and sort of letting other people read the resulting content.
I unfortunately do not, as the ability to generate a given amount of invite codes is occasionally given to existing users, and my account isn't old enough to have been there the last time it happened. You can however send an email to invites@tildes.net to request an invite yourself.
I tried this yesterday (a terrible time, I know) and I'm waiting to hear back. I figure I'll hedge my bets by joining a few different communities to see which I like best. I may, in the future, just use many of them for different purposes.
That's probably the best course of action. Kbin seems positioned to welcome about the same kind of content Reddit did, but Tildes is more aimed toward longform, in-depth discussion (so no spamming low effort memes).
It is very good! However, I have stopped using Ivory and started using Mona instead as it's a more complete app in my opinion. The customisation features are awesome too!
Near as I can tell, there are only five so far (listed on the homepage under "Instances" ), and only two are primarily English-speaking (kbin.social and fedia.io). The reason "people don't know that other kbin instances exist" is because either they don't, really, or because kbin's homepage is accidentally hiding them all.
I imagine Christian could just make his own instance kbin.apollo and maybe use app subscriptions or donations to give it a beefy server, but I wonder about over-centralization. (Or if that's even how this all works...)
But that would require him to administer a server. That's a lot of work.
Look at the strain its putting on ernest. We have a growing pile of threads talking about what features need to be added, but he's spending his time trying to keep the website from spontaneously combusting.
The separation of community administration and website administration was a key element of Reddit. It's what made it work at all. The separation of website administration and development takes this one step further.
If we'll ever stop demanding that software developers be social media website managers, at least.
Yeah - Christian has also publicly stated that he's not interested in building or operating a service.
It's a shame in a sense though, because there is this one-time opportunity of invested users migrating from Reddit to something else and it will likely end up in a very fragmented universe. (Though maybe that is for the best).
I firmly believe that Reddit is too big to actually be useful as anything other than a passive ingestion experience for the overwhelming majority of people there, even the ones who want to be engaged. Major subreddits are too big to actually discuss issues, and the entire comment system is gamified to promote finding new posts in popular subs with a low number of comments with the potential to reach the top of the sub and then posting something biting.
That's not actually a healthy model of interaction, and it actively twists the way we think about topics, both as posters and lurking readers.
A multitude of accessible communities of a few hundred to a couple thousand users on the same topic where those users can actually be seen and heard and engage in a discourse is just better for us all. For each of us individually, for the online communities, and for society as a whole.
The fragmentation is a feature, not a bug.
Yes, there's the very real possibility that some post that you would have been interested in will show up on another website. Maybe that website will federate with the one you're using, so that you can go and fetch it and engage in it directly, temporarily engaging with another community. Maybe it'll happen on a website that doesn't federate, and you'll have to open another browser tab to read it. There will be friction there, sure.
But that friction is a good thing. It makes you make active choices in how you engage, rather than passive ones.
And yes, there's also the possibility that the post never crosses your field of vision, and you never know it exists. That you miss out on it entirely.
But that already happens on Reddit. It happens more times than you can count, as new posts that might be interesting to you get ignored by the subreddit at large and never get upvoted into relevance.
The FOMO is real. I get that. I experience is quite strongly myself. I go down way, way, way too many rabbit holes during my day, because websites like Reddit are designed specifically to make people burn hours scrolling past ads while having interactions of negligible meaning to anyone.
We have the opportunity to do something different now. Something more considered. Something without CEOs and investors who are looking to exploit our psychology and our passions to line their pockets. Instead, we can take ownership of the space at the infrastructure level and decide what's actually good for us, not just what's easy or what extends session times and clickthrough rates.
High quality take. There's just one practical issue, most users of the internet are creatures of convenience, and they're not super big on the philosophical aspects of online culture. Fragmentation, friction, healthy interactions, these aren't considerations of the average social media user. They like integration, centralization, and (at the risk of sounding derogatory) being part of a hivemind.
As an example of that behavior, despite the scores and scores of videos and articles telling people not to pre-order games, to be wise with their purchases, gamers on the whole still pre-order games on a large scale.
We don't have to cater to everyone. If the average social media user won't climb over small barriers -- assuming those barriers aren't actual accessibility barriers, and are just an unwillingness to try -- then maybe... They can stay where they are?
We can have a healthier space. They can join us if they care enough to.
The difference with a federated system is that you can leave kbin without leaving the entire ecosystem. Don't like how kbin is being run? Well, you can go join Fedia, or some Lemmy instance, and go right on following the communities you enjoyed, without losing anything terribly meaningful (at worst, your post history, and Reputation if you value that).
Imagine if Reddit had been part of the Fediverse. You could abandon Reddit, but keep all the things you liked about it. That's the biggest advantage of decentralizing access to content: while Reddit has a monopoly on being Reddit, kbin or any other Fediverse instance does not.
EDIT: Yeah, yeah, editing after being downvoted. In case it's unclear, I'm not telling this user "If you don't like it, leave." I'm saying the nature of the fediverse is that leaving one instance does not necessarily mean leaving the fediverse. If what they suggest comes true and kbin.social eventually does something to provoke a mass exodus as Digg and Reddit have done previously, people can basically just move next door and go about their day as normal instead of being uprooted from all of their communities.
It is, but kbin is just software. I was meaning more like "If you don't like the way the administrator is setting policy, you can move to another instance with a different admin team." If your problem is not with the people but with the software itself, then absolutely, you can move to a different software platform like Lemmy or any future equivalents that come along.
Yeah I'm pretty sure when I started using reddit it was RES on desktop and just the compact mobile site for my smartphone. It worked fine until I discovered Rif. Kbin doesn't really need an app. I just discovered a new mastodon variant called Calckey and the interface is insanely good and responsive. If any fediverse site doesn't need an app it's them, hands down.
What exactly is the advantage of an app over just using a browser? I've been moving to just using the browser for many apps now and the experience is the same. Hide the URL/navigation bar (save to home screen) and you effectively have a mobile app. A surprising number of apps just end up using the phone's default web view that links to a web URL (which functions the same as in the browser but without a navigation bar).
I mean, there is a certain "feel" that some apps benefit from being native, but usually those apps are things that are very computation intensive and using lots of cutting edge and system-level features (of which Reddit doesn't).
Not being able to collapse comments and entire threads is a huge hindrance to the way I’m used to using Reddit (Apollo) though. I collapse the comment chain when I’m ready to move onto the next. Here I just have to scroll and scroll until I get to the next one.
this is the way, lots of people are making user scripts there was a post the was tracking them will edit if I find it again. And on top of that the KBIN dev(s) are listening and changing the platform quickly to add these features as they gain traction.
Main thing I'm missing is the ability to collapse comment threads. I'd prefer to not have to scroll past tons of replies to find the next main thread in a comment section.
Collapse threads and hide read posts (and manually hide posts I don’t want to read) are basically the only options I desperately want. Lol. Right now my feed is full of posts I don’t care about or have already finished.
I'm using the mobile website since I mostly browse from my phone, but man does it need a lot of work. Like showing the current magazine until the end of the page, is there a way to bring it up top or in a menu? It makes subscribing to magazines a little cumbersome.
Do you mean the sidebar? You can access it from up top via the burger/3 lines menu button as well. Tap that and scroll down a bit and you should see the subscribe button.
Shouldn't be too hard for someone to make a wrapper for the website using the built in Android Web view stuff, and publish it as an app. Add a 'scroll to top' button and you're done?
kbin is really new so things are still being set up. An official app seems to be on the roadmap, but looks like the priority of the dev is to stablise the platform first, and rightfully so. But I anticipate third party popping up before the official app once the kbin API is fully fleshed out.
The main thing I'm missing from the mobile site for me, is the ability to use an amoled black theme so that it's easier on eye strain. Jerboa has this functionality so at least for now I'm just using Lemmy on mobile but kbin on desktop.
The thing is, my main reason for using a Reddit app in the first place was because the website wasn't good. If Kbin remains a good, usable website, I won't need an app for it.
The benefit to a third party app is that they can work on features like being able to collapse comments and a different navigation UI while the local admins can work on things like stability and infrastructure. Spreads the load out (and that can help inform the kbin admins where they should focus future attention)
Apparently not. Supposedly there's an integrated app called Shortcut that you can use on IOS. I wouldn't know for sure thought because I've not been on IOS since IOS 8 came out.
So far the mobile browser experience has been spot on. I have a foldable and it switches pretty easily. It takes a sec to reload the page, but nothing crazy. A dedicated app would be nice though, I miss using Sync.
Sync user of 4+ years here, I hope LJ makes an app for kbin/lemmy soon. The v22 UI/UX changes were fantastic and I'll be really annoyed having to use the official app again which hasn't meaningfully changed its UX since I started using Sync.
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