duringoverflow

@duringoverflow@kbin.social
jeebus,
jeebus avatar

After reddit my needs from a social book marking website are simple:

  1. Completely open source
  2. Moderators can be recalled by the communities they mod.
  3. Not for profit (ads are not the primary source of funding)

The internet needs to have something like reddit as core infrastructure. A digital public square. This requirement is incompatible with profit motive. This is why time and time again social media sites fail.

/kbin - a few quick announcements

Good morning! :) Today I want to focus mainly on reviewing the pull requests you've submitted. There are many great things there that will help improve the kbin experience. That's amazing, thank you! I'm also in the final stages of sorting out the infrastructure-related formalities. Soon, the situation with the website's...

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

So until... Friday, I think? Thursday? There was a difference between Kbin and Lemmy. Kbin used "boosts" for upvotes and "reduces" for downvotes, but Lemmy used "Favorites" for upvotes instead.

Kbin literally flipped the switch right before Reddit started coming over here en masse to follow Lemmy's lead and have it be favorites/reduces instead.

The issue is that the reputation code doesn't seem to have been updated (probably because... y'know, the website exploded). So the reputation displayed on your profile counts "boosts" as upvotes still. IIRC sorting algorithms like "Hot" still use boosts instead of favorites too.

So I'm giving you a boost right now - which should give a +1 to your reputation.

This is just a visual bug for now, though, so it'll probably be fixed when things die down. This site has only been live for a month or so, so there's still bugs here and there.

MeowdyPardner, (edited )
MeowdyPardner avatar

The kbin.social/stats page actually reflects a count from the instance DB, which includes federated accounts/posts/comments. Check https://kbin.social/nodeinfo/2.0 for just local instance stats, it's about 20K for kbin.social. 125K I think is lemmy and kbin combined considering all lemmy instances is ~100K, kbin.social is ~20K, and fedia.io in second place is ~2K.

fedidb.org also uses the nodeinfo (and shows the raw data when you click into a specific instance), though it lags slightly, I think by 6 hours maybe more as it still shows only ~6K for kbin.social instead of 20K.

OC The branding for kbin is perfect

The branding for kbin is perfect for capturing the reddit migrators. The biggest friction point for the Fediverse is choosing an instance. If I want to join Lemmy, googling Lemmy takes me to a landing page with no join button, telling me to go to these other sites. Some of these sites even actively discourage signups, creating...

1bluepixel,
1bluepixel avatar

This is like saying Mastodon is easy because you just sign up with mastodon.social.

You laugh, but as a sorta-but-not-super-techie guy, that initially stopped me from joining Mastodon. It prompted me for an instance to sign up on, and that felt like a serious choice for which I was missing some info.

Same deal with Lemmy, really. At first glance, the implications of choosing an instance are not clear. And then you start reading and you realize that some instances ARE problematic even if you have access to the entire federated content from it.

It's definitely a small but significant barrier to entry, and Kbin presents a front that feels easier to grasp when you're not familiar with the concept of the Fediverse.

Recommend to have the "Upvote" or Favorites list be hidden.

Currently, each thread has the "Activity" link that shows publicly everyone that upvoted/favorite a thread. This is counter norm to many coming from Reddit and newer folks that expected otherwise. I think hiding the list should be high priority in next feature update(removal?) to encourage frictionless upvoting behavior....

experbia,
experbia avatar

I'm still a little new with all this but from my understanding of the underlying federated protocol, this isn't really easily possible. It might be possible to remove the listing from the kbin and/or lemmy interfaces, but that would be visual-only: I think it will always be technically possible for another piece of software privy to the federated network to inspect these things about a post. Due to this, I think it would be better to show them and have it be known that this information is public than to hide them just on kbin and have it be a nasty surprise for users that the information is still relatively trivially accessible on another front-end or tool.

I think the safest course of action would be to have a separate account for interacting with information you do not want associated with your primary identity, as I suspect a "fix" for this issue that conceals voters is a long time out and on an ActivityPub protocol level, not a kbin level.

Bloonface,
Bloonface avatar

In general I think decentralisation is significantly oversold as a panacea, and conversely its advocates deliberately ignore that there are pretty concrete advantages to centralisation.

Worse, the advantages to centralisation are almost entirely on the end user experience side - "you can talk to anyone on the service no matter who!", "you only need to register one account!" - while the advantages of decentralisation are all remote and philosophical - "nobody can take it over!", "you can run your own service!". So centralised services will keep winning because they have the best pitch - or, at the very least, servers on decentralised services that become so big and have so many users that they are effectively centralised services all on their own (e.g. Mastodon.social, Kbin).

Most people don't care about philosophical stuff but they do care about having a usable service. It reminds me a bit of Linux advocates who preach the gospel about open source and how bad Microsoft is and how DRM will eat their nans or whatever, but fail to see the glaring issue that for 99% of users Windows works just fine and they don't actually care about anything philosophical, because they see their computer as a tool that plays a minor part in their life, rather than a means of self-actualisation.

That said, I think the best way to explain fediverse is to not. You don't need to tell people all the technical details, you just need to sell them on what they care about. Leading with decentralisation as your USP is a hiding to nothing because most people don't care - "it's a chill place here and you can do XYZ" will work far better. Anyone who cares will find out.

koopacha,
koopacha avatar

100% this is what it is. Subreddits with younger user bases are calling this blackout corny among other things, young people do not give a shit about their privacy or possess tech savviness on a level to where they could navigate anything except the most mindless and simple of apps, and they donโ€™t care what that algorithm throws at them

artisanrox,
artisanrox avatar

It's more IMHO that fascists are actively trying to take over every useful socmedia platform and turn it into a propaganda loop bubble. Keeps us from talking to each other.

StaticBoredom,
StaticBoredom avatar

Although I get your point, I would come at this from another angle. For example, Iโ€™ve never heard anyone say that a website โ€œonlyโ€ runs on advertising. We somehow take this as a given as if thereโ€™s nothing more normal on the planet than a business sustaining itself solely through our various corporate overlords.

I think we need to reframe this approach and instead make user-funding the norm, exactly as it is with every non-internet service. No one goes to a car wash or a house painter or a whatever and expects the service to be free.

Google fucked our minds so much with their approach to revenue generation that we somehow remain blind to what a strange approach to service provision that this is, but itโ€™s end result is clearโ€”an internet built not for us, but by the rich and for the rich. Fuck that.

altair222,

didnt twitter try pulling something similar to this? (apart from ofc banning TPAs)

this,
@this@sh.itjust.works avatar

all good dude, it's easy to get that confused. lemmy.ml is actually just one of a number of websites that make up lemmy and the fediverse at large. while you interact as a user almost exclusively through your home instance, much of the content you can access is actually hosted on a different website, even though you still access it through your home instance, think if it like email in that sense. even if you don't have a gmail.com email address you can stil send and receive emails to people who do. that's why my full handle is @this, yours is @Marv, and we are communicating with each other on a public form via the individual websites our accounts are hosted on. If you have ever used or plan to use mastodon, that works the same way and actually uses the same protocol (activitypub), there are also other currently less popular social media alternatives that use this protocol as well as speculation that it may be added into some mainstream social media platforms(though I wouldn't hold my breath on them federating with lemmy/mastodon). If you ever join a smaller instance (which I and the devs recommend to help the network scale better), you can use this link to find communities on other instances(they won't show up on your home instance if no one is subscribed to them or they are blocked by your instance): https://browse.feddit.de/

ElectronSoup,

Apple users will want whatever apple tell them to want

pax,

oh no. I hate voice controlled tech. it's off for me. I would not use that at all.

bitsplease,

The Apple headset does look a lot more lightweight and comfortable than most of what we have today - but even then, I just don't see it.

Even if they got it down to the weight and bulk of actual ski goggles, that wouldn't actually be comfortable for long sessions compared to sitting at a computer or watching TV (or even using a smart phone)

And ultimately you have to ask what the actual benefit is. The VR/AR industry seems (baffingly) to be moving away from games and towards social/business use cases (the Apple headset baffingly seems to be mosty selling itself as a laptop replacement). Everything we saw them doing with the Apple headset in the demo would be more comfortable and easier to do via more traditional mediums.

And don't even get me started on Meta who wants us to start working and shopping in VR...

VR has amazing potential for games, but it seems like just when we started to realize that potential with HL:A, the industry just gave up on it. Now-a-days, all the new titles are arcade games optimized for the quest, and hardware developers seem hell-bent on selling these headsets for everything except games.

I could see wanting something like what the Google Glass was supposed to be as a "wear everywhere" headset, but even then it'd be a niche thing for tech enthusiasts

JshKlsn,
@JshKlsn@lemmy.ml avatar

Say what you will about reddit, at least an established subreddit was the place to gather on the topic, ie r/technology etc.

There are plenty of subs that have branched off due to corrupt mods and other things.

/r/meirl and /r/me_irl

/r/web_design and /r/webdesign (merged now, though)

/r/gaming, /r/truegaming

but I do agree with you. It definitely hurts to have communities fragmented. Especially if new users don't understand how to view or subscribe to communities outside their instance, they may never see the more popular community on a different instance.

veroxii,

I think over time some apps will add functions to allow you to visually merge them. But purely at a UI level. They will still be separate instances on the backend.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar
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