YSK that kbin.social is now federating, adding hundreds of communities and ~26k more users content - Lemmy.world

This "You Should Know" post is top of ~June, for good reason. This post announced the kbin.social Federation/compatibility with Lemmy.

A huge amount of test-posts from a wide-variety of instances came in to test the new federation abilities (including from kbin.social, one of the biggest kbin communities).

I think this post shows the hope that over the long-term, we can get federation across the larger fediverse. I don't know if Mastodon is in the works, but these kinds of posts give hope.

LostCause,

That explains it then. Well, good to know for those who might have missed it.

osarusan,

Can someone ELI5 Lemmy vs Kbin for me? I understand that they are both part of fediverse, and they seem to be accomplishing the same task... but there are people saying that they prefer one over the other or that one is better than the other. I made accounts on lemmy and kbin and I can't see any real difference as a user.

Shrek,

https://beehaw.org/comment/181634

That's what I found about it.

burgersc12,

Check out the microblog. That and the overall layout/design are the main differences. Imo Kbin feels like a cross between Reddit and Twitter and Lemmy feels closer to Reddit

osarusan,

Interesting. Am I correct in understanding that the microblog on kbin is basically a feed that is equivalent to Mastodon? That it is a separate thing from the magizines/communities there, as opposed to just another way of viewing the same data?

lwuy9v5,

That's my understanding. You can "boost" which effectively tweets a reddit thread under your profile. I wasn't really using that feature too much. The "reddit" part of the UI felt slick enough

Life_Lover,

Is there a good mobile app for kbin? Jerboa has been pretty swell.

raku,

Hello kbiners! I might check it out again cause of this. How's the experience vs lemmy?

aceshigh,
@aceshigh@lemmy.world avatar

i'll have to circle back. i want to know too. i made an account yesterday because i really dislike how comments are displayed on lemmy. so far kbin is confusing to use, but i just started.

MuskX,

Now that Sync for Reddit is being discontinued I'm dropping Reddit.

I saw a good write-up about kbin, so I signed up about a day ago and have been liking what I see - although it's obviously still in its early stages.

I don't know much about Lemmy and Federation, but is it a bit like the Newsgroups of old (Usenet), where you joined a Usenet service and any posts on any service propagated across all servers?

dragontamer,

I don’t know much about Lemmy and Federation, but is it a bit like the Newsgroups of old (Usenet), where you joined a Usenet service and any posts on any service propagated across all servers?

Yes and no.

Usenet's communities / groups (alt.whatever) were unified. While communities on Fediverse are not. This means that !technology is a different set of posts than !technology.

Like Usenet, the federation model means that individual servers can accept, or reject, other server's traffic. This means that posts aren't guaranteed to be global. (https://Lemmy.world and https://Beehaw.org are having a defederation spat right now, at least while moderation tools are being developed to fix the problems). This should be familiar to any old USENET user, though the younger group is extremely confused about federation.

Namstel,

Thanks for the clarification. I have another question I hope you can answer. Is it possible to be in an instance that have a federation with lemmy.world and beehaw.org? Even though they have been defederated with each other? I hope my question makes sense...

beanz,

Sure, in that case you can interact on any beehaw post with beehaw users and any users from instances federated with beehaw, or interact on any lemmy.world post with lemmy.world users and any uses from instances federated with lemmy world.

But if a post is created on beehaw and a lemmy.world user subscribes to it, lemmy.world downloads a copy of the post for lemmy.world to interact with which is separate from the original post on beehaw. So you would effectively have access to 2 different versions of the same post, one with comments from beehaw users & federated instance users, and another with comments from only lemmy.world users.

In practice you'd only ever really see the first version of the post though, same as if your account was on beehaw in this example. There's no solution where you could interact with both beehaw and lemmy.world users on the same post from being based on a third instance that's federated with both.

TCGM,
@TCGM@lemmy.world avatar

Hello there to anybody on KBin reading this, feel free to throw memes at me

m3enzo,
m3enzo avatar

Hello!

Spzi,

How do lemmings subscribe to https://kbin.social/magazines?

I tried searching for !science but no results.

dragontamer,

Try going to /c/science@kbin.social and clicking the subscribe button there.

Spzi,

404: couldnt_find_community

Probably because I'm from a small instance and none of my fellow lemmings has discovered it yet. Though even for big instances, someone has to be the first. So how to discover magazines?

Nougat,

They're "magazines" at kbin, so:

https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration

for example.

I don't think there's a "science" magazine at kbin, which is fine. Also of note, the magazine name is currently case sensitive, but I know it's on the list of improvements to make that case insensitive.

dragontamer,

I finally remember where I heard of this problem.

https://lemmy.world/c/newcommunities

A: At least one user in an instance needs to search for a community before it gets fetched. Searching for the community will bring it into the instance and it will fetch a few of the most recent posts without comments. If a user is subscribed to a community, then all of the future posts and interactions are now in-sync.

I did do a search over on your instance lemmy.click, but it didn't work either. Very curious. I'm going to have to research how smaller communities import kbin.social magazines more reliably. Its probably less of an issue on Lemmy.world because we're bigger and someone else did the right process already (whatever... that process was).

Mr_Figtree,
Mr_Figtree avatar

Does searching for the URL https://kbin.social/m/science work? That's how I've had to do it the other way around to subscribe to Lemmy communities that hadn't federated yet.

AnonymousLlama,
AnonymousLlama avatar

The UI I've found is still getting adjusted, but there's a subscribe button on mobile that's hidden behind the kbin logo and then the sidebar will open up and there's a subscribe button in there.

I'm mostly just browsing /all for now but streamlining the UI/UX looks like it's on the agenda to help new people find content

dragontamer,

The poster you're talking to is from lemmy.click. The GUI looks completely from their point of view.

Here's a full web-link to what @spzi sees: https://lemmy.click/comment/145357

So life is a bit difficult since we're all on different servers, and each server will have its own bugs with federation. But all in all, we're able to communicate and try to work things out.

sheepyowl,

This is the first time I've realized that comments are federated. I absolutely thought that the comments will not be shared across, and only the content would be. Woah.
Also that lemmy.click site has some nice UI

Haus,
Haus avatar

Kbin doesn't use the '!'

burgersc12,

Try the whole url https://kbin.social/m/science

Myriadblue,

Oddly, kbin can't see all of lemmy.world. I made a kbin account to check it out and couldn't find all the communities.

Anomander,
Anomander avatar

Commenting from kbin; what makes it over to here seems pretty variable - sometimes I feel like the feed is all lemmy posts, other times lemmy might as well not exist.

dragontamer,

Yeah, I'm seeing buggy behavior like that too on my end. Lemmy.world can't see all of kbin.social. But I'm seeing "enough" that we can somewhat communicate with each other.

sab,
@sab@hostux.social avatar

Good news: You are already federating with the greater fediverse! Mastodon checking in. :)

Jaluvshuskies, (edited )
Jaluvshuskies avatar

Can someone please ELI5 federation to me? I keep seeing threads and comments about this but I don't understand the concept. Does federation essentially just mean connecting all different instances and platforms across the fediverse which is how I can use kbin and see all the content here even if it's from Lemmy?

edit: thanks everyone for the answers :)

dragontamer,

Yeah. I'm a https://Lemmy.world user.

The fact that you and I are talking right now is called Federation. In fact, people over here at lemmy don't even know what a kbin (or magazine) is. They're called "communities" over here.

paorzz,
paorzz avatar

There’s some videos that explain it well. For example this one by simply explain.

sab,
sab avatar

Federation is bilateral between servers. Whenever two servers interact with each other for the first time, a link is created between them. From then on they will inform each other about what is going on (unless they choose to break the connection). You post something in kbin, users can see it from Lemmy or Mastodon.

A federation is not an ideal metaphor, as federations tend to have a centralised authority. The fediverse is really a network of web sites that are all treated as equals, and all use the ActivityPub protocol. They need to find each other through user interaction: once they do, they are federated until either site chooses to "defederate" (as Beehaw famously decided with some servers).

The fediverse is this entire network of sites in the network: some have only created connections with a few other services, others are connected to the vast majority of services supporting the protocol. Over time, as users interact more, the network grows.

AtomicPurple,
AtomicPurple avatar

Yup. Seems like you understand the concept just fine.

fedi,

@Jaluvshuskies yes federation is when users on a kbin website(instance) can talk to users on a totally different kbin instance. The protocol used is called ActivityPub.

But more than that it is also when a kbin user can talk to a lemmy user. Both are parts of the threadiverse (before kbin it was mostly called the lemmyverse).

The microverse (more usually called mastodon) can also interact with the threadiverse because of federation using ActivityPub.

In fact this reply is from a mastodon

CreeperODeath,

I thought kbin was already federated and compatible with lemmy?

dragontamer,

Hmm, good to know. I admit that I'm still relatively new to Lemmy and the Fediverse, so maybe I'm getting my facts wrong.

MeowdyPardner,
MeowdyPardner avatar

Yep it federated before the influx, and cloudflare was only temporarily in place until early last week when federation kicked in again. So this would be news to people who joined like Monday and haven't been here much.

LostCause,

I‘ve been commenting and upvoting stuff on lemmy all day long from kbin, no idea how that would be possible if they weren‘t federated.

MadCybertist,
MadCybertist avatar

It was federating last week. So this post is just a few days late lol.

garrettw87,
garrettw87 avatar

Federation was turned back on well before this was posted. Like probably a day or two or three ago.

Mogster,
Mogster avatar

It was, and then it wasn't as the admin had to enable Cloudflare DDOS protection during the Reddit surge. This broke federation, but it's back off now and Kbin's back in the fold.

MadCybertist,
MadCybertist avatar

This happened almost a week ago. So we have been federating for a bit now.

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