Holy shit. It's not just that the #Lemmy dev is a tankie, he's a LaRouche conspiracy-brain NazBol. Okay #fediverse tell me how this isn't as bad as Gleason's Soapbox and how you are separating art & artist because making them a Eugen-level BDFL just has to happen because of the #Reddit exodus.
I did some testing of #Lemmy and #Kbin yesterday (i.e. decentralized Reddit). The Lemmy network is having some growing pains. I was also unable to follow (find) any feeds (! Prefix) with my Mastodon clients. KBin however I was able to follow one, but i'm not yet sure it's federating as I haven't seen any posts yet.
Curious if anyone here knows why PHP was chosen for kbin's implementation? I know PHP has come a long way, but there's still a lot of uncertainty / dislike for it out there. @ernest might just really like PHP, which is totally cool, but as someone who would like to contribute, but also as someone who hasn't touched PHP in almost 10 years, I'm genuinely curious!
@rodhlann It is built with tools from the Symfony ecosystem. Which is strong in Poland. And I am guessing @ernest is a Symfony developer. There are specific API Platform apis to work with Activity Pub. And a schema tool to work with federation.
@Fencken Follow kbin account from your Mastodon account. Upvote or post from here. It will show up on your Mastodon account where you can boost it. Good luck.
Finally! I've been trying to blog here for days, but the lag has been impossible.
Lemmy doesn't seem to have the option to blog to your own account at all - and I don't know if anyone else in the Fediverse outside of kbin will be able to see this entry here. Likewise, Bookwyrm allows me to post "Direct Message"s to my own profile, as far as I can tell - effectively microblogging - but they appear to be private only, which makes me suspect that I'm the only one who can see them. Even if that's not the case, I'm completely in the dark as to whether anyone outside of Bookwyrm can read them!
@BobQuasit I see you. They will scale up and we will have more normal functionality here in a few weeks. I think I am seeing you because of the Fediverse tag.
Is it possible to run my own instance of kbin? I've tried googling, but all results link to private reddit subs. Haha. What are the chances. I would like to self host an instance of kbin just for myself.
Probably a pretty simple/stupid question but, can Kbin and Lemmy instances federate and communicate with each other? I'm not new to fedi but am new to properly using Kbin/Lemmy.
The way the fediverse is expanding, also with ActivityPub plugins for CMSes like Wordpress and Drupal, I can't help wondering when somebody develops a single user instance that is as simple to install on shared hosting as — well, Wordpress.
Federation is not as simple as RSS, sure, but all the fedi applications I've seen require command line access or semi-esoteric dependencies. How about a "upload the files to your server, edit the configuration file, off to the races" setup?
@haverholm Some of the Fediverse hosting companies may provide something like that eventually, once they see how things shake out and if there is a business case for it.
A few people on Reddit were having trouble getting their heads around what the Fediverse actually is, so I tried to write a jargon-free ELI5 description. It's garnered quite a few upvotes over there so I thought I should actually post it onto Fedi as well!
I'll see if I can make it all easier to understand. This might be a bit long, but I'll try to keep it as non-technical as I possibly can.
You will naturally be aware that there are many different systems on the internet, run by different companies. And these systems are generally incompatible with one another.
For example, you can't use GMail to compose and send a post to Twitter. You can't log on to Facebook and read content from Reddit (unless somebody has copied it there). You can't watch Youtube videos via Flickr. And so on.
All of this seems obvious - they're completely different systems. Why on earth SHOULD you be able to interact with them from elsewhere?
A few years ago some people decided that even though this was obvious, it wasn't the way the internet HAD to be. They developed a protocol (which is just a set of instructions for computer programs to talk to each other over the internet) which they called ActivityPub, and then basically said to software developers "here it is. We think this could be a cool way of getting different systems to interact with each other. See what you can do".
In the 5 or 6 years since then, lots of software developers HAVE tried to see what they can do with ActivityPub. One well-known example of a system that uses it is Mastodon. It's a system that is similar to Twitter.
Another couple of ActivityPub systems that are becoming popular right now are Lemmy and KBin. They are Messageboard systems, roughly similar in concept to Reddit.
There are many other ActivityPub systems, for example Pixelfed (which is a bit like Flickr, so for hosting photos), Peertube (yep you guessed it, videos), Friendica (like Facebook) and far too many others to list. Collectively, these systems and any others that use ActivityPub call themselves "the Fediverse".
OK - so what? These are just wannabe competitors to the big boys: Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, right?
Not right! The magic of ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that they can all interact with each other.
So you can log on to Mastodon and subscribe to Lemmy groups. That would be like logging on to Twitter and subbing to your favourite subreddit. And then being able to read the posts from that subreddit right there in Twitter.
You can log on to KBin and follow users on Peertube. Imagine being able to follow and view content from your favourite Youtube streams from right here in Reddit.
That's the real beauty of the Fediverse - every system knows how to talk to every other one. The other clever bit about it is that because ActivityPub is a publicly-defined protocol, no one company can own it and take it over. It's almost impossible for a billionaire like Elon Musk to take over Mastodon, or for Lemmy admins to decide to shut out third-party APIs. Because the system has been built from the very beginning to be open, and shared, and communal.