The kbin.social/stats page actually reflects a count from the instance DB, which includes federated accounts/posts/comments. Check https://kbin.social/nodeinfo/2.0 for just local instance stats, it's about 20K for kbin.social. 125K I think is lemmy and kbin combined considering all lemmy instances is ~100K, kbin.social is ~20K, and fedia.io in second place is ~2K.
fedidb.org also uses the nodeinfo (and shows the raw data when you click into a specific instance), though it lags slightly, I think by 6 hours maybe more as it still shows only ~6K for kbin.social instead of 20K.
Oh wow, this makes so much more sense now!
I was super confused how kbin seemed soooo much more efficient than lemmy, because kbin.social seemed to handle ~120k users similarly how lemmy.ml handled ~35k.
At the same time I knew the server config of lemmy.world, EPYC Rome 32 cores 128GB ram, which was completely fine at ~16k users.
Now I learned that lemmy.ml (35k users) only just moved to a baremetal server, and it's not a huge one at that, it helps paint the picture: 6 cores 32gb ram
Now that it seems like kbin.social is not at 125k users, but at 25k, this makes much more sense, even though I don't know the server config of kbin.social
Well, I'm just forgetful.
kbin is (probably) running on a CCX41 or CCX42 by Hetzner, judging by a fairly recent ernest comment, so if i understand this right, it's 8 cores with hyperthreading and 64gb of ram
But to be fair, the CloudFlare DDoS protection needs to be dropped so kbin.social, where most users and content are, is able to federate properly. This is a huge obstacle, especially when some are complaining that we need to register on other instances and not crash this one (e.g. fedia.io). Fedia has pretty much no content.
I doubt it's a PWA. A PWA is still active even when you aren't using it. Allows for notifications and picking up where you left off. What you probably have is a web link on your home page, which can be done in Android as well.
Confirmed. On my Android (Samsung) it's just a link. When I did it on an iPhone (iPhone 6 in fact), it was a proper PWA. Not sure why it works as a PWA only on iPhone but not on Android.
I tried to run Lighthouse through Chrome dev tools on kbin.social but it seems like CloudFlare is throwing that off.
Lighthouse reports that fedia.io isn't PWA compliant due to a single issue in the manifest file (probably forgot to update a url from kbin to fedia or something trivial like that).
Edit: and a day later, with CloudFlare off, I get the install option and the true PWA.
From what I can tell, Kbin recently got PWA support and some people have already installed it. But with the Cloudflare setup alongside federation this too broke, and now the manifest does not work correctly.
Waiting out a few weeks before badgering anyone about it myself 🌝
Edit: the PWA is working again!
Next stop: collapsible comments, and the app to find system screen orientation support 🙏
For sure, with kbin.social not federating we effectively have two networks running right now. It'll be cool to see how everything looks once they're working together.
Could you, or anyone else, explain federation and kbin/lemmy? I obviously came here from Reddit, and I like it because the UI is very Reddit-like but I keep hearing about federation, lemmy, etc., and if things get complicated it’s just going to scare away people like me, the casual users who just want a community but don’t have the time to delve into complexities.
You can join communities (which are called magazines on kbin) that are on other servers, and people from other servers can join our communities on kbin.social. That's about it. You don't have to do any of that if you don't want to. You can just participate in the communities you like here on kbin.social and still have a good experience now that the instance is growing.
The nice thing about federation is that you don't have to worry about choosing between kbin or Lemmy because you're afraid of missing out on communities or content. And you don't have to have two accounts just to see what's going on in each.
If you find a Lemmy community you want to join, then you'll be able to join right from your kbin account here. So if there's a thriving community over on a Lemmy instance that piques your interest, you can subscribe to that community and participate just like any other threads. Posts will show up on your subscription feed and so on.
And that goes both ways, so once federation is re-enabled, you'll start seeing posts and comments from people on other instances.
Federation just takes a bunch of smaller reddit-like sites and lets them all interact with each other.
A lot of people were talking about going to stand-alone sites like tildes.net when they moved away from reddit. Imagine a dozen of those sites, all separate from each other - with redditors going in 12 different directions and separating into a bunch of smaller groups. Not a great thing, you just fractured a big community into lots of little ones. Now imagine that all of those sites could talk to eachother so that no matter which one you signed up for, you could still join a community on any other site.
I'm just on Kbin. Got a long way to go before we are anywhere near reddit numbers, but as long as there is content to interact with, smaller might be better
I don’t want to deal with Reddit official app, and since I have no alternative, I hope kbin.social will be good enough for my needs. Let’s see how it turns it in the coming months :).
Saving kbin.social as a bookmark on my home screen (android) works for me. It's close enough, just tap the icon and I'm here and it's formatted for my phone.
While I love a native app, this will do just fine for now. Hoping more of the smaller communities make the jump, but regardless.. I'm here for the long haul. Was a longtime Reddit user, started on it in 2009, and I've long been disillusioned to Reddit. Happy to try something new with less people, things were better when Reddit was smaller.
Ouch. Reddits old shit on mobile is...well it's there. At least for now, sounds like they're going to kill all access to the site on mobile platforms and force users to their app.
I've set up accounts on a few other sites and one thing I'm liking about all of them is the smaller community size. There seems to be higher quality content with a smaller userbase. There's definitely diminishing returns the larger a site gets. However the trade off is that niche interests don't have enough folks to engage with when the total community size is too small
Agreed. I think the move right now is to take niche topics to more "umbrella" mags, like instead of a world of war craft server, start a thread in gaming or pcgaming. Instead of a Philadelphia Eagles Mag, bring it to an NFL or Sports mag
Network effects are very much a thing in social media, i.e. a lot of the value comes from the number of users. The fediverse is still a drop in the bucket compared to corporate social media. Let's hope that changes and this becomes a serious factor.
Would love to see the addition of a mobile app of sorts for kbin once the backend infrastructure is stabilized. Considering the official Reddit app is the reason for many leaving Reddit a good mobile experience could really help instances like kbin or Lemmy stick around.
Way more important to me than an app.. being able to minimize all the nested comments in a comment chain. I hate having to scroll to the bottom of a chain to try and find the next parent-level comment. It's a strain on my eye and is just bad UI these days.
Surely it's in the works, but I'd much rather have that than another app any day.
I'm scrolling through the magazine list and it looks like a ton of the subs that are on Reddit are being created here. Hopefully they start to gain traction and get more daily users. But the groups I care about most are already here.
It's so nice to see. Loving this so far. Only thing is I still don't know how to comment directly to a post. Only reply lol. Still, part of the fun is in the learning. The community seems great too.
If you're talking about wanting to make a top-level comment (as in, replying to a thread not someone in the thread) then there's a box at the very bottom of the page that does that. It's not a great place for it imo because you might never see it in posts with lots of comments, but stuff like that will presumably be changed and improved with time.
Honestly, I think it will be important that instead of us hoping that niche topics pick up, we consolidate into umbrella mags to have our discussions. Instead of a World of Warcraft mag, talk in the videogames mag. Etc etc.
I’m curious to see how kbin/lemmy users from before the migration feel about the influx of new users. Do you feel positive about popularity or do you feel your space is being invaded?
I have tried to register to beehaw, but I still have not heard anything back in regards to getting approved or not. Kinda weird. Went to kbin after that and am pretty happy. The growth is something you can actually see happening through the increase in comments and submissions.
Fedia,io is another kbin instance that is still federated if what your interested in is the kbin ui. But yeah to connect kbin.social to and from other lemmy/kbin instances is gonna take some time for the influx to die down a bit.
Not really stagnated, but poorly managed I'll agree with -- they're changing, but in what I'd consider to be the wrong direction.
Just about every change has been a net negative for people who want reddit to be more like reddit was 10 years ago.
More stuff to buy (awards, avatars), subreddit chat, lower information density on both the site and official app and all that are all things I feel makes the site worse, and many others who have migrated here (or are considering it) probably agree.
Pretty sure that they're trying to move toward an instagram/tiktok type of platform instead of a more discussion-oriented platform. Which means its well past time for me to be gone.
Most changes that I've noticed -- and Reddit will have a lot of work going on that I can't see, like on dealing with spammers or scalability -- have been not really been negative, but also not positive. I was pretty happy with old Reddit.
The avatars are something that I don't really care about, but don't hurt me.
Ditto for the awards. I don't use them, and they haven't really directly added to the experience for me, but they're probably trying to explore ways to pull in more money, making Reddit Gold more economically-workable, without creating problems for the userbase. If the choice is "inserting more advertising" or "sell awards via Reddit Gold", I'd rather have the awards.
Subreddit chat...again, I don't care about it and don't use it. But...it also doesn't really hurt me. And my impression is that there is demand for this sort of thing, as some other forum systems do have more chat-oriented functionality.
There have been things that I didn't like, that were honest negatives, and those have generally been newer.
Changes to how blocking worked. Originally, blocking a user ignored them. Apparently, some other popular forms of social media caused blocking to also prevent replying. This created a whole host of issues, like people making a comment in a conversation then promptly blocking the person so that it would appear to other users that the other user didn't respond, or blocking preventing commenting on a post by a user.
The "new" interface. Honestly, I don't even really understand who it's aimed at appealing to. It's more mobile-phone-friendly than the "old" interface, and I can understand that being important for mobile users, but Reddit tries to nag you to use their app if you try to use the web interface on a mobile web browser.
Restricting the API access in such a way that third-party clients get blocked is going to be a major problem. One thing that I really liked about Reddit was the third-party clients; like Usenet and IRC, a lot of improvements that weren't handled on the server side were addressed because anyone could go out and make a new client (or at least add an improvement to some existing one).
But in all honesty, there haven't been that many things that I can think of that I really actively disliked that Reddit did, though the above are certainly big ones.
Keep in mind that the third party shutdown hasn't even begun yet. Everyone who is here from reddit now is here early, so 125k is extremely conservative.
That's so true, whenever you try to search something with the reddit search bar nothing of interest comes up. But if you type "reddit <whatever you're searching for>" into Google it shows up instantly. And it's been like that since the website was created, bunch of incompetent idiots over there.
There are search engine libraries out there that they could link into the thing. Like, if you asked me to build something like that into a small website, I could probably get some kind of search functionality working reasonably well inside a week.
But...Reddit isn't just any old website. it has to scale pretty well. Reddit has a lot of text to search through. Reddit has new content being constantly added that has to be added to the index at a pretty rapid rate. Reddit permits comment deletion, which means that the search engine's index probably needs to support efficient deletion of arbitrary comments from the index, which I suspect is fairly uncommon for a search engine (and which many index designs won't handle efficiently). And a search engine used by Reddit probably needs to support some kind of architecture for running a distributed set of search engines and generating and distributing index updates reliably, which is something that Ye Typical Search Engine Backend probably doesn't need to deal with and may not have support for.
But if you type "reddit <whatever you're searching for>" into Google it shows up instantly.
Google put a lot of (expensive) engineer hours into building that kind of scalability. I don't know what kind of money Reddit pulls in, but I can guarantee that it is nowhere near what Google does.
You're perfectly right, I know how something that looks simple from the outside can be very complex behind the scenes. Hey, I did study IT when I was young before branching out to brewing so I knew how to code and can perfectly understand the challenges of a search function. However, it seems like a long time for reddit not to look into it, they also have a team of engineers and developers even if it's smaller than Google's.
Reddit will die because it’s content creators are no longer there. It’s moderators who are the backbone of the site are leaving in droves. The site may exist but it won’t be the Reddit that was.
I registered at lemmy.world and kbin.social since at the time, there was open signups for both and kbin.social hadn't started getting hammered quite yet.
Something about Beehaw's really strict censorship and ban policy just feels Orwellian and put me off. They have a nice and large community, but their moderation reminds me too much of Reddit and how they had volunteers that acted like this was their full time job and identity.
Thing is, tight moderation is well known to create friendly and manageable communities. And applications keep instances from getting crushed under influx waves caused by external events.
There are discussions to be had around intervention thresholds, but anything that leans too heavily toward not intervening just leads to evaporative cooling of the community.
Poor moderation can give you a big space with a lot of content scrolling by, but the underlying atmosphere is often just toxic.
People are welcome to hang out in toxic spaces if they want, but social environments mould us. Caveat Usor.
Over-moderation can lead to a different kind of toxicity. Think r/twoxchromosomes or r/conservative. Don't agree with the mods? Straight to jail. Say a word on the banned list? Straight to jail. Mod having a bad day? Believe it or not, also jail.
As with everything, moderation is key (get it lol, it's a pun) (you get it right) (I'm so funny)
Yeah. On Reddit I got banned from subs from /r/worldnews for speaking out against dehumanization, because the guy who did it was some Israeli official and called Arabs animals or something (can't remember exactly). At least I assume that's what it was, because they didn't even bother with adding a ban reason. Another ban was on /r/europe, but not by the mods but by Reddit's AEO. Apparently saying that a fascist Italy should get kicked out of the EU & NATO is considered spreading hate and worthy of a sitewide perma ban + refused appeal (in which I explained that both institutions require a democratic basis from their member states). Or on /r/Diablo I got banned after I spoke out against the predatory FOMO bullshit that games nowadays use. I got attacked & straight up insulted by a bunch of users for that and then came the ban. None of the attacks on me were punished, or even removed. /r/de banned me for complaining about it, citing "ban evasion". No replies when I tried to talk to them. lol
It's so bad now that I don't even know what the hell you are allowed to say, because apparently you can get banned for the most mundane opinions. Meanwhile whenever I report hundreds of literal hate speech, racism or homophobic bullshit, or even harassment against me, Reddit's AEO just tells you that this stuff does not violate their terms of service. I can't even tell if they're just incompetent like nothing else or if they have some sort of agenda.
Probably a mix of both. The "first offense perma-ban no appeal" button has got to be pretty appealing when you're dealing with a lot of spam, or someone hurt your feelings, or whatever. It got so bad I had to start using VPNs to make new accounts on the regular, and then eventually I just stopped commenting and started lurking. On some subs it was a game of "whoever gets reported first gets a permaban" so if I got into any arguments whatsoever, I was gone.
In some cases I could see it was incompetence (or, charitably, lack of attention). For example:
Person: says something racist
Me: quote their racist statement, then refute it
Person: reports my post for containing the racist statement that I quoted from them
I don't like those, but at least you can avoid those. It's pretty fine-grained. /r/twoxchromosomes became a default sub -- which I think was not a great idea -- at some point, which I think was probably an error, since even if some people like it, a lot of people deeply dislike it.
But if you're doing censorship at the instance level, or willing-to-interact-with-other-instance level, things are less fine-grained. And in lemmy's case, there's a built-in slur filter, and I saw someone link to a comment by a lemmy dev saying that they didn't want to make it easy for right-wingers to use lemmy. I'm not really keen on going into a platform that takes the idea that censorship should happen at a platform level.
I'm hoping kbin is the sweet spot. But it's cool having options. lemmy may have a built-in filter, but I don't think kbin does. And I don't think kbin has any nsfw communities, but lemmy does.
I got on Beehaw no problem... I guess read their philosophy a bit carefully and think about what you actually want to contribute there?
I've only made a few comments so far, but whenever I have, I've gotten a helluva lot of upvotes and often insightful, engaging, thoughtful replies. It seems to be a really good place for positive, in-depth discussion. Beehaw comments tend to be paragraphs, here's its more a few sentences a la Reddit.
I think Kbin's got a solid foundation feature-wise, but so far the discussion depth on Beehaw feels deeper. At the same time kbin feels a bit more alive whereas Beehaw's pace feels a bit more gentle.
Let's see how things play out over the next month.
Same here; I just checked their stats and they're at 10k users so the application must not be too hard to bomb if the applicants put a little thought into it.
I'm hoping that kbin.social will be able to drop the Cloudflare protections that are breaking federation – imo, federation is the appeal of these instances. I'd love to be able to participate on kbin's threads from my Beehaw account, in the same way I participate cross-lemmy instances, but it's broken and that's sad. :C
This kind of discourse is going to get very confusing very quickly once there are a hundred kbin-based websites. Kbin the software and kbin.social the website are going to mean very different things in the weeks ahead, just like Lemmy and Beehaw mean different things.
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