This is a result of the original design. Kbin, up until just before the peak traffic hit, was using boosts as upvotes and favorites/likes were just below the post/thread (where boost sits now). Lemmy does it the way it is now (likes = upvotes) so Ernest changed it to match Lemmy behavior. But just as he changed it, he hadn’t changed the calculation for reputation to match when the server nearly melted down and he has to spend all his time just trying to keep the site alive by himself.
I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.
Yes, but my bigger point is that it’s not threaded as a reply to one of that user’s comments.
Edit: Oops, nevermind. I saw their comments elsewhere down here but didn’t realize they were OP. Just one of the interface things on Kbin that needs improvement.
Edit 2: I need to figure out how to do strikethrough text on here
As a desktop kbin user, there's no strikethrough. Unsure as to why, if kbin is markdown. Strikethrough is considered advanced markdown formatting so I'm guessing kbin didn't include it. Now I'm curious to see how much common markdown is visible on kbin's desktop platform.
Guide for those unfamiliar with markdown, so you can see what I'm doing. ✔ means I can see it on desktop kbin, ❌ means it remains unformatted (formatting characters remain).
Wow ;) I'm incredibly lucky to have come across people like you. The authors of those posts are actually right - managing /kbin is a significant challenge nowadays. It requires extensive knowledge and experience to keep it under control. But also I've never hidden that fact - the information about it is placed at the very top of the repository's readme ;) However, as I mentioned, a lot is changing very quickly https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/122333/Fediverse-won-t-replace-Reddit-as-long-as-Lemmy-is-the#entry-comment-478779. And we're all working hard on it, to improve and automate as many things as possible. Thanks to all of you, I believe I can face it head-on, and together we can create a better place. Better internet. Not just this instance, but cooperation between platforms is the key here.
Unfortunately, there are delays occurring again - I've decided that smooth website operation will be the priority this time. There are approximately 450k tasks waiting in the queue, and everything will be handled, but it will take some time. Today, we're also conducting final tests of the new infrastructure. It's taking a while because we're documenting templates that can later be used by others to create their own instances. I hope these are the last issues we have to endure ;)
I'm a firm believer there can never be too many thanks you's given so: Thank you ernest and everyone working on this.
I myself don't have much php experience other than one small site that i run, but i hope in the future i can too contribute to this project. But that said i do have somewhat more linux experience and if you or anyone here needs help with anything feel free to shoot me a message.
I just logged in and noticed the updated reputation counting system. Ernest is a man of his word, y'all. I know we're in good hands and look forward to seeing where things go in the future. Really appreciate all your hard work
Thanks for all the work you do, and I hope you find it rewarding. Most of all, look after yourself mentally and physically. The same goes for the whole team.
The fact you are being transparent and honest about your work and plans for the future, is a huge bonus. Even admitting to setback and problems, is refreshing. I certainly don't expect a super human running the show, and everything to be perfect. If anything, that would make me question the place and avoid it. So many places talk rubbish, spewing out a word salad, but actually say nothing. Even worse, they say one thing and do the precise opposite. You come across as .... well, the total opposite of Spez and those running Deaditt.
What you've done here is truly impressive. Reach out to the community when you need help and stay healthy. It's clear you know what you're doing and thanks for all the hard work!
Thank you for putting the time into this. I'm really enjoying what you're creating here and I look forward to all it can become. Please pace yourself and find help where you can. Don't burn yourself out!
tl;dr: It's Mastodon. You can use Mastodon from Kbin.
The Microblog tab shows posts from Kbin + Mastodon, just like how the Threads tab shows posts from Kbin + Lemmy. So if you have people you like on Mastodon, search for them using the little magnifying glass and then follow them from Kbin. Their posts will appear in the Microblog tab.
Additionally, if people on Mastodon use a #hashtag for something, it'll automatically be sorted in magazines that care about that hashtag. This means if you follow someone and that person uses a hashtag, their post will be placed in the "Microblog" tab of whatever magazine relates to that hashtag. This allows other people to discover the person you're following through shared interests.
Magazine moderators determine what hashtags they want included in their magazine - so @Futurology has said "We would like all posts with #research to show up in our microblog section". (You can go to @Futurology directly to see what hashtags the mod team thinks are relevant.)
If no hashtags are used on a post (or none of them match any magazines), then it goes to the magazine @random.
Wanna write a tweet/toot from right here on Kbin? Put it in a microblog. Use #hashtags to organize it into a magazine, or use the dropdown on Kbin to pick a magazine manually.
People can follow your Kbin profile from Mastodon. They'll see microblogs as a Mastodon toot, and "boosts" as basically Mastodon's version of retweets. People on Lemmy don't see boosts, but will see microblogs as a "normal" Lemmy post (since Lemmy doesn't have a "microblog" tab).
(Note that it seems things which come from Mastodon don't get automatically sent to Lemmy - just microblogs from Kbin itself. That Internet Archive post I mentioned above doesn't seem to exist on Lemmy.world.)
This behavior is one of the main reasons why I chose Kbin over Lemmy; I love that I can post once and have my stuff federated everywhere else super cleanly and easily. Lemmy is a bit more messy when it comes to Lemmy -> Mastodon and the devs aren't interested in changing how it works (I asked before I came over here).
Ernest seems really invested in playing to the strengths of the fediverse, and the Kbin roadmap has him planning to integrate more fediverse services in the future. For example, Mobilizon support is planned, which is like a group calendar on the fediverse.
If @Starwars wanted to have a watch party for a new episode of The Mandalorian, they could (theoretically) schedule an event on Mobilizon and have it federate to their magazine as a normal thread. Then they could (theoretically) pin the Mobilizon thread and use the comment section of the event as a Kbin megathread when the episode airs. See https://demo.mobilizon.org/ and imagine it being part of Kbin, just as Lemmy and Mastodon are "part of Kbin."
This is a great explanation; I've been a Mastodon user about 6 months now and was having trouble figuring it all out. One question: is there a way on /kbin to see just the users I've clicked "follow" on? Or is it all doled out into magazines based on tags or random?
Yeah - if you go to your profile and click on "following" you can see it. I believe you can also see other's lists who they follow - here's mine: https://kbin.social/u/EnglishMobster/following
Part of who I follow are people I'd normally follow on Mastodon; another part are people who frequently use hashtags that I'm interested in (like #ModelTrains) and I want to see their stuff in magazines like @modeltrains.
Note that if you follow a Kbin user, I believe you'll see posts they make across the fediverse in your "subscriptions" feed, even if you aren't subscribed to that magazine. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of that, but I suppose it makes sense. (People you follow who use Mastodon only seem to pop up in the "microblog" section.)
This is excellent. Thank you! I genuinely didn’t get it until reading your reply. In fact, I was thinking of posting a meme along the lines of ‘I don’t understand how the microblog feature works and at this point I’m too afraid to ask’. No need anymore.
Now all I DO need is a way to save/bookmark posts for future reference.
Works fine for me? I even gave a link in my first post to a Kbin link working on Mastodon.
Federation is a little delayed at the moment because of how many new users both Mastodon and Kbin are getting. But if you give it a few hours (usually 4-6) it'll sort itself out.
That is confusing AF tbh. It’s aspects like this of the Fediverse that will continue to hamper adoption. If it’s confusing for tech savvy people, it will only be a barrier to entry. Little to no upfront explanation or tutorial is a problem.
Maybe that’s for the best, but without casual users this place is not gonna get much bigger; even with the Reddit fuck up / migration catalyst.
I might be here for the long-haul, but I see major gaps here. It’s unfortunate because this opportunity is somewhat wasted.
Imagine if your reddit comments could be read on instagram, twitter, and facebook automatically, and you could read everyone elses comments from reddit too! Not 100% accurate, but definitely a simpler explanation and gets people interested.
@EnglishMobster This is an amazing explanation - thank you, I learned a lot.
Question: Magazines can pick up hashtags from toots/microblogs. What about the other way around? Ie can hashtags attached to magazine articles/links be picked up by Mastodon and other twitter-like applications? Ie, if I tag a magazine article with #startrek, will that article appear in the feed of any Mastodon user following #startrek? I thought that's what the purpose of the hashtag field was when creating an article, but it doesn't seem to work, based on some experimenting that I've done.
The other way around is supposed to work but is currently broken.
Bear in mind that kbin.social (the first general-purpose English-language Kbin instance) was created in... May 2023. Our Benevolent God Ernest has only been working on Kbin seriously since January 2023.
When I joined in June, it was mostly Ernest talking to himself, with a few other randos from Lemmy who were curious about this not-Lemmy thing. A couple weeks before I joined, Ernest was in here completely alone. Getting 100k people randomly show up a month after he released the first public alpha wasn't exactly in the cards, I don't think - so he's been putting out fires that come with "oh shit my little toy project now has thousands of people using it overnight".
And here I thought the whole point of being a benevolent god was omnipotence. ;-)
Thanks for clarifying. I wasn't sure if that functionality just isn't working yet (but now I'm confident that it will work down the line) or not an intended feature at all.
"Omni" for a certain definition of "omni" after all.
At a certain point you have to expect that he chooses to do it. After all, in Genesis (lmao autocorrect tried to suggest "Genshin Impact") creating the world took God 7 days (well, 6 days + 1 day to rest and admire). Surely someone omnipotent could've done it quicker - so it's either that or he simply chooses to take longer. ;)
This is a great explanation, thanks. Can I follow certain tags on the microblog side of things so they show up in my microblog feed? Right now, I only have microblogs directly associated with magazines I'm subscribed to.
That part I don't think exists yet. Mastodon lets you do that, but I think Kbin's intended use case is that you follow magazines which are a collection of hashtags.
Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
Assuming we coalesce around Kbin, 5-6 years down the road when Kbin is a lot more polished and has a significant user-base,h ow do we prevent a repeat of Reddit?
It’s inherent in human nature to coalesce, to form a community, which ultimately creates a centralized hub that is ripe for control by a few people.
Federation already solves this, mostly. If kbin.social disappeared, other places like kbin.cafe and kbin.lol would have copies of the magazines, so content wouldn't be lost. And the community could regroup under a new magazine.
The only issue is magazine portability - right now there doesn't seem to be a way to annoint an instance to be the new owner of a magazine that's hosted by the kbin.social instance. But maybe that technical problem will be solved in within the next five years.
Maybe kbin.pub should have a banner at top like "Got here by mistake? Maybe you just want to join an instance? Try ..." with .. being picked at random on each page load. Or we could have a featured kbin instance of the month or something...
They're not redundant functions. They're... Mixed up on kbin right now, because things were originally built with the up button boosting content, but that's incongruent with how Lemmy does it, so it was changed.
But boosting isn't really about sorting at all. It's about republishing content, so that it can be sent out to instances that have started following a group after the content was originally posted.
How it's interpreted it is entirely up to the UI layer. On microblogs, it's surfaced as a retweet-like behaviour, but it's not surfaced at all here, really, except on kbin where it's used to report who has reboosted something.
At its core, it's a republish button, and just as if you were to republish someone else's blog post on your own blog, people can see, if they look closely enough, that you've done it.
Perhaps more importantly why would one retweet a comment? Rather than a post?
The way content propagation works here is that someone using Website A follows a remote content source (either a user, or a group -- aka a "community" or a "magazine"), and the remote hosting website (let's call it Website B) sends all subsequent content from that source to Website A, where the requesting user can then view it. If someone from Website A was already following that content source, then they get to see all of the content that Website A had already received, and benefit from earlier users efforts. But if that person was the first from Website A to subscribe to that content source, then they only get future content.
It's very similar to a, well, a magazine subscription in that way. NatGeo isn't sending you their 150 years worth of back catalogue when you subscribe in 2023 (not that you should bother subscribing to NatGeo in 2023).
The 'boost' button republishes content, though. Posts, comments, whatever. Hitting 'boost' on a comment republishes it, and once republished the group actor (the little bot-like construct that functionally is the group) sees it as new content, and pushes it out to everyone following it. This means it will reach websites that started subscribing to the group after the comment was originally posted.
Boosting is how older content (where older basically means "from anytime before literally right now") spreads through the fediverse.
Thank you so much for this explanation, it really helped some of this click for me. I don’t use kbin, so the boosting isn’t so relevant to me, but I’m beginning to understand some of how the federation works together.
I'm not sure how Lemmy syncs and backfill, but under its hood, I imagine it's doing the same thing, just automatically. Lemmy groups are really spammy with boosts when viewed from Mastodon, for instance.
So this is one of those things like git, where you can't explain how it works on the surface to a normal person because it barely even makes sense if you don't know about the underlying plumbing. :\
Not awesome, but I guess that's what you get when you graft a reddit-like experience onto a fediverse that was more or less invented for microblogging.
Yea, i'm working on my own Fedi software and i'm struggling with the point of boosting in the link aggregator context. It's an odd overlap with Reddit-style reposting to appropriate subs, but based on the user.
It makes sense in the Twitter UX, but i struggle to find it's place in the Reddit UX.
I think boosts have potential to be used for crossposts, and the current implementation are just crossposts to your profile. Though they're likely here right now just because Kbin is a mix between thread and microblog software
Boosting is super important in all contexts in the Fediverse.
When am instance subscribes to a content source - be that a user actor or a group actor - on behalf of a user, it only requests future content. Back catalogues are not fetched by default. Boosting re-publishes the content, so that it is received by new followers.
With a group actor, the boost triggers the actor to reboot the content itself, sending it out to new subscribers to the group, and filling in that back catalogue.
Users who use the website that the community is hosted on have access to the full library of it. They need to boost stuff. And people who subscribe from remote sites need to boost older content that they've seen.
but relevant users cant see it, its never fetched for them to see it. Sure users on the home instance can see it, but they're on the home instance, it's already fetched for them. Ive run into this problem on here, where there is a lot of content on other instances that isnt visible from kbin. I have the option of visiting the home instance to see it, but it takes me completely off of kbin, I cant boost it from that page.
Someone just needs to follow. The community owner either needs to seed the community to big instances using accounts on them, or people who find the community via other instances need to subscribe and know that fresh content will come. Then they can boost older content from the hosting site.
Things take some conscious effort here. That isn't necessarily a bad thing.
"Then they can boost older content from the hosting site." No that's the problem. Like you yourself said back catalogues arent fetched. They can't see the older content to be able to boost it, they'll only see new content.
If my instance follows a community at time t = T, and your instance starts following it at time t = T+10, I can boost content posted between T and T+9 so that you can see it.
Meanwhile, if people on the hosting instance boost things posted from times earlier than T, we both get to see them. Then, once they're visible to us, we can continue to boost them for new instances to see.
If boosting is meant to be a solution to the back catalogue problem, then it's a horrible way to do it. You'd have to go through and boost every single post from before the hosting instance was followed, and then it'd only show up the user page of the guy who went to all of that effort? (or, realistically, bot).
If what I'm saying is accurate (and I'm still not sure because this is admittedly a bit too complicated for me) then it doesn't sound very useful since individual profiles aren't nearly as important in a forum context when compared to something like twitter, and especially when you can just upvote something and have that show on your profile. Unless I'm mistaken and anything you've upvoted doesn't propagate to another automatically instance while boosts do... but I don't think that's a big enough distinction to have two different buttons? You could just have an upvote also do that.
I see it as similar to the "save" function on Reddit, except it's public. I've started using it on things that I think I might like to read again later (and so by extension anyone who's "like me" would probably want to read it too).
i disagree, it's a great functionality that people should learn.. and here's the simple point.. you can BOOST a comment you disagree with, so that your argument AGAINST the comment will get more visibility.. reddit is dysfunctional, and this mechanism can help fix one of the problems reddit cannot get rid of.. this mechanism can help discussion, and fight against things like brigading..
think about it a minute.. someone makes a really TERRIBLE point that you can dismantle easily.. tear it down, and BOOST the hell out of it.. reddit cannot accommodate that.. keeping those two functions separate is critical..
this will help keep every thread from becoming a popularity contest that is entirely predictable, once people figure it out
edit to add: i've only been using this platform for a few days.. but i promise you, it works the way it's supposed to.. try it out..
The truth is most internet communities which found and advertise themselves as an alternative to Reddit die.
To be honest, there were damn good reasons why Voat, etc, died in a massive fire. The Reddit exoduses in question were from huge chunks of the userbase effectively being kicked out for being massive bastards/racists/bigots, etc. The communities that they spawned after leaving were absolutely horrific and nobody else on the internet wanted to go anywhere near them.
The current exodus is made up of actually normal people (at least, normal enough), and the reason we're here isn't just because we're all joined by hatred (weeeelllll... maybe a hatred of u/Spez in a lot of cases, ha!), but because we're genuinely looking for a better forum-space than what's been available recently until now.
Sure, there are similarities, we're still here because we find corporate control over the forum-space to be "oppressive" (just what an incel/racist would say, right?), but it's not because our views aren't tolerated there, it's just because we're really fucking tired of the cost of having somewhere to actually discuss things is that we're endlessly sold as a product, followed by our discussion area being destroyed by corporate greed. Over and over again.
The reasons why this place is getting busy is fundamentally different than the reason why the previous migrations created places like Voat or Parler, etc. We're already in a massively better position due to that alone.
Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I really hope that all of the interesting discussion here doesn't eventually get buried by memes like back on Reddit. Memes can be fun and all, but sorting a lot of otherwise really great niche-subs by top of all time back there was often a case of finding nothing of value at all because there were 50 pages of fucking memes at the top of the list. Personal preference, of course.
Yeah that's a fair point. For me it was the constant twitter screenshots/ tiktok reposts and repeated and shallow discussion of whatever bullshit fill in the blank political figure/ tech billionaire was doing that was killing the fun for me. I really think memes were more fun back in 2012-~2018 or so, mostly because there seemed to be more emphasis on novelty, but the endless soyjack reposts or dead tv show memes (cough the office) were definitely getting stale. I think it works better when memes are on hobby/niche subreddits because I think they invited discussion in the comments, but man are they useless on anything related to current events. Some subreddits did it really well though, places like noncredibledefense (that's the only one I can think of rn) really had a unique voice and were making new formats.
I found that, for me at least, memes on reddit were generally a negative aspect in most subs focussed on discussion.
They worked really well though when you had the main sub basically ban memes, but spawn a secondary sub specifically for them.
You get the best of both worlds there, where people can either take them or leave them, and the main sub doesn't end up with a massive noise to signal problem.
+1 I really want this, separate communities for memes and for content. I really enjoy spending time scrolling through memes, and I want that to exist somewhere - but not in the same place as the actual content. I hope that becomes the standard here, and also that people start making more meme-focused communities, cos I haven't seen many yet.
Yeah, /r/AnarchyChess wouldn’t be anywhere close to where it is now if memes were allowed on /r/chess. Splitting the memes and discussion apart is definitely the best way to go.
There was a fascinating point on fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu where it felt like a narrative type was getting created. New characters and kinds of story lines were popping up all over. It was kind of amazing.
I have really fond memories of those old rage comics, they're part of what got me to make an account in the first place. I know they've grown corny as they've aged, but gee so have I. I think most places online can't really replicate the kind of communal rush to engage in the community, I think we've all grown a mite cynical.
we're still here because we find corporate control over the forum-space to be "oppressive"
It's bad when any corporation does that to anyone, regardless of respective points of view.
Most users don't want to see racism and bigotry in their feeds. So although yes, it's bad when corporations single out a viewpoint, in that case they took out the trash that the rest of us had to constantly downvote/block.
There are fascinating thoughts relevant to this that could be explored when people have the technical capacity to catch up the software even just to the submissions that have already been made to the kbin software.
Like instead of just "top" and "hot" and "new" and such, there could be like "popular" vs. "niche", where niche is a different dimension of popularity. Otherwise, you get the same tired old cats & doggos that "we" (at least, as a community overall) really DO love to see, and that's...well you're never going to change people's minds, so good or bad, it simply is what it is, but it doesn't leave quite as much room to see anything ELSE that you ALSO want to see is the problem. But where there's a will there's a way!:-)
I posted something relevant in https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/113196/An-older-article-that-is-taking-on-new-significance-considering (also duplicating it in https://kbin.social/m/BestOf/t/113715/The-Ennui-Engine-or-how-chasing-short-term-gratification-drains-our) if you are interested. It's a wall of words but beautifully constructed imho, I couldn't put it down b/c it really piqued my interest precisely on what I was thinking. But one down-side to the approach that it suggests is that it depends on good-faith actors to always act in the best interests of the community, which lets face it, is never going to happen. So it's high time that we found some OTHER solution that may be practically more viable. Ironically, the magazine https://kbin.social/m/bestof really does look like one solution to that problem: it gathers the nuggets from across the site and places them there to be read. But it also requires far too much effort, compared to just clicking the equivalent of an upvote or boost button, to be able to rank content by popularity according to some other measure than just "cool meme bro".
I suppose you could also make an alt account, or even on your main, simply unsubscribe from every magazine like m/memes, or m/starwars, etc. By curating your experience, you can tailor it more to your liking. Although then if you visit those communities, you won't see any comments in those articles while still logged into that account, so it's kind-of a one-way ticket for it to disappear for you, not something that you can easily toggle back-and-forth depending on your mood, from one account.
I suppose you could also make an alt account, or even on your main, simply unsubscribe from every magazine like m/memes, or m/starwars, etc. By curating your experience, you can tailor it more to your liking.
Wait, doesn't everybody do this? Currently, my lemmy account is my "meme" account and this, my kbin account, is my "discussion" account where I try to respond more thoughtfully to things. (but I do more "subscribing" than "unsubscribing")
I think a lot of people may be less technically proficient, and especially if they are trying to perfectly replicate the Reddit experience it just isn't there yet. There are lots of things possible to do - use multiple browsers, each logged in to a different account, or the same with apps, etc. But one issue I could foresee with that is that anytime you want to block something on one (like a magazine that speaks in a different language), you'd have to replicate that with the other.
As someone who was originally part of the Voat migration, I was very skeptical of the move to fediverse precisely because of how Voat ended up shaping up to be. Hell, part of the reason I'm on kbin and not lemmy is because of the huge pro-Russian presence on lemmy.ml. Not all of us who migrated to Voat during those days were bigoted, or had actively hateful views towards certain groups of people, and early Voat wasn't a total right wing cesspool. I simply wanted to support a grassroots platform that promised to provide an alternative to what was then becoming a highly centralized platform. Ultimately the worst of the worst won out over the reasonable people who were there, and the myriad of technical failings on the web host's part made us regret being there, and it's ultimately why I abandoned the platform.
I still fear that happening with kbin, but because of the different circumstances of the current migration, the nature of the fediverse, and the more diverse make up of people on this site, we are at least in less danger of the crazies running the show. My biggest fear is this site failing on the technological front, as there are still many aspects that feel unfinished, and with the recent situation on lemmy.world with user LMAO, there are still a lot of fundamental problems with the site that could be its downfall if not swiftly addressed.
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I really hope that all of the interesting discussion here doesn't eventually get buried by memes like back on Reddit
It will be filled with memes, just like reddit.
That's the side effect of popularity. That's the "peanut gallery" effect.
The first people joining any media platform do it out of interest. Because there is the technical hurdle to pass. That's why the first subs you see are always very technical. First were /programming/, /linux, hardware, /java, then /atheism. Stuff that people want to talk about. There was no /interestingasfuck in the first days of the previous media platform. These misc subs appeared the last.
Now look at the avalanche of subs with zero posts we have. Theses subs are created for popularity, not by interest. They were created day one! Waiting for content. The writing is on the wall.
The "peanut gallery" joins in for the popularity, not by interest. It is attracted by the gravity effect of other people. That's where the buzz is. And the "peanut gallery" outnumbers us 10 to 1 easily. Once the platform becomes popular is when you will say goodbye to it the same way you said goodbye to reddit. You left reddit like many others because you spend more time clicking the minimize button rather than reading interesting content.
That's why we should not celebrate the rising numbers of accounts on kbin. Each more subscriber get us closer to the critical mass where the posts are not created out of interest but to increase reputation. You already know the process anyway, you've seen it in action too.
Eventually, we need to get to the place where we’re creating unique meme formats
I agree with what you're saying in general, but I really hope that all of the interesting discussion here doesn't eventually get buried by memes like back on Reddit. Memes can be fun and all, but sorting a lot of otherwise really great niche-subs by top of all time back there was often a case of finding nothing of value at all because there were 50 pages of fucking memes at the top of the list. Personal preference, of coarse
It sounds alot like your telling people how they should talk and act, thats not how the internet or social media works. One of my favorite boards right now in the fediverse, especially after a long day is 196. I would rather see 100 posts from 196 then another post about leaving reddit. And i can do that by filtering and subbing. thats how this all works,
I'm not telling anyone to do anything, I'm stating my opinion about what I think works and why.
Different things.
And since you mentioned 196. It's still a decent example. I have 196 blocked because for me it's just noise that I don't want to see, because for me the content there has zero value.
The fact that I can block it completely (for me), get the result that I want and yet have that not effect anyone else's use of it at all is literally a good thing.
I personally find the entire sub worthless because of the almost total noise to signal ratio problems there, but that's personal preference on my part only, which I'm entitled to and merely means that I don't personally find the place useful. Having these sorts of things separate means that it works for everyone regardless of their preferences.
Also, If I did still wish to see 196 occasionally, I can choose to either just go there, or unblock it temporarily, and nothing I'm doing effects anyone else at all.
None of this is telling others what they're allowed to do, it's the opposite.
196 is a practically random community anyway, it's chaos and there's no real way to "drown out" the content internally with memes or anything because the memes are just as much the content there as anything else could be.
This is good to know. This needs to be the thing that happens when you click the actual picture. We shouldn't need to know this as a medium-advanced protip.
Though I know they're still working their butts off just to keep the thing floating right now. Lots going on for a small team. One thing at a time!
you have to be logged in to see that icon. I learned that as I was going to ask "what icon?! I dont see anything". I guess I was logged out, but when I logged in, the icon appeared.
As I’ve been lurking around the fediverse, running instances seems to be universally a hobby project, and it’s a little concerning. It kind of gives the impression of all being idealistic young kids embarrassed to ascribe value to their own time. I mean, you can do a lot with volunteer labor, especially if it’s a good ecosystem with appropriate recognition and gratitude, but the people are absolutely the most valuable parts of kbin.social, lemmy.world, etc, and they do have to eat, pay rent, go on vacation. It’s tough to respond to a 3am message about your instance being hacked if you have a job to be at four hours later, and leads to a whole different kind of burnout.
It’s early days yet, but I hope the bigger instance teams get some input from people who’ve managed growth spurts in non-profits, and especially the transition to their first paid staff members (even when that staff member is the owner).
@elscallr Well some history. IPv4 (and later IPv6 now) was meant to connect computers together, ideally without any router/modem in between but each device directly on the web (but ipv6 came too late). So we got an interconnected web.
Later Tim Berners-Lee just want to have a human-readable documents to be linked together, with a distributed architecture that would see those documents stored on multiple servers, controlled by different people, and interconnected. I think the fediverse comes pretty close to this idea.
I also think big companies and centralized solutions might make it easier for the user, but we also now know all the downsides of those solutions from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft,... you are the product.
Ackshually yeah you're right, but I was simplifying.
I'm 25 years older than you are, if you're the person in your pfp, and was there when you had to dial into the service you wanted to use. Not saying that to flex, just to say... I fucking know.
The contraction we're seeing in the tech space this year is in large part a consequence of venture capitalist funding. A significant portion of tech sites were being funded at a loss, with the idea that profitability could be achieved after establishing a userbase. Rising interest rates pushed the VCs to put pressure on the companies they invested in: "no more free lunch, realize our gains now". This is why you see a rash of tech sites abruptly restructuring (Discord) or completely collapsing (gfycat). Reddit falls somewhere between the two, because it's likely they're seeking an IPO and they don't care about the fate of the website once they cash out. Twitter is ruled by an emperor with no clothes. Facebook can't make as much money as it did prior to the added government scrutiny, and the Zuck has been frantically trying to diversify his company these past few years.
This is a long-winded way of saying that ernest deserves a lot of praise here for being realistic and up front with the operating costs of running the largest kbin instance. lemmy and kbin draw inspiration from the social media platforms that came before them, but can't budget for growth the same way that their predecessors did. It's not going to be cheap, they aren't going to get the free lunch that prior social media platforms had, and ernest needs to proceed with the well-being of both himself and his project in mind.
I saw my first beheading at the age of 12 on ebaums world. My buddy got targeted by a pedophile and sent child pornography on a messaging board. Half the sites were on angelfire or geocities and featured constant porn pop-ups. My email was absolutely filled with dick pill spam immediately. Newgrounds was a super popular site with kids my age and like half of it was porn games. There was this really annoying emoji banner ad on like every site that would constantly shout “OH MY GOD NO WAAYY” and “SAY SOMETHING” (seriously it happened so much I can still hear it).
I don’t know that the internet “worked fine” lol. I mean, I think I turned out alright, but if my parents knew what I was seeing on the internet they never would’ve let me on the computer again.
I agree ... one of the greatest things I've seen in FOSS has been #HomeAssistant growing to the point that Nabu Casa can employee 25 people to work on the project (I have no idea if they're all full time or what, but I know at least a decent chunk are).
If I spin up an instance, whether it stays afloat is between me and the people on my instance, but if we want the flagship to stay up and for our dev to have the time/willingness to make improvements, he needs to get paid. Even just project managing a project of this size is an immense undertaking and just accepting PR's from others can get to be crazy.
I'd honestly prefer to not have to decide between "I want this to go to /kbin" or "Ernest is 'allowed' to buy a beer with this". I'd prefer to donate to something that ensures /Kbins needs are met for x amount of months and then the rest is split between employees of the org at whatever ratio is agreed upon. That's just my $.02 ... I really do appreciate that Ernest wants to be so careful with the fund though, I just don't want the /Kbin account to be sitting multi-thousands of dollars in the black while Ernest is struggling with basic subsistence.
Hmm. Interestingly, I just tried it again and it seems the issue may have fixed itself (probably affected by the other changes). If it does start again I'll make a report. Thanks!
Great work guys, really happy with how many tweaks, bug fixes and be additions we got in. Super super keen to get the click to toggle comment functionally in (love it on mobile) along with some of the new bigger pieces
lol I got super confused cos I could've SWORN your PR that you're working on atm about user profiles was merged already, but after the update the 2nd display name is still there....so I was like, did anything change? when did the commits go up to? and then I realized this PR isn't merged yet and heavily 🤦♀️
Hopefully soon! Adjusted styles on it so it doesn't overflow now which is great, waiting on it to get reviewed. Be good to get rid of all these extra parts of the system that aren't really helpful.
Thanks for the updates Ernest, just fyi I had to delete the pwa I had for kbin and reinstall it to get the updates. Maybe have to adjust something in your manifest to auto update? I'll take a look at code later. Really happy so far tho, the screen lock is a life saver!!
The manifest is a pain. Apparently even updating the theme_color should be enough to force chrome to download a new version and update the local client, but that can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or so 😰
I've found deleting it and reinstalling thankfully works and now shows the fancy icon on Android
Reddit was something unique and personal to each user. Some it was new, some it was the only place to find specific tech or other advice that wasn't corrupted by ads and algorithms on goggle and other big corporations.
Reddit was my way of disengaging from world news before I knew about anxiety, and how things could affect me and become personal even though I had no way to help world events. So I used it to personalize my mental diet, if I was creative I could sub to many craft subs like leather or metal etc, it's where I went to get other perspectives on movies and content that I didn't fully understand.
End of the day, is all that possible still on Reddit, kinda, but it's going away, and they pushed me personally to leave as I could see it was becoming google/Facebook, ad algorithms to push what people pay for or get paid for. So time to reset.
Become involved, I'm way more involved and adding to discussions on the new sites I'm on. Everyone adding comments and posts and perspectives and opinions are building this up from bottom up.
You are the future, make your perspective part of the future by helping guide these new sites to something we can be proud of.
I’m upvoting your comment because you bring up great points, but I personally disagree with the disengaging from world events aspect. I’ll miss the niche subreddits that helped you solve the most random of issues, but I think reddit was far from a great place to disengage from news and the political discourse brought by news. Ever since the 2016 election cycle, I personally saw a considerable increase of posts regarding politics that came from both established subreddits and new ones that popped up (like /r/enoughtrumpspam which simply added more spam to the pile).
I think Trump’s campaign and presidency really ignited a lot of this, and while I neither like nor support Trump, I miss when the biggest disruptions were from isolated events (like the Occupy Wall Street movement or the Ellen Pao fiasco) rather than 4 years of a presidential tenure.
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
Kbin and the rest of the fediverse will grow, and I’m aware that the same kind of posting will find its way here, too. Thankfully the fediverse lets you subscribe to multiple communities of the same name, so maybe /m/news isn’t up one’s alley but /c/news is, for example.
I didn’t realize how shit reddit was getting until I stopped using it. The constant barrage of political shit accompanied by low effort comments/puns did a number on my happiness. I stopped using Facebook for similar reasons.
I’m glad you’re also adopting the mindset of being an active contributor. For years I also just would scroll and seldom upvote, but if we want to make “this house a home”, we need to put in the effort ourselves! I look forward to seeing how this all plays out. So far, I am very optimistic. I hope you find your niche interested here sooner than later!
After years of nonsense, it all just got tiring. You can curate your reddit experience, but what happens when all the political doom scrolling finds its way into your favorite subreddits?
I'm not much into US politics, but you know, this reminds me of why I started disengaging from my own country subreddit. At the start it was mostly about the people and the community, and I liked talking to people and hearing their problems. I was hosting regular get-togethers and eventually became a mod. As Reddit got more mainstreatm, the anti-government political people started coming in and well, I don't want to be hearing about moaning all the time. These people also had a terrible persucation complex (not helped by my country's history of surpressing opposition views), so any attempt to moderate these people when their posts and comments got excessive and off-topic was met with fierce pushback. I just wanted a more positive place for people, instead of endless political bickering.
Until I got to the part about your country's history of suppressing opposition, I thought you were talking about my country's subreddit!
We went through the exact same trajectory from being a small friendly place with meetups, getting bigger, becoming negative and political arguments all the time. In the end I stopped dropping in there at all.
Might have worked. They created one for my country, and also we could filter out politics on the main sub, but some people still just bring it up in other threads.
I always stuck with front page and never was on popular or all, I feel that was my saving grace. Also reposts and crossposted content drove me batty, so overtime unsubbed from groups that got political or negative. I wasn't subbing to just kitty cat pictures, more so hobbies, movies, and specific YouTubers like rlm etc. That's why I mentioned that everyone's experience was different, just a few different subs and the whole experience is different.
I'm in a demographic that people actively try to push and radicalize as well, so even if I am frustrated with things and how they affect me, I always keep one foot out and try to be super aware of that. I feel some, not all obviously get caught up over time and it erodes who they are and normalizes some really crazy things. So when I realize something like American politics is affecting me and my day, as a Canadian, I step back and look at what I'm letting into my mental diet.
End of day I hope we all learn from the past and can improve on what worked and avoid what didn't. There's no reason to not learn from the past and try to grow in a positive way.
Absolutely this. It got very homogenized. I joined reddit for the variety of people and their ability to understand topics I'd like to understand better. Then it all turned to bots and reposts. Then I would unsub from one subreddit and migrate to the new sub that was similar to the sub I just abandoned until the new sub became infested with bots and reposts, then rinse and repeat.
I feel like I can do away with the doomscrolling and time-wasting, but it's the specific advice and hobby subs that will be difficult to tear away from completely.
I'm also going to have trouble avoiding my city's local subreddit. It's definitely a hub for everything going on here, and I've made some real life friends on there who I plan on keeping up with.
What I liked about reddit was its "googleability". You had a question and found an answer without reading through an endless article that winds it's way through rephrasing your question 5 times, adds extensive biographies of everyone mentioned, the wider history of the problem and the author's grandmother, all to pad the article and have you scroll through more adds.
But now there's ChatGPT, so most of my "googling" can be done that way, and I don't have to scroll through walls of puns or "this is the way" or "thanks for the gold, kind stranger", or "take my updoot and get out". I wonder how much of that bullshit were bots, anyway.
First thing I did when I got chat got was use it as a search engine, it's not perfect, but google should wake up, when something is better at its own game accidentally, imagine what's possible if they don't fix their algorithm
It's possible that this is a consequence of the latest Lemmy update, in which a lot has changed. I have noted that kbin has some issues with request signature in communication with certain instances. I will try to check it tomorrow first thing in the morning.
It takes time. I just setup my own instance and I sent a comment from there, it took 40 minutes to arrive on kbin.social, upvotes and replies have not made it back to my instance yet some 45-60mins after they happened.
Because, when you post here from kbin.social any other instance with [email protected] will get a copy of that and vice-versa. But each side is exchanging posts from multiple magazines to multiple other instances. It's also balancing resource usage for people visiting the site too.
Also new instances are gradually fetching the back-catalog of posts for various magazines (and communities on lemmy). So all of this leads to a delay.
Anecdotally the delay is quite short this morning. Yesterday it reached up to 2 hours from my view at least.
Case in point, it took less than a minute for this to reach my instance (this is me, posting from my instance... Maybe I should have used another username... This one has a picture, is the instance me).
I don't understand why the delay is so high thought.
I just downloaded several GB in a few seconds, what is stalling the process that when only a few bits of information are exchanged? That seems unnatural.
I am severely underestimating the bandwidth load?
Well, there's a bit to unpack here. When you download something in seconds that's your whole connection to a server that is on a super fast connection.
Most people running instances are on a much more modest combination of hardware and connection and even the bigger ones (kbin.social etc) are not going to have a connection as fast as dedicated download CDNs can offer. I would expect they probably have a gigabit, and at most 10gbit. That's shared between everyone on the site downloading cat pictures, posting, refreshing AND the federation of all the new content to and from other instances.
But that's really not the problem here at all. Far more of a load is the processing of the incoming and outgoing messages to and from many instances. This takes CPU load (and to a lesser extent memory), and this is shared between the message queue for these inter-instance messages, the web server and database.
When you look at how the fediverse of kbin and lemmy is laid out. You will see there's a handful of larger instances with most of the popular magazines/communities. This means that they're doing the lion's share of this processing. Couple the fact that the population has exploded over the last month or so, even these larger instances might be struggling with hardware and/or infrastructure layout (maybe running all on one box, and needing to split the load for example). That's speculation though.
At any rate, for whatever reason (maybe the lemmy problems backing up message queues with errors) things were MUCH slower last night.
Until kbin.social servers are fully upgraded, such delays will occur. Even afterwards, it might happen if the other instance is running on slow servers. We are still in the early stages of this platform, and there is no huge corporate throwing money at us (it is so early that there hasn't even been an actual 'Release' yet). These quirks are to be expected as kbin develops.
Wow, thank you for the quick communication. Amazing aptitude. Almost nowhere else do you find a lead dev in the comment trenches letting us know what's happening, I'm kinda baffled.
I've noticed we are also not federating with lemmy.wtf for some reason, maybe it's something related. They are connected well with other lemmy instances but kbin can't get a hold of them despite being on their list of linked instances
People who hoard more money than they can spend in several lifetimes while people are literally dying in the streets cannot be good. These things are mutually exclusive.
For me personally it's more a question of does your money hoarding system exploit people or is it family money that's been made unethically. I think keeping that kind of money to yourself is unethical. And I don't mean you should go living from riches to rags but recognize that you own something to society and do something about it.
Another way to describe individuals who hoard enormous amounts of wealth to the detriment of society and other humans is ... pathologically unsound and incapable of compassion or empathy for others around them
Hopefully more people contribute, and on a regular basis. Even if everyone on average double the default amount, it's only like $7500 so far, which isn't that much in the scheme of things.
Ok, so in the next few days, I'll be testing some things. It might be a bit worse for a while, but it will definitely speed up the problem-solving process. I'll be grateful for any feedback. I'm unable to reproduce it in local/testing environments, so it might be an issue with the cluster.
This is anecdotal, but I don't experience these log outs on fedia (I have to relog like once every few days but that doesn't bother me, I assumed it was cookie expiry but maybe it has to do with server restarts or something). So I can understand if it happens more often to kbin social users it might be some other way it's set up like caching or something that others might not be running. Then again, without version info, it makes it a bit tough to debug so this might not be helpful, fedia could be running some random sha atm which might be the reason.
I'm not sure if it helps, but I wonder if this is linked to the inactivity error.
Load up any kbin thread or main page, open a new browser tab in the foreground, me around in the non-kbin tab for 15-30 minutes, and return to the kbin tab. Now any clicks on 'actions' (voting, posting, basically sending info to the server) sends you to an error page. Whatever info you were sending doesn't register (vote count or highlight, posts don't show up, etc.
I didn't have any logout problems at all until maybe a week ago. Since then I've been logged out 5+ times.
Not a big problem for me, but I could see it annoying others.
Slightly annoyingly spending 10min drafting a comment seems to cause the same on occasion. (I guess there is no activity outside the edit box).
Fortunately if I get an error after posting, usually going back means the text is still there, then it's usually copy the text, click through to the profile of the person I was replying to and post the comment from that page. So far that almost always works.
Weirdly I don't seem to get logged out, just randomly directed to a error page when interacting (e.g. upvoting or trying to comment).
Edit: I don't think I can reliably recreate this issue...
I've developed a habit of copying everything I write before I hit send, because my comments tend to take a long time for me to write/format to my liking. Not because I keep losing it, but just in case.
Usually when it times out in the comments, I get brought to a page containing my lone comment box and a notification about "something-something, this page is federated, click here to return to the comments section."
So I wonder if it's really related in part to the page's continually updating federation making whatever you're trying to interact with obsolete. Though that doesn't make as much sense to me on our timelines as it does in a comment section :/
I've only had to dig around in someone else's profile twice, and that was because the notification's link to whatever reply you're trying to check doesn't seem to be mixing with numbered forum pages. By the time I check my replies, they're usually on a different page than I'm being linked to.
I don't think this has to do away with the numbering, it would just require a different method of linking (right?). But it IS one of the finer annoyances, and that I usually consent to scan/reread the entire thread looking for my avvie speaks to how stubborn I am.
I've had a similar experience. Only thing I can add is that more rarely even refreshing the page doesn't resolve running into an error page when voting on some comments. However, each time I was able to visit the user's profile and vote from there without issue.
Apparently, the error condition might NOT be dependent on idle time (a period of time without any interaction). — Evidence: Periodic clicks on a vote button, scripted at 45-second intervals, did not prevent the error's eventual occurrence.
If I had to guess it’s probably the stickiness of the session (which user is assigned to which server on the cluster) that expires after a certain time which leads to needing a new login or in the case of the error page a CSRF token which isn’t valid on this server of the cluster.
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