First and foremost: Thank you @ernest for your incredible work and dedication.
Pay yourself a salary. Whatever you feel is appropriate & covers your personal costs. Developing and maintaining /kbin seems to be a full time job (or at least will become one)
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TRANSPARENCY. That's why we are here. This builds such a huge trust with the community. Whatever you need, we'll be here.
With additional tools for moderators, a system for taking over abandoned magazines will be created. I want to automate this, but it will take some time. I am in the process of finalizing the last formalities. I will soon post a status update.
I think in part it's that a few Lemmy communities are extremely active / almost spammy and there's no algorithm filtering how much content you get from each place. In the "All" view, most of the content I see comes from the same couple of Lemmy "meme" communities. So it's no wonder most of the content I'm seeing comes from Lemmy when almost all of it comes from two specific communities which are basically meme factories. If I filter those out, there's suddenly a much bigger variety of content from all around and on my "Subscribed" tab I can see plenty of activity from Kbin communities.
You can fix this by subscribing to magazines, and then choosing "subscriptions" in the dropdown menu, or defaulting to subscription in your user settings.
I did this, and only the lemmy magazines I subscribe to show in my feed.
I do this as well and sometimes I switch federation off/on. But I would love to have a way to influence how much a magazine/community pops up in my feed though: by giving a "weight" to a magazine/community that could be accounted for in the ranking algorithm, you would be able to prioritize them. If you like a specific magazine you could give it more weight, which could rank all the posts from that community higher on your feed.
But let's say that I don't want all news clogging up my feed. However, when there is something very big going on that gets a lot of upvotes, I still want to read it as it might be something important or more interesting than the average post from that magazine. In that case I would subscribe to the magazine and give it less weight, so only the highest ranked threads show up.
I think @ernest is already way to busy right now though, but I wanted to share my idea anyway :)
What would be helpful is a page, tab, or dropdown menu that shows subscriptions. Prioritizing feeds would be a nice addition...I wonder if it could be done. But ernest definitely has a full load.
What we have currently is pretty good so far, it's not breaking under the intense load of new users migrating. I'm just happy this is working, and navigation is relatively easy.
I liken this to using a new UI, or OS...you just have to get used to it at first, and figure out how it works. Because I was pretty disoriented when I started using it; people just have to jump in and explore to find things and figure out how it works.
Sprog is the cat we all know and love
I've asked myself: 'will he make the move?'
Sprog's poems make life a little more fun
Hard to accept this joy might be done
Signs of life are a blessing from above!
Why do we want another reddit? Why don't we want something better/different/more engaging than reddit? Reddit has made the mistakes, we can learn from them. And even better, we don't have angels to make happy at the end of it all. Just us.
In my opinion, Reddit did many things right and there is no shame to copy what Reddit did right, and now we have the chance to improve where Reddit did not want to improve on.
I find the kbin website to work rather well, it’s good work. Also the backend seems stable for now, I didn’t notice any hiccups recently when commenting. If things can be made simpler and more intuitive over time, it does seem like a viable alternative.
I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.
I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.
And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).
Maybe a different approach would be a way to specify which languages you are able to read. There are plenty of users who are multilingual might want to see posts in several languages.
Sure, but shouldn't we also need to subscribe to communities/mags from these instances? I know i see lots from .de domains in my feed, but I am not subscribed to any of the communities/mags on the instances those posts originate from.
I just meant that "Hide other languages" is different than "Show me these languages" - the former is potentially read as "only show me 'my current language'"
I didn't mean to imply they were shitting on German, more that the German users probably also read English and would want to see both.
While that wouldn't exactly be a nice way to word it, monolingual designers designing for monolingual use cases is a huge issue that crops up a lot.
For example, you used to be able to right click a text input field in Chrome and directly select the language for the spell checker. Then they changed it and said, multilingual people should just select all the languages they speak, and the spell checker will just allow every word as correct that appears in at least one language.
That's a horrible solution, because you frequently have similar words in multiple languages spelled differently, so that the word in a different language just masks a typo. For example, compare grass (English) to Gras (German). If I am typing a German sentence and accidentally type it with two s, the spell checker will not flag it.
Anyone who frequently uses multiple languages would instantly know that that's bad design, but apparently the person who designed this doesn't speak multiple languages.
As far as I can remember, there was a shitstorm and they reverted the change. It's been a long time since I used Chrome.
I mean, there’s like thousands of languages out there and usually you’re only going to know a handful of them. From an experience standpoint I’d rather just check the ones I want to see rather than check all the others.
I think the problem is that on some/?all instances the default language is set to either undefined or English. I've noticed its undefined on lemmy that I have used, while on Kbin it's set to the language I set to read - English. So if people don't change the language they will be posting undefined text or in English inadvertently.
My account is set to show undefined and English posts only but I'm seeing a lot of German content.
That's not my experience, I don't have kbin in english, but the comments are still automatically set to english. I can't set them to undefined either (*cry in emoji).
It would be pretty cool if it would detect it automatically by default.
We're working with alfa and beta software.
Ideally the mods could set the default language on the magazine/community, there are a few english communities on feddit.de
And with prefs you could select to hide certain languages.
So when beehaw says they're degenerating from sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw's view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It's identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other's servers. Since kbin.social is not sh.itjust.works or lemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and because kbin.social hasn't defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content from kbin.social minus any contributions from the defederated servers.
It's a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it's used. I think it's a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren't a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it's pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you're on. That said, it's very much a "with great power comes great responsibility" thing; I think that it's fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it's not really an issue.
I also think that as part of a "community taking back the internet from billionaires" movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it'll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of "generally acceptable behaviour" is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same "space" on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.
Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won't matter for any one server if they can't access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from lemmy.world or sh.itjust.works really want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!
New here and still learning the ropes. With lemmyworld being defedrated and the way activitypub works, can I still post to, interact with(up vote, down vote) and subscribe to instances originating from beehaw? Or would being federated put all people who log in from lemmy.world on a block list from interacting with the communities and only being able to view?
None of the content from beehaw.org would update on lemmy.world, so if you (a lemmy.world user) subscribed to a beehaw community, no posts would ever be sent unless beehaw refederated lemmy.world. Essentially beehaw's server is not talking to lemmy.world in any way currently
Is that right? I thought federation was a two-way street. Lemmy.world hasn’t defederated beehaw, so wouldn’t posts from there still be visible? Lemmy.world users would be able to comment, but none of their comments would be visible to beehaw users, no…?
This is correct as far as I understand. Content from Beehaw can appear on other instances still federated to it, but content from those instances will not make its way back to users that are viewing the community from Beehaw.
To further what rideranton said, the way federation works is by mirroring content across different websites. You're interacting with copies of posts and comments that have been sent to lemmy.world, and when you reply to someone, or post in a remote community, all of that is happening locally. You're exclusively engaging with the local copy of everything.
When sites are federated, they then sync up their content. If they defederate, that syncing merely stops occurring.
Let's say there are five websites all federating, A, B, C, D, and E. There's a popular community, Junk, on B that people on all 5 websites use. This means all 5 sites house a local copy of Junk, and whenever someone posts to Junk their local site pushes those posts out to the other 4.
But one day, B defederates from A, because they decide that there are too many assholes on A. Now, anything people on B post to Junk just never reach A, and similarly anything people on B post to Junk never gets sent to A. But A is still communicating with C, D, and E. Their updates still flow out to those 3 other websites, and updates form them continue to flow back. Similarly, B is still in communication with C, D, and E, so they stay in sync as well. And really, from sites C, D, and E, it kind of looks like nothing happened (though if people pay close enough attention, they may notice that people from A never comment on posts from people using B, and vice versa).
Now, users on A may still be able to see posts and comments from users on B if they arrive on A via C, D, or E, but it won't work the other way: Because site B has explicitly blocked traffic from site A, any content whose author is on site A will be filtered out when syncing with C, D, or E.
That makes it a lot easier to understand. I was confused on how messages propagated. Your last paragraph is what cleared it up for me. Won't this lead to strange comment chains? You could have a hundred different people commenting on a chain and they're all a mix of federated and Def federated instances. Some will see some comments and others will see other comments but none will see all the comments unless they're completely federated with all the sites. This is where it loses me. Not that I don't understand what's happening, it's I don't understand how it's supposed to work in a threaded environment. I guess once I start seeing in an action I'll get a better grasp of it. I don't think this is going to work out as well as it was intended to.
It absolutely can lead to odd comment chains, depending on how filtering is handled. I'm not sure how either Lemmy or kbin do that, though. The easy solution is for site B to filter out posts or comments from site A, and every comment that follows in the chain.
Where I still struggle is in the details of defederation for a service like kbin because it's more interactive than Mastodon. Here are some examples that confuse me.
For these, let's assume we have Servers A, B, and C. Server A has defederated from (i.e. blocked) Server B, but otherwise they are all connected to each other.
Someone from Server B originates a thread. Someone from Server C sees it and comments on it. I assume people on Server A don't see the post at all, even though there are comments from Server C people.
Someone from Server A originates a thread. I assume people from Server B can see it and comment on it? That is, the blocking is only one-way?
Someone from Server C originates a thread. Someone from Server B comments on it, and someone from Server C replies to that comment. What can people from Server A see?
Anyone who can shed light on this will be greatly appreciated. :-)
The fediverse has, generally, done a very poor job of explaining itself and how it works. There's a huge disconnect between most peoples' mental model of the space, and what actually happens.
During the Twitter migration, the mental model that people seemed to have was that of a mainfarme. That is, that "Mastodon" lived in one specific place, and that everyone was just "logging on" to it via portal, or dumb terminal.
Here, people seem to be better understanding that things live on multiple different websites -- in big part, I think, due to remote community/mamgazine names having the full address shown in the sidebars (Mastodon's UI goes to some lengths to hide when people are on other instances). But how it ends up looking is that you are viewing remote websites through your local instance, kind of as if your local instance is a Fediverse web browser. In this sense, viewing, say, politics@lemmy.ml is the equivalent of browsing to a separate website and viewing or interacting with that content directly.
This is not what happens, though.
Really, that's not what happens with Firefox or Chrome, either. When using a web browser, you request content from a remote computer (the web server), that content gets downloaded and stored on your local hard drive as your browser cache, and then you view the local copy of of that page. If the website is dynamic in some sense, updates from that website get repeatedly pushed to your computer.
This is also how federation works here.
When you view politics@lemmy.ml from, say, lemmy.world, or kbin.social, if you pay special attention to the address bar, you'll notice you're actually viewing kbin.social/m/politics@lemmy.ml. That's a magazine hosted locally on kbin.social. All of the posts and comments you see there are stored locally on kbin.social; when you engage with them, you're merely engaging with a local copy. These copies remain synchronized with other sites by passing messages back and forth.
Defederation is just refusing to accept messages from, or send messages to, a certain website.
With this in mind:
Someone from Server B originates a thread. Someone from Server C sees it and comments on it. I assume people on Server A don't see the post at all, even though there are comments from Server C people.
This is likely correct, yes. Server C will likely send a message to Server A with the comment, but Server A will not have the post in order to properly assign it, so it will probably just get dropped.
Someone from Server A originates a thread. I assume people from Server B can see it and comment on it? That is, the blocking is only one-way?
No. Server A is not sending messages to Server B, so Server B does not get the post, and the copy of the community that is mirrored on Server B will never be updated with that post.
Someone from Server C originates a thread. Someone from Server B comments on it, and someone from Server C replies to that comment. What can people from Server A see?
Server A will receive the messages send by Server C, so the original post, and the comment originating on Server C. It will have blocked the comment from Server B, though, so it will not know what to do with the comment from Server C. The comment from Server C will include metadata that tells Server A that it's a reply to a comment that Server A doesn't have a record of. So, in all likelihood, the comment will get dropped on Server A.
Don't mention it. It all clicked for me when I set up a Calckey instance and explored the database. It really hammered home that everything in this space is local. Remote users have entires in the user table. Rmeitr posts are stored right along side those originating elsewhere. Everything I looked at, everyone I spoke to, it was all there.
And with that, the entire project snapped into focus, and all of the weird quirks of the space made perfect sense.
Everything is local. Anything that looks otherwise is an illusion.
Thank you very much for this insightful, lengthy reply. I think it’s a great feature. My initial concern was ensuring continued engagement in the early stages of this experiment. I got very excited yesterday when everything seemed to open up and there was content out there, and got concerned when I woke up this am when Beehaw pulled the lever to shut out some instances. They are well within their rights. Just want to make sure this whole community isn’t going to croak before it gets a chance to find out what’s it’s defacto rules are
Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.
And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.
That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.
The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.
Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!
It's definitely possible to actively use this place without wrapping your head around the how of it, but it's unfortunate that it's part of the experience, which is intimidating to new users. Hopefully Lemmy and Kbin become more mature and easier to use from the start without using your brain.
It's possible to use this place without developing an understanding of how it works, but you'll experience a lot of friction if you end up in some kind of edge case.
Like, with the Twitter migration, it became clear that a lot of people's mental model for federation was actually a mainframe/terminal model, which makes questions like "Why can't I search posts on [other site]?!?" make sense if you don't recognize that [other site] is a different website. Once you grok that, it becomes like asking why you can't search Facebook posts from etsy. But the mainframe model actually posits that there's a singular place (called "Mastodon" to Twitter migrants, and "Lemmy" or "kbin" for newcomers from Reddit) that you're accessing via some kind of dumb terminal, and certain things (discovery, defederation, etc.) will just appear fundamentally broken when viewed through that lens.
I actually don't think it's unfortunate, but mostly because the technology needs a shakedown period. Having some barriers that will keep out less technically savvy, or even just the less motivated to learn, allows the people that are more invested to work out the kinks and build something valuable.
Think of the coming months and years as the incubation period that Reddit had before the great exodus from Digg made it a much more mainstream place on the web. The only reason all of the people fleeing Digg went to Reddit is because it already existed with its own community that was (mostly) able to help absorb and train the incoming waves.
We've seen the same thing on Lemmy and Kbin, where people that had already been around are helping others adjust. Eventually the user experience, the differences and similarities between instances, probably some consolidation and splits of communities between and across instances... all of that will be happening as more and more people join.
(If I'm being honest, I would be perfectly fine with some of these barriers remaining in place forever. I don't necessarily need to interact with a billion people to meet my news, hobby and curiosity needs.)
@buffaloseven do you mind if I pick your brain? Why does kbin have microblogs AND threads, and why do some magazine have only microblogs? Is that an admin choice?
I'm not super-familiar with the inner workings of kbin yet; my gut reaction is that if a magazine only has microblogs, it's because nobody's made threads in it yet? I don't think there's an option to prevent threads in a magazine.
I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
I completely agree! The potential is absolutely there and so far I can't see how corporations will ruin it this time. However, I'm trying to be cautious, because I recall how excited people were for blockchain to revolutionize everything, only for that to turn out worse than useless. Granted, the problems there were fairly evidence from the beginning and there were plenty of naysayers. The Fediverse is too new and obscure to get the same kind of scrutiny yet, I think.
If everything goes as I think it could, we may look back at the 2010-2025 years as the first true 'dark era' of the information age.
Beehaw is big enough to be self-sustaining -- they don't allow users to create subforums there -- and it only takes a few hundred active users to actually create a self-sustaining community.
They have thousands.
At the same time, they only have like 10% of active Lemmy/kbin users. The rest of us will also be fine. People are mostly just irked because they have very active gaming and technology forums, and people are still habituated to seeking out the biggest community on a topic and treating it like it's the only one that matters.
This is an opportunity for everyone else to understand the importance of not relying on single points of failure -- this is the fundamental lesson behind the Reddit and Twitter migrations that people mostly haven't really processed yet -- and to subscribe to multiple manageable communities on topics they care about, and to treat them as communities, and not just a faceless content stream.
This is the kind of transparent communication that buys so much goodwill and trust from the community. I've been enjoying my first experience in the Fediverse with Kbin, and the response here only makes me love it that much more. Nicely handled.
Agreed. I had already created an account on a Lemmy instance (Lemmy.one since I wanted to avoid the two main .ml instances). I had just about settled but decided to give Kbin a try. While it doesn't seem quite as far along in it's development, it struck me as a better user experience. Combined with reservations I have about the Lemmy developers... Well, here we are. And seeing this level of involvement and dedication to doing the right thing from the developer confirms that choice. Kudos @ernest
As I am totally new to this whole thing, could you elaborate for me on those reservations about the lemmy developers? And are those the same that created lemmy.world?
@ernest While umbrella plattforms are great, if you want to think in the longterm, I wager this is something you might want to evaluate a bit. People may dissagree, but I think that in the longterm the fediverse will look much more like email, being a ecosystem of single providers, instead of a plattform consisting of many sub-providers, although there probably will always be space for it.
Umbrella platforms are great if you don't have a lot of infrastructure and capital as you can get a lot of horizontal growth without having to invest in it yourself. But in the long term this is a battle for the one big forum provider, the place people will go to have reddit-style groups in the fediverse. If you are smart and want to beat Lemmy to the dust I'd just push donations, and really build Kbin.social and make that your whole thing.
This is also way better for new people that are not familiar with the fediverse and instances, checking out Kbin.pub, which will make the onboarding that much more efficient than your competitiors.
This is also the direction Mastodon is going, and later also where Pixelfed is going, after I've pestered him for years.
Don't waste your time and jump over all the hoops. Kbin has so much potential, and going as the opensource hotmail/gmail "reddit" of the fediverse is the future! B-)
Anyway, I have great faith in you Earnest no matter how you do it. Go rock the world!
This is the exact antithesis of the fediverse. It isn't looking to make the next centralized social media site. That's not the goal. Expanding one big site as much as possible is exactly what we don't want and isn't sustainable.
I really don't agree on the site feeling like a mess because of posts from other sites, in fact that's what sold me.
As soon as I made an account, I was browsing all (m/all?) and the top post was from a lemmy instance. When I realized that was the case I got overly excited and hyped about the future of fediverse.
I think having access to all the content so easily is a huge step into beating reddit and moving to an open web.
I had the exact same experience and feeling. Kbin Letting me see different Lemmy instance instantly made me feel like transition was easier. Now if only we could see the comments from other instances too and have cross instance commenting it would be perfect.
I was wondering about this, I thought you could already see comments across different instances (in this cases instances being lemmy - kbin) but I couldn't find a specific comment and didn't pay close attention to the rest so I am probably wrong.
It should be that way. However currently it seems federation is broken quite a bit as Cloudflares' DDoS protection is active and requesting CAPTCHAs for a lot of connection attempts to the server.
Thank you for explaining that. It completely makes sense now why the UI seems to support it but it feels like we're shadow banned in replying to federated content.
It would be really nice if @earnest added an instances page to kbin.pub that would allow folks to choose instances to join. Even if that means it’s more static/curated instances he trusts etc.
You propose centralization in a federated ecosystems. I don't really see the rationale.
much more efficient than your competitiors
I guess if you're planning to "compete", then you need to think about beating your competitors, but if that's the case, then why base your project on federated protocol in the first place? Why not just build something separate (like Tildes https://tildes.net/, if we're talking about Reddit alternatives) - and remove your project from internal competition from the get go?
But why does it have to be a competition?
This is also the direction Mastodon is going, and later also where Pixelfed is going, after I've pestered him for years.
Once Meta releases their Instagram active-pub service, we'll have 1.2 billion MAU's hitting the protocol. You're saying we should all just go there and forget about all the other servers? I don't see any logic in that.
People may dissagree, but I think that in the longterm the fediverse will look much more like email, being a ecosystem of single providers, instead of a plattform consisting of many sub-providers
Allow me to be the first.
This is exactly the opposite of the value proposition of the Fediverse. It's going from the internet being 5 websites to the internet bring 5 other websites. It's merely and change in ownership, and that should be avoided at the ideological level.
the long term this is a battle for the one big forum provider, the place people will go to have reddit-style groups in the fediverse. If you are smart and want to beat Lemmy to the dust
This is weird corporate monopolist thinking, and it's a fucking mind virus. Lemmy doesn't need to be beaten. The Fediverse is fundamentally a cooperative exercise, and deciding that some other piece of software needs to be crushed to dust is not healthy for that exercise.
We don't need that shit here. None of this needs to wholesale replace corporate social media. It doesn't need 3 billion users to succeed. We shouldn't want it to look and behave like the purposefully toxic spaces, and we don't need to behave like the sociopaths that run them.
This is weird corporate monopolist thinking, and it's a fucking mind virus. Lemmy doesn't need to be beaten. The Fediverse is fundamentally a cooperative exercise, and deciding that some other piece of software needs to be crushed to dust is not healthy for that exercise.
You're just ignoring the realities of network effects and crowd psychology.
Take one network and divide it into 4 different networks and the results produced will be less than 1/4. You know what's great? Common decentralized standards. You know what's not great? A community that's fragmented and impossible to find.
This is weird corporate monopolist thinking, and it's a fucking mind virus. Lemmy doesn't need to be beaten. The Fediverse is fundamentally a cooperative exercise, and deciding that some other piece of software needs to be crushed to dust is not healthy for that exercise.
I hate to admit it, but this is my biggest mental hurdle for the future of the internet. Capitalism has dictated that in order to succeed others must fail thus far. I see the implicit value of the fediverse, but the value of reddit was it's mass (before it hit critical mass, at least). So I need to relearn that I don't need to go to one place for value.
The "value proposition of the Fediverse" as defined by you is something of basically no interest to people who ultimately want to have Reddit but not Reddit, who are also coincidentally the people most likely to be attracted to Kbin.
The Mastodon migration got screwed up by people pushing their purist version of decentralisation over decent UX, Christ help us if Kbin blows its chance in the same way.
@Kichae I must say that I am really suprised this is the one that has the most upvotes. I know most people come from Reddit and are like super internett nerds. But it is pretty disheartening at this is where the Kbin community is at.
I still have hope for the network, but it also attracts the worst kind of people to associate with as well. be it super right-wing people, or super anti-capitalist people, even like antisemetic, genocide denying tankies like the two devs of Lemmy, never touching grass and living in their own bubble, and the worst part, just really fumbling at everything they do, even as things manage to go their way.
I've been a part of the fediverse movement since the start, but it's sad to give so much and build so much for it to end up into this. Particurarly when I have personally put so much sweat and tears into it myself.
You're sounding like you're pushing for the Fediverse to be an open source mirror of what already exists. Centralized in practice, and apparently at war with itself.
I can't imagine why you'd think replicating systems that are already abusive would be the way forward. Replacing the masters does not fix the fact that the system itself is toxic.
It's the nature of sites that use upvoting and downvoting concepts, upvote and downvote is toxic. Downvote especially. Talk about people who dislike replacing bad systems the corporations made, the toxic voting system these sites use is now being carried over to the fediverse. It exploits the bad parts of human behavior and makes the systems worse.
I've disagreed with this when Youtube made the dislike change and I'll disagree with it now.
Upvotes/downvotes may not be needed in opinion pieces, but they are pretty necessary for any educational/scientific/news/tutorial etc. content to filter out the factually wrong answers so removing those will inevitably lead to misinformation being spread around. So in that context, an upvote/downvote system actually adds value.
It may be toxic in some instances, but there's really no better simple alternative (the only one I can think of would be extreme moderation, but that's a whole other can of worms).
I don't think it's fair to compare large instances existing to fully centralized platforms. I think there is a place for both large and small servers, we need both.
I love the potential I see in the Fediverse and its underlying technology, but I feel like a lot of people here have a hard time accepting that this is genuinely pretty confusing to the average non-techie. Anything we can do to reduce friction and have a recommended entry point for the average casual Twitter/Reddit refugee is a good thing.
It's not like small instances are gonna go away for those that want them. The true beauty of the Fediverse is that we can please everyone.
This is asinine. It's an online debate platform not a nuclear reactor. It should be as simple to use literally any other messaging app or platform. Good software meets the user at their needs, not the software's.
Not everyone wants to dig deep into understanding everything, and if you expect everyone should have to you're going to lose a lot of people who just want to read the news and upvote cat pictures.
No one has to have a deep understanding of anything. With usage comes an intuitive sense of things.
Picking up a new technology and deciding not to engage with it because it isn't an old technology isn't walking away because you lack a deep understanding. It's because you want it to be something that it is not.
I think you really overestimate the average user. Most people genuinely don't care to learn or engage. They see Reddit is popular on the App Store, download it, upvote whatever's on the frontpage, and that's the extent of what they know. That's what we're competing with.
Expecting everyone who comes to the Fediverse to do a whole bunch of research about different instances in order to pick out the best fit, do you actually think that's realistic to expect of most people? Most people will just use whatever's at the top of Google Play.
These kinds of options are great for power users like you and me, but most people are not power users. Expecting them to be is a form of gatekeeping that will keep the Fediverse from growing.
Picture your most technologically illiterate family member, who barely knows how to use Facebook as it is. The Fediverse has to be able to meet these kinds of users where they are. Some people want a simple popular server they don't have to think about.
Heck, I’m totally capable of doing research and learning these things, but even I prefer simplicity. Not everything has to be a complicated learning experience. Even people experienced with tech can appreciate something simple and easy to use.
@Kichae Most people don't hate email. I love email. It's the most successfull, healthy example of a decentralized network that empower not only enthusiasts like yourself, but the average person.
Every time I get a response from people like you, I get reminded of how selfcentered some people are to their own needs all the time, or wanting to promise a utopia even though we have the closest example to it that we actually can promise to people.
And not only that, you are a part of the unresponsible and toxic part of the fediverse.
You are the problem Ms. or Mr.
Edit: Seems like people need to be reminded 24/7. Lemmy is run by tankies that suppoort Russia, deny the genocide of Uighurs, and sooner than later is just going to destroy their platform. Read this thread
email is everything but a healthy example of decentralization, running your own personal email server is near impossible without complying to the big email providers like Google that will block/mark as spam your emails if you don't match their standards.
@blobcat that is the bauty of federated decentralization. Everyone can choose who they want to collaborate with. This will be an issue for you both with larger or smaller providers. But the reality is that larger providers will be easier for 'the common person' to use, whatever that is. But email shows that. And them protecting against spam and malicious email sources is a product of them being responsible. If you were to meet their standards I'm sure you'd be whitelisted.
I have an email with my fully own domain on my own email thing and I have no issue emailing anyone. Only limitation is that most email stuff don't work with the norwegian characters ÆÅØ for the adress and such.
It also confused the shit out of newbies who neither know nor care what an instance is and find the idea too outside of their existing comprehension or level of caring to wrap their heads around.
If it's too hard for you to click a "join a different instance/server" button and select any that's available, then I just don't know what to tell you. It's not that it's confusing, people just got extremely lazy when all they have to do is open of the 5 mega-platforms like Twitter and Reddit to access everything.
people just got extremely lazy when all they have to do is open of the 5 mega-platforms like Twitter and Reddit to access everything.
That's a funny way of saying "to an end user, not having to give a shit about what instance you're on is an objectively easier and thus better experience".
Particularly when most people couldn't tell you what a server even is. It just makes them confused because it's neither something they understand nor something they're going to be motivated to care about.
If using a platform feels like hard work compared to its competitors, that's a failing of the platform, not of users. Users don't owe the platform anything.
I can guarantee there are also plenty of things you, in common with everyone else, simply do not care about and cannot be convinced to care about, and would similarly consider it an imposition to be required to care about them or be judged as "lazy".
Do you think normal people know anything about client-server architecture, or are willing to learn? A successful service must have a single website with a single auth system, with a domain name having few characters at .com, or a competing service will win.
I just want to comment that it's so refreshing to see a post that's heavily downvoted but not hidden away. This just got me so excited for kbin. It feels like the old webforum experience, where people said controversial things and it sparked discussion and new ideas, not an echo chamber where everyone's smelling their own farts.
I agree with the 5/8ths majority that's against you, and that isn't a reason for you to feel shame or me to feel smug. It just is. It's beautiful.
The nice thing about Reddit was that you knew the vibe of each of the subs. Since everything is so new here, and the influx so immense, it's going to take time for the various communities to settle. Unfortunately for the old timers here, the pre-existing magazines here are unlikely to maintain their prior vibe. Hopefully they don't hate the Reddit exodus too much.
I have a feeling most of the exodus is going to be reddit old-timers that might fit in a little better than the rest of reddit, but y'know, remains to be seen.
Like any similar site it will succeed or fail on the back of the community it manages to attract and keep, but I have to say that for me KBin feels far more like a natural workflow than Lemmy. I think I'll stay!
That's the cool thing about the fediverse. We can all access the same content the way we like it. If it made sense to you, you could view this all through Friendica (FB) if you wanted.
Me too! Today I tried both this and Lemmy, but I find Kbin more to my taste in terms of interface, and I can still access all of the Lemmy threads, which resolves the only issue (IMHO) of kbin: lemmy seems to have more content and "threads/magazines/subreddits".
I hope to make Kbin my new home after the Reddit exodus!
@ajar7 Yep, I saw it that way, and it seemed to be going quite well. That changed a few minutes after I posted the screenshots and server specifications :) Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it was a huge change in such a short period of time. I still want to verify this and have external confirmation, but DDoS protection is currently the only option to keep the website alive.
You have the right idea. A common misconception about the fediverse is "I have a Reddit account, so I should be able to log into everywhere with that." It's more the opposite. Your login only works on the instance you signed up on. But that same account can talk to other Reddits, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. so you don't really need more than one account. Though I do have a kbin, Calckey (Twitter) and Pixelfed (IG) account.
One other thing about the fediverse is that new instances don't magically know all the other instances out there. Someone has to either specifically search for something from the instance or boost it from a different instance. Basically someone needs to be the first person to start the interaction.
And with the fediverse, bad actors get blocked or defederated at the server level. That means they have no way of interacting with you. It they're truly bad, and they do and have existed for a while in some form or another, they do eventually become an island no one will interact with besides other terrible people. So when you join an instance check their rules and make an informed decision.
Upvotes and downvotes are meaningless beyond telling the author good job or fuck you. There's not much of an algorithm in the fediverse; you are the algorithm. Boosts are where that comes in. They bump the post to the top of Active and add points towards Hot. If you go to Mastodon or Calckey (Twitter) you'll see favorite and boost. Upvotes map to favorites and boost is the same. A common theme around the fediverse is to use favorite/upvotes liberally since they don't mean anything and we all like being acknowledged. Use boosts to mean "I think people need to see this"
There's not a save yet, but anything you boost you can find listed in your profile. It's a workaround for the time being.
You've seen by now one is in the works. In the meantime I'm using the mobile web page as a PWA and it works pretty well.
Tags are one place that kbin has an advantage over Lemmy. They don't do much here, but it's an important way of finding things in Mastodon/Calckey. When you create a 'magazine' whatever tags you put there, they'll be pulled into the microblogging section of your magazine. That makes it easy for you to interact with people in the fediverse without leaving kbin.
I haven't figured out badges yet, but I also forget to look.
Be excellent to each other. Seriously though, this is a new world for us, let's shape it into something we can so be proud of.
Also, this whole thing is being done by a guy by himself. There will be growing pains like there were when Twitter first started and when Digg migrated to Reddit. Be patient, he's doing a lot of great things with limited resources. But this is open source, so if you have the capabilities, you can always lend a hand.
I am very confused about the mastodon integration tbh. Is every thread on kbin also shown as a post on mastodon? Is every comment? Are you supposed to tag threads or comments with hashtags?
Or in the "microblogs" section, I guess that is just normal mastodon posts... how do you subscribe to anything there or is it always specifically local mastodon posts for the current instance, or maybe even for a specific community? Are you supposed to tag stuff there or is it automatically tagged based on where you wrote them for?
Also, on a more abstract level, what is the purpose of microblogs? Is it supposed to be a twitter area where users post their daily experiences and personal stuff, or should it be always relevant to instance/community?
It's just such a weird amalgamate of social networks...
It's everything everywhere all at once! Though for real, all the information on the fediverse is always there available to everyone, but it's a pull method not a push, so you have to ask to see it, it's not forced on you.
This conversation we're having is visible to anyone on Mastodon/Calckey that is following either of us, or this post, or magazine. But chances are slim that anyone is. @ernest is the dev here and I follow him on Calckey so I see his posts there as well.
You can tag threads here with hashtags, but they're not super important unless you're trying to gain visibility on other corners of the fediverse. That said, feel free to tag away in general. It won't hurt anything, and might get more interaction if you do.
The microblog section is set by the mod that created the instance. They choose relevant hashtags and those get populated into the microblogging section. So you can go there and see relevant conversations happening outside of kbin/Lemmy that you can participate in.
As for the abstract level, yeah microblogging is Twitter like, so somewhat less permanent daily thoughts or whatever. From the kbin side it would make sense to keep it relevant to the topic of the magazine you're in.
It's not trying to be a mashup of all the social networks rather it's allowing you to interact with it they way you want. If the rest of the fediverse doesn't interest you, you can easily just stay in kbin. But if you want to comment on someone's video in Peertube or thought on Calckey, you can from here.
Of course! We were all new once (I haven't been here that long myself) and just trying to pay it forward.
If you want to test it out, you can search for me @madcodger@calckey.social and then follow me here. I don't post much and you don't have to stay followed, but it would be a way to play with cross functionality.
I’d imagine there are other developers such as myself that are leaving Reddit and coming over to the fediverse. Do you know if the Kbin dev has open sourced the code and wants help?
I’m just pointing out that the „fascist“ label got thrown around by people like you so inflationary that it lost every meaning or sense, making you sound similar desperate as those you seek to oppose. What this does have to do with the age of my account here is beyond me, on the other hand I sense a hint of alt tech elitism that fits the picture just right.
Funny how this escalated from you thinking that the socialpolitical movement of fascism has anything to do with a subtribe of modern, post–liberal 2nd wave feminists all the way to antisemitism - something, that wasn’t even remotely on the table. if you now manage to stir „racism“ into the mix, you can call it a day.
like, fuck terfs, fuck the anti-trans movement, but the connection between the anti-trans movement and fascism is framed in this suuuuper abstract way that no meaningful definition of fascism would allow. It kind of just makes fascism sound like "statism."
There are plenty of terfs (again, fuck terfs) who are not calling for government action, but trying to exclude trans women from feminist spaces on non-governmental levels, arguing for a limiting social or academic definition of feminism or of a woman and holding exclusionary events. Fascism is an incorrect label for that behavior.
Furthermore, to call terfs fascists implies that they are generally for other things fascists are for, like a command economy, which I don't think is common.
And to be clear, there is an overlap between terfs and fascists, and an even bigger overlap between anti-trans people in general and fascists. We all know the Nazis fucked up a lot of good gender research, but they were never pretending to be feminists.
... did you link to the wrong article by mistake? that article doesn't really have anything to do with fascism, except insofar as most fascists also happen to be racists.
I could link articles all day but I have better things to do than entertain (presumably) a cis guy while he plays devils advocate about the people who want my friends thrown in camps not being fascists.
that's literally the first article you linked to. Do you have a point at all? You can link to articles all day, but only two of them, and only one that argues for your point at all, which I've already addressed?
I'm not advocating for terfs or fascists, they're both villains, but to say they're the same is like saying the KKK and the muslim brotherhood are the same. Just because they're both evil and there are some common threads between their ideas doesn't mean they're the same. I think we should learn how to talk about the terrible groups out there instead of just equating all of them and dancing around our own ignorance. I'm not advocating them, I'm advocating against them as strongly as I can, and you're promoting ignorance instead of responding to the one damn point I've made.
I read it, and responded to it. You've been ignoring my response because you don't have an answer to it. So again. The core argument that terfs are fascists is:
To that end, Butler does a good job of laying out that the anti-trans movement ultimately is about strengthening government oversight — restricting access to medical care and generally seeking to ban LGBTQ+ people from the public sphere, which fits pretty neatly into just about every standard definition of fascism. That includes gender critical feminists, the self-professed “leftist” equivalent of the more extreme right-wing fundamentalists.
Which, again:
Pretends the entire social-focused aspect of the anti-trans movement doesn't exist, when it obviously does, and there are obviously many, many terfs focused on non-governmental oppression. The article itself describes governmental forms of oppression, but this does nothing to imply that the anti-trans movement is actually all about focusing on government oppression
identifies an extremely superficial relationship between two positions as both being statist and therefore being the same. The police state is also about increasing government oversight. A command economy is about increasing government oversight. The founding of the CFPB was about increasing government oversight. Having courts is about increasing government oversight. These are not all forms of fascism.
fails to describe fascism at all. Fascism is a specific thing with a specific definition, it's not just the idea of having an active government. Fascism is a form of nationalism with a dictatorial government, a strong military focus, a hard command economy that exists to support the state and the military, expansionist policies, suppression of opposition to the government, denigration of the individual in favor of the collective in the form of the state... Now, the terf movement, overall, is doing some of those things, but the article doesn't reference any of them.
fails to establish that most terfs, or the core proponents of the terf movement, or terfs in general, are fascists, let alone that a terf is categorically a type of fascists.
If you have a point, then instead of linking to the same article again or linking article that isn't about fascism, please make your point.
who gains from making up a new definition of fascism? why do you want people to be ignorant?
know thy enemy.
I'm not nitpicking here, I'm not being pedantic, your article didn't even vaguely touch on what fascism is. Maybe the underlying article did, but I'm having trouble imagining what the point is.
Does it piss you off you spend all this effort flailing about defending fascists and I still tell you (correctly) you're wrong and spend a fraction of the effort?
does it piss you off that you don't have any response to anything I've actually said? does it piss you off to discover that this publication you like just published a point it didn't understand at all? does it piss you off to see a person argue that we should attack terfs for being terfs and fascists for being fascists and not just assume that all bad people are the same kind of bad person?
is that why you're afraid to read any of my comments?
Having no time for a jackass in a month old thread dredging up his lack of reading comprehension and pathological need to defend fascists from true accusations of being fascists is very much different than being afraid.
You are correct that I am not reading your replies at this point, nor is anyone else.
you didn't read any of my replies, and you kept accusing me of shit I'm not doing, because you are, in fact, not interested in defending your bullshit. Blaming me for that is sad.
also... I just found this thread today, how did that happen?
I'm upset that you're promoting the Westboro Baptist Church!
I'm upset that decent people are being tricked into a stupid opinion about bad people. Just because fascists are evil and terfs are evil doesn't mean we should be making up confused bullshit about them, we should make coherent arguments and insult them for what they actually are. Making fun of terfs for being fascists is not effective because intelligent people will see that they're not fascists, and then not understand the actual issues with terfs. This is doubly problematic if your argument that terfs are fascists is as superficial and weak as the Them article you posted. You'll alienate people that absolutely want to be on our side.
Why are you so cut up about arguing in a thread you're not reading?
I'll be here for as long as you keep defending Tucker Carlson.
I'm not doing this for the fascists. The fascists love it when people get confused about who they are.
I'm doing this for your benefit, and for the benefit of any other decent people reading. Decent people don't like being lied to, decent people don't benefit when you tell them that cake is a type of potato, decent people don't suddenly get smarter when you tell them that Rush Limbaugh is a Scientologist. Labels have meanings and degrading those meanings is not a progressive act.
I spend my cis-ass time helping progressives avoid ignorant people like you who are helping terfs and fascists recruit. I spend my cis-ass time attacking terfs and fascists.
the worst thing you can do to a terf is tell the truth. The worst thing you can do to a fascist is tell the truth. They have no defense against the truth. Their ideas are genuinely that bad.
But when you lie, they party in the streets—that's their whole recruitment model. They say "look, libtards call us fascists just because we don't believe (insert some strawman version of the lies terfs tell)," and they laugh about how many "moderate" votes you gained them in their swing states.
I hope my fellow progressives don't think your ignorance is the norm among progressives.
I'm not talking to a group, I'm talking to a dumbass.
As a Jew, I feel fairly entitled to talk about fascism, and fairly entitled to be upset when people say insert group of assholes are Fascists without any understanding whatsoever of any definition of Fascism beyond "government." I do, in fact, have a stake in how you lie about my oppressors.
But it's also perfectly reasonable for me to be upset when you lie about your oppressors and try to trick trans people and allies like me into believing your lies. Why are you so strongly opposed to the truth?
Currently, kbin has no delays in the queues. This may be due to not all streams being sent to us or an error in the federation. Over the next few weeks, this process will be improved.
The federation between the Mastodon instances I am using for testing is either immediate or takes a maximum of a few seconds. However, other instances may experience their own delays.
/kbin meta
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