We Should Focus On Building Kbin, Not Getting Back at Reddit. Here's How We Do It.

While most of the people here upset and rightfully so, we have got to move past the angst to actually build this place out.

We have to recreate the environment and communities we've created on on Reddit here, so that people don't feel like they're missing out being on kbin.

That way, the next time Spez goes full Elon, we already have everything in place to make the jump.

I help run r/MMA on Reddit. We aggregate news as well as bringing on MMA figures for AMAs.

We, like many other magazines here, will need a way to quickly aggregate breaking news onto our magazine, and the easiest way to do that is going to be through a bot that mirrors submissions to our subreddit.

At least for the mags that rely on breaking news, if we implement this at scale, the end user wont be missing much by migrating over here if they get all the same great breaking news.

Do we have any bot builders in the house who could take this on as a project?

We would be leveraging Reddit's own userbase at scale to better kbin, and eventually beat them in the long run. That's the biggest L we could ever deal them.

EDIT: WASN'T SURE THIS WAS GONNA BLOW UP. IVE MADE https://kbin.social/m/BotIt FOR DEVELOPMENT. IF YOU'RE INTERESTED AND CAN HELP OR JUST WANT TO FOLLOW THE PROJECT, COME ON OVER. THANKS.

kadu,

I much prefer building up Lemmy over Kbin.

bdonvr,

I much prefer they build to be 100% interoperable and people just choose what they like

kadu,

Glad Kbin fixed the CloudFlare issue with their federation.

peroleu,

How come?

Mintyytea,

Building up either is great :) They actually share the same content since they are in the same federation.

Xathonn,
Xathonn avatar

Building up one builds up the other though? That's how the federation works

michikade,

For me personally, either one, we all play in the same sandbox (for the most part).

But this particular magazine is on kbin so of course OP is interested in building up kbin.

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

The issue and solution are the same whether you're on kbin or lemmy.

kadu,

I totally agree

lavender, (edited )
lavender avatar

I’m curious, could you explain why?

Edit: missed the reply button, this was meant as a question to a previous comment. See below.

Kichae,

It's good to have a variety of options for hosting social websites. They have different strengths and weaknesses, and appeal to different people in different ways

HorseFD,

Lemmy is more mature, much easier to set up for those hosting instances, and has more users. But in the end, it doesn’t matter because they both communicate with each other.

Tilted,

No preference for me. Either would be good, and both even better.

Varyag,
@Varyag@lemm.ee avatar

I'm commenting on this kbin post from Lemmy. I also have a kbin account. We can make them all grow.

lavender,
lavender avatar

Ah, seems I misclicked. This was in response to @kadu because I personally prefer kbin over Lemmy for a variety of reasons. I do agree we should grow both rather than devolve into tribalism.

kadu,

For sure! One of the many advantages of the fediverse, thankfully.

I_Miss_Daniel,
I_Miss_Daniel avatar

Yep. The content is the same, it's just the viewer that's different, roughly speaking. No real point to being tribal as a result, which is great.

1st,

Okay, I've been trying to understand this for the last hour and I finally thought I did, but maybe not? Can someone tell me where I'm going wrong in this?

A magazine (or any type of group) can post to a federated site and it will replicate the data to all other federated sites. Kbin and all the Lemmy sites are federated so we share the same data right? It's just accessing it from a different server with a different UI.

lackthought,

people on lemmy can subscribe to kbin magazines and comment (like I am now, from lemmy, hi!)

and people on kbin can subscribe to lemmy communities and comment there as well

I'm also fairly certain that Mastodon users can post to kbin/lemmy by replying to the magazine/community names

torturedllama,

I was a bit confused by this for a while. I'm using Lemmy as well and I was wondering where all this kbin content was coming from. It's pretty cool that there isn't a divide between the fediverse server types. So much so that for users interoperability can be accidental

lusterko,

Can you help me a bit with that? I have created a magazine on kbin(using kbin account of course), but I can't find it/follow it from Lemmy. I am following a few kbin magazines, but for some reason I can't find mine

lackthought,

it is hit-or-miss right now, I think due to servers being overloaded

I can find/subscribe to some kbin magazines from lemmy but not others

basically just try to search for the magazine from lemmy > communities > search box with the name like !magazinename and hope for the best, hopefully things stabilize soon

lusterko,

burgersc's recommendation (pasting the url into the search bar) worked for me.

lackthought,

I tried that a few days ago and it wasn't working, but just tried again with a troublesome magazine and it worked this time!

burgersc12,

Paste the url for kbin into the search field for your Lemmy instance. You should be able to subscribe to it soon if it doesn't show up immediately (i think it can take up to an hour?) Then you will see any posts made after subscribing, but none of the ones before iirc

lusterko,

Still wasn't able to find it :(

Edit: it worked! Thanks again

lusterko,

That's very helpful, thanks

Kichae,

Basically, yeah. Whether something is a Mastodon post, or a Calckey note, or a PixelFed picture, or a PeerTube video, they're all encapsulated using the same formatting guidelines, and so every one of these platforms can share and view the same content.

And they share this content via mirroring.

So long as they're passing content back and forth, growing any one site or any platform contributes to them all.

Otome-chan,
Otome-chan avatar

Each community has a "true" version that is controlled by the hosting instance. While indeed people can access communities from other instances, those other instances may make different mod decisions, may defederate with other instances, etc.

For instance, lemmy.world users cannot access beehaw.org communities, because beehaw.org defederated lemmy.world. However, us here on kbin can access both lemmy.world communities as well as beehaw.org communities.

MircoL,

Won't that become a problem when API access is highly restricted? Generally it is doable and should not be a very big project.

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

I'm clearly not an expert on this, but I know people scrape data without API's

MircoL,

Of course it's possible, but API would be the quickest and most simple solution.

CMLVI,
CMLVI avatar

Nah, bot scraping is different than API calls

MircoL,

Yes, you are right. My question pointed more in the direction whether an API solution is doable since it might be easier.

CMLVI,
CMLVI avatar

Technically I think? I think the free API license gets 100 calls a minute? Or an hour or something, I forget the time frame. On a medium sub, 100 posts a day would be updates every 15 minutes 24/7 I think. Not instant, but absolutely doable, and if you optimize the time for 6am-1am, that gives you one about every 12 min?

Varyag,
@Varyag@lemm.ee avatar

I like the idea of making a bot that posts news links automatically. Gives fresh content for people to interact with, without people racing over each other to get the karma of posting them first. Communities based on sports events are the simplest to do that with, you just need to set the bot to take news from some specific big sites and bam you got stuff to talk about.

tangelo,

In practice it's not so easy without some manual curation. News sites post a lot of filler stuff and you don't want to start spamming yourself with every article posted to <insert magazine here>. Even on higher-traffic subs you don't generally see more than one or two posts from the same site on a given day. It's generally more effective with something repeatable and reliable like a weekly column where the expected "quality" is invariate. Certainly you can front-load the manual curation by building a set of filters into your scraper, but whether you filter the results at the front or the end of the pipe, you still need some kind of heuristic for what constitutes "good" content, and that's frequently a moving target.

Quinnel,

The structure of lemmy would filter out the good from the bad, wouldn't it? That's what the votes are for.

abff08f4813c,
abff08f4813c avatar

I've built scrapping bots like this before. Would definitely be an interesting project.

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

https://kbin.social/m/BotIt lets do it!

Mintyytea,

I like your idea :) Has anyone contacted the 3rd party app developers to see if they want to make any apps or bot scripts for this fediverse?

Haan,

Great idea! I really miss r/MMA

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

Devs (like me) can help, the main issue is hosting the bot somewhere and covering the costs, but I think is a good idea.

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

I made https://kbin.social/m/BotIt for us to congregate

BasicallyClean, (edited )
BasicallyClean avatar

Maybe create a magazine for it to get some additional support? I could edit the top post.

EDIT: https://kbin.social/m/BotIt

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

I will take a look at the technical side, I want to know how easy it is to make something like this. I won't make promises but if manage to get something working I'll let you know.

ChemicalRascal,
ChemicalRascal avatar

I don't think basic scraping will be particularly difficult, especially if the rates are kept low. While I also don't think it's actually the right way forward, I'll happily help out.

lixus98,
lixus98 avatar

You think using the api is better? I'll take a look at it

ChemicalRascal,
ChemicalRascal avatar

No, no, I think it would ultimately be better to rely on people to post stuff. But scraping links would be better than using the API.

I_Miss_Daniel,
I_Miss_Daniel avatar

The API prices are high, but maybe it can be done with just one or two calls, which would make it almost nothing. Of course, the API might just disappear one day.

ChemicalRascal,
ChemicalRascal avatar

Nah, I mean more that I think relying on people to just post stuff themselves would be better for the community. But scraping would be the way forward, relying on the API would be prohibitively expensive IMO.

HaleyHalcyon,
HaleyHalcyon avatar

Fuck the API, scrape the HTML from old.reddit.com for free

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

https://kbin.social/m/BotIt if you would be willing to help

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

If Reddit has proven anything as of late, they're unreliable as a partner.

I'm clearly not a developer but would have reservations in relying on the API just for how erratic they are.

llama,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

Even if it was just the top upvoted link post per sub each day, that would give a lot of content here to get started and make communities (or magazines kbin parlance) look alive. Once people start posting on their own it won't be needed anymore.

TGRush,

Pro Tip:

instead of linking to magazines with their links, do it something like this:

@BotIt@kbin.social
@BotIt

This way no matter what server you're viewing from, you'll stay logged in.

aeternum,

You can get VPS's for like $30 a year these days.

Aeonx,
Aeonx avatar

I keep hearing this but all the VPS solutions I find cost an arm + leg. What VPS solutions cost $30/year?

topnomi,
topnomi avatar

Vultr has VPSs starting at $2.50/mo ($30/yr)

I also commonly find links to really cheap servers on nerdvittles.com

Example:
https://my.racknerd.com/cart.php?a=add&pid=735
$13/mo

Aeonx,
Aeonx avatar

What are the decentralized p2p storage options for hosting bots, would decentralized hosting and storage options be a viable solution?

tangelo,

It's trivially easy, but you'd be pulling in a lot of noise along with the signal, creating more moderation headaches for yourself (think of all the low-effort and spam stuff you usually have to filter out). You'd be better off scraping the content you want from primary sources directly rather than mirroring every post that goes to your old forum.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

RSS would do the job

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

https://kbin.social/m/BotIt made this to figure it out

tangelo,

You raise a good point. Little overhead, the endpoints are well-formatted, you can get a digest of articles in one blow without API keys, and you just need to parse the resulting XML.

llama,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

I think the key is you don't actually mirror every single post, just posts that meet specific guidelines like so many upvoted and no self posts or reddit images

tangelo,

That seems reasonable, although there is no telling what a highly voted post might constitute under new management (is that too paranoid?). I'd personally take a scrap and build approach here, or at least manually approve the incoming results (hybrid approach) if they're being delayed anyway due to waiting on vote generation.

enki,

I’ve thought about it, but I’m not sure if it’s legally allowed or if reddit dmcas you. Would be down to join the effort, it shouldn’t be impossible. But compute heavy.

Deref,

There's no way to enforce that. Bots can change IP address and not all instances have a dmca page.

llama,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

Just don't index the reddit self posts or images hosted on reddit. They can't tell us not to index links to other people's websites.

TGRush,

Mirroring would be trivial, but you'd have to either scrape content yourself or pay for the API (soon)

funkyb,

I don't know about the rest of you, but even working a full time mid-career corporate job, I think I can make time for both. It doesn't have to be either-or.

Strolleypoley,
Strolleypoley avatar

I think it's mainly about introducing new users to the fediverse and making it easier to understand, I'm glad I found out about this stuff and am happy to learn more.

BasicallyClean,
BasicallyClean avatar

I think it is for a lot of magazines, however our magazine and subreddit requires timely news to really get going.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

The best thing we can do is be active here. Make the effort to get involved, post , report idiots and be civil. This goes beyond reddit, it is about getting out from under the thumb of corporate control. We can't have free expression if the narritive is being controlled.

JoeKrogan,
@JoeKrogan@lemmy.world avatar

Also we have networks here we can draw upon, devs , artists , folks who make videos, people who write, etc we can. Ask them for help to create videos and promotional material to quickly explain the fediverse in a simple and concise way.

tikitaki,
tikitaki avatar

100% agree

our social media sites need to be open source and decentralized. any other way will lead to the slow inevitable march of enshittification

health427581,

draft - This is a good post. Should/can I post this post link with a short description to my mastodon account? What about my twitter account?

Nougat,

Por que no los dos

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