Hoping this is correct. Whats a Thread under a magazine, especially vs. a Microblog
And why must I create a new 'article' to make a thread and not a post - which I think makes a new microblog.
I'm coming from a Mastodon POV, I run my own instance and have a pretty good idea (I think) about how federation works. The way ActivityPub is used is close enough to be familiar but also... not; very uncanny valley.
Additionally, if upvotes are favourites, what are downvotes? and how are they federated?
There's a definition disconnect happening between Reddit refugees and more experienced Fediverse users. Identical terms seem to have different meanings here:
Reddit: Kbin/Fediverse
Post: Article or Thread
Top-level comment/thread: Post
Comment: Post
Microblog (No real Reddit equivalent, profile posts maybe)
Subreddit: Magazine
Upvote: Boost
Thus, making a new "post" is called creating a new "article", while making a top-level comment (starting a new "thread") or response to that article is making a "post". Any other comment is also called "posting".
It's confusing as heck, but it's natural that a different social media ecosystem would have different terminology.
You can write on your own user profile in reddit, I'd say is the equivalent to Microblog
Let's say you are /u/BaldProphet on Reddit
You go to your profile, click on "Write new post" and this post will not appear in any subreddit, but only in your own profile. It will appear on the feed on people following you and people who enter in your profile can read and reply those posts
This feature is mostly used in NSFW profiles (people self-promoting their onlyfans)
This is the answer I was looking for. So this is sort of how KBin deals with fediverse posts outside of groups - an automated "subscribe to tag" feature based on the magazines that you're subscribed to. Neat!
Thing is, if you go to your profile to post something, you don't see a big ass stream of Twitter posts there. Here, the Microblog tab is full of content from Mastodon, Misskey, and Pleroma users.
There probably isn't the time or will to do this, but it'd be fun if there was a "Reddit refugee" mode you could set in your profile that swapped all the words out to the more familiar ones. It'd only last until Reddit sent a cease-and-desist over trademark usage but that might still help a lot of people make the transition.
To make it feel extra-familiar for Reddit refugees, perhaps also cause people with that mode set to occasionally randomly double-post their comments, randomly show them a "You broke kbin!" screen, or maybe even simulate an abusive moderator randomly banning them from communities.
It's extra confusing since if I click on the plus in top right, I get all of these as options. Wouldn't that mean that all of these are just types of threads, as in article is a text post/thread, photo is an image thread, etc?
Basically, thread = submission in reddit terms?
And it's just a comment, it's never called a post in this context, at least based on the button that I'm about to click to send this? Top level comment doesn't start a thread, right now it says that the thread owner is "VerifiablyMrWonka" whos the author of the whole thread, not the commenter.
They are all threads other than "post" and "magazine." The form for each has a slightly different layout and fields. Maybe they should be consolidated.
I'm trying to understand this comment, but i can't get my head around it. Unfortunately I find the reddit vs fediverse table (is it that?) actually more a hindrance than help. It doesn't format, at least where I'm looking from (kbin.social on web) so I don't really understand what it's trying to communicate.
It would really help if you could describe what this hierarchy is. It doesn't even need to be compared to reddit - just a clear explanation. Or of course a link to something that describes it plainly to those who are new to it. Thank you!
Kinda ditto. I just created a magazine, went to create content and wasn't sure whether to add an article or a post—and whether it mattered. Somehow what I posted showed up as a microblog.
Yeah, you want an link/article/photo or video not a post. Posts are like Twitter/Mastodon posts and are actually viewable by people on Mastodon and other fediverse short form services.
I'm boosting this in hopes that it will help someone explain it as well. Presumably it's similar to the boost/"re-tweet" in Mastodon, but I'm not sure how that manifests in a site designed to mimic reddit.
You can sort your front page by "top", "hot", "newest", "active", and "commented". Active uses a similar algorithm to hot, but it sorts by most recent activity.
You can follow kbin users on Mastodon etc (and on kbin itself of course). So in those cases boosts will just work like boosts/retweets, broadcasting a post to your followers. That plus the mentioned bumping it im the active queue.
Yup, boosts are a "I think people should see this button". @ernest mentioned in a post that boosts bump a post to the top of Active and add points to it being Hot.
Upvoting tells the person you are upvoting that you think they are splendid person, who provided good content. It's the equivalent of a 'Favourite' in Mastondon, but doesn't effect any algorithm, I don't think
It would seem. Upvoting things on reddit didn't rebroadcast the comment to everyone else, but neither did it have zero effect on the algorithm, and it's interesting to see it decoupled like this.
Only, now I'm super paranoid about ever boosting anything. It used to take a fair bit to make me reblog things even on platforms where that was expected, because I didn't want to bother anyone with stupid stuff. So I'm probably just never going to touch it for at least a year.
Only, now I'm super paranoid about ever boosting anything.
I'm kinda feeling the same way. If I'm going to boost something, it had better be pretty darn important or useful. That's probably a good thing because it means the threads and comments that are boosted are more likely to be higher quality.
So, the way federation works is not dissimilar to the way newspaper or magazine subscriptions work. If you subscribe to someone or something (called an 'actor' in generic terms) on the Fediverse - be it a person or a group - you're asking the hosting server to send you everything that actor published from that point onward.
You don't get the back catalogue, only the new stuff.
So, if you're the first person on your instance to subscribe to a remote community, you'll only get stuff posted after you subscribe.
"Boosting" is basically a way of republishing content. So, if you subscribe to a 3 year old community today, you won't see anything posted yesterday or any day before today. But if someone boosts an older post or comment, the group actor will re-send it to everyone who is subscribing.
In the microblogging sphere, that means the booster is sending the post to anyone who follows the booster. You cna see the same post boosted a hundred times. Mastodon does some light deduplication for users if requested, but that's about it. Here, I assume there is heavy deduplication taking place, so people don't see the same post a dozen times. But if you don't already have the post on your instance, the boost will transmit it and make it visible.
Then you'll get everything after the first subscriber on your instance subscribed.
At the end of the day, the server is the entity that's really subscribed to a content feed. It just directed that content to the local users who ask to see it.
This seems really weird, so the instances in the fediverse are not universally federated, they are contingent on someone in each node creating a link to each other node?
If that is correct then each instance should be really careful about who it lets subscribe, as it will be affecting the signal to noise ratio of all other users on that instance, no?
I think I've not understood it properly, but I really can't find a good guide to this.
No, they're not universally federated. There's no central, universal relay to cause anything like that to happen.
The instances in the Fediverse are just websites running some kind of content server that have the ability to send and receive messages using a communication protocol. Just like every other website out there, they don't know that any other website exists unless they're directly informed.
Like, it's not like you have every email address in existence in your address book if you set up an SMTP server. And you didn't automatically get added to Yahoo! back in the day when you set up a website.
Or hell, you don't automatically get indexed by Google if you set up a website. It needs some way to find it, first.
The only thing that makes different lemmy or kbin servers know that each other exist is that someone tells them.
Got that, about the servers needing to be aware of each other, of course but the content being federated based on user behaviour is what confuses me!
Let me give an example.
I am on server A. Servers A and B are aware of each other. You are on server B. Bob is also on server B.
I make a post on server A on the subject of CoolTopic.
Nobody on server B knows about CoolTopic, so the post doesn't get picked up and shown to anyone on that server.
Bob decides to subscribe to CoolTopic (on Server B), and so now he gets to see my post, as he is subscribed to it.
Because of Bob's actions, you now may see my post on CoolTopic as part of a random feed on your server, even if you don't know Bob.
This is how I interpreted your comment "Then you'll get everything after the first subscriber on your instance subscribed." It's the combination of my last two points above - is this correct? If so it means that your user experience is affected not only by what instances your instance is connected to, but also what behaviours other people on your instance have - people you may not even know.
Because of Bob's actions, you should see posts from CoolTopic begin to appear in your 'All' feed, yes, just as you would on Reddit even if you weren't subscribed to r/CoolTopic.
And yes, that means your experience is a reflection of the whole community on the instance you use. If no one ever subscribes to CoolTopic, it never gets pushed to your instance at all.
And really, why should it? If no one there is interested, it's just wasting disc space and bandwidth.
And really, why should it? If no one there is interested, it's just wasting disc space and bandwidth.
Well, that goes against the point of the 'All' feed, which is meant to promote interesting things to a user. Except it is now 'All but only on this instance - other things may happen on other instances, and if they're not propoagated here, we can't show you them'.
Which again reinforces the notion of the audience as a key part of what server in the fediverse you join. If you're a board games fan and you join an instance with predominantly board game players, you're likely to see lots of indirect stuff also relevant to you. If you're a vintage cars buff and you join that same server, you'd probably see less of what is relevant to you. With that in mind, I'd be prone to choose a server that tends to attract people with similar interests to me!
I'm not criticising just learning and musing, thank you for the explanations.
So a boost is more of a sort of "revive necrothread" than anything else, and only serves to give visibility to content that is no longer on people's radar?
if not, what is the point of me boosting a comment someone else made 5 minutes ago? Is it because people who might follow me but not subscribe to the thread the comment was in, would otherwise not see it? So like, it's retweeting it to bring attention of that comment to my social circle?
Yes and no. Again, there seems to be some precautions in place to prevent boosted comments or posts from being rendered as duplicates here, and I don't think it's pushing anything to the top of any of the sorted feeds (though maybe it gets counted as an upvote as well? I'm not sure). It just re-sends it anyone following the booster. And then the group re-sends it to everyone following the group.
This is actually really easy to see on Mastodon, since Mastodon doesn't handle groups differently from any other actor. Groups on Mastodon appear just as another user, and you interact with the group by @-ing it. You subscribe to a group by following the group actor, and the group actor will boost any messages it receives. You can create a new thread by @-ing the group in a top level post, or you can reply to a post by replying to a top-level post boosted by the group actor.
And the the group actor boosts it right back at you.
Thank you, this makes sense! I mean, it also makes me think this becomes exceptionally noisy as the boosts may grow at a low exponential rate as the number of users expands, but I will watch it and see how it works here :)
So the boost has a dual purpose? It both puts things in front of users (I want to see it because someone I follow has boosted it, so it is relevant to me) but also ensures that that content gets to other parts of the network itself - implying that it could not be discoverable on another part of the fediverse unless it was boosted into it?
This sounds so messy, mixing visibility algorithms with network propogation...
Your account can be followed by a Mastodon account. Any Mastodon/Misskey/Pleroma/etc. follower will see on her/his feed not only all your posts and comments, but also anything you boosts. Boosts is retweet/reblog.
Articles are Lemmy/Reddit-style posts, microblogs are Mastodon/Twitter-style posts. Kbin is interesting in that it can talk to both types of networks this way.
Seems neat but what dictates what microblogs appear under any given magazine? I'd assume the user that 'is' the magazine is included but I can't see it?
When open your own magazine you can use the admin panel and add tags . They get a leading hashtag and then kbin adds microblog posts to your magazine automatically when the tag matches.
I think how it works is that kbin is able to post microblogs to any magazine, but anything federated from other software that doesn't know what a magazine is just goes to /m/random.
if you admin a magazine you can choose relevant tags for it that can actually bring in posts from the rest of fedi that use those same tags, so they will appear on the microblog tab on kbin ~ for example on /m/food there are a list of tags including #dinner or #cooking, and you can see posts from mastodon etc in the microblog tab because they have those tags too
So how much moderation ability is there for a magazine admin? Going with your /m/food example, what if someone posts Breaking Bad memes and use the #cooking tag? Does the admin of the magazine have the ability to prevent subscribers from seeing the unwanted content?
I think so, or at least there is a little popup menu where you can moderate a post, and in the case of the microblogs that includes ban & delete options, but I'm not sure if that would only work for posts created on kbin or what. And for the main threads, a mod can pin, delete, or ban.
For someone who doesn't use mastodon or twitter, what does this mean? Can you provide something descriptive about the two without referencing other sites (or at least not exclusively - and this isn't a criticism at you, almost everyone seems to be doing this!).
It's very confusing trying to understand what an article, a thread, a microblog, a magazine are, and what their use cases are, hence why they are all separated. I think if I understood the use case, I would understand the reason why, better.
I think microblogs are like Facebook status, if you ever used that, wherein you announce under your profile page. People that follow you will see your microblog and can comment on it.
Thank you. So would I be right in saying that it's a post that is published to my own 'space', and that while it's public, it will only be promoted to people who directly follow me (and hence my space)?
I mean it seems to be the exact same entity as a post to a community/subreddit/etc, just into a different context so not sure why it has a whole different name! This is I guess why I'm getting confused.
That gives me a feed of the magazines I'm subscribed to, but not a list of them. Like it shows me things from gaming and news, but it doesn't just list those two categories so that I can get a glance of that magazine by itself. I can search for it, of course, but I just want to see a list of things I'm subscribed to.
Under Settings > General > Notifications. (I just found it I haven't tested it).
There is an option to change the visibility of subscriptions on that page as well, as a matter of fact.
What dictates which goes where? I've seen some magazines having rules like "Gameplay videos should be posted exclusively in Microblogs". Is there some kind of universal etiquette to know what is supposed to go where if the magazine don't have rules specified for this? Or why even segment the community into two different channels?
Like... why would you post under Microblog instead of just making a Thread?
From what I've seen elsewhere in the thread it appears a magazines microblog content is pulled from hashtags that the mods can attach to their magazine - that was it can show related content from all over the fediverse and not just things posted to the magazine itself.
Thanks for asking this question! Can someone explain why the word "article" was used here? It seems like it means something very different here compared to the way I usually use it in US English.
When talking about posts, ActivityPub differentiates between "notes", called toots on Mastodon (short, usually not-formatted, usually single-paragraph), and "articles", which can be longer and formatted.
/kbin is compatible with WriteFreely minimalist blogging software and its blog posts, already in the size of your typical article, can be read without any problem via /kbin interface, in "Threads"
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