Why we need to move on from kbin.social

I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We've left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc..

But we need to spread out.

Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.

A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from 'the bird site' (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk's new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.

We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.

I'm a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:

https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105

The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting 'off the record'. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.

And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.

I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It's the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn't really register with me until I spoke with this person.

https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3

Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:

https://kbin.social

We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.

Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.

TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.

I invite correction and clarifications.

EDIT: Adding further sources below.

Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207

Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible

Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d

Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media

Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618

And a cartoon to boot

https://cutie.city/@nuz/110602855304673785

brilokuloj,
@brilokuloj@kbin.social avatar

I plan on switching instances whenever account transfer becomes feasible! But as it stands right now I'd rather not have to get my account set up all over again for another instance that might potentially go down or make radical changes. That was the very thing that put me off of Mastodon, before they added migration, and I'd rather not repeat that again. (If you have more time and energy than I do, and you're thinking about manually migrating - absolutely do so)

mohawk,
@mohawk@kbin.social avatar

I fully intend to self host once the software matures a bit, so there's that. Hopefully that comes sooner rather than later.

Countmacula,

Honestly this is a pretty small community. The whole platform needs to mature a little before we start “spreading out”

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

When I joined kbin.social it was the only kbin instance. Or at least the only one that was actually online at the time.

When there's a way to migrate accounts I'll definitely look into moving somewhere else, though, for the sake of load balancing if nothing else.

Jcb2016,

I agree with this but also I have an account on lemmy mastodon and kbin. the only reason i use kbin so much is because it has Threads, Microblogging and magazines. I really like the microblogging cause i can see all the mastodon and other people. yea but we do need to go to smaller servers and still interact. Whatever Meta touches turns to shit!

Flax_vert,

Kbin can see lemmy pretty sure. I am on a lemmy instance and can see this magazine so

sentient_loom,

Yeah they're not perfectly synchronized but I can interact across platforms and instances.

Jormar,
@Jormar@kbin.social avatar

@Gargleblaster Many thanks, this post is as much enlightening as it frightens me. Those who wished ill for us exist and have the means to do so.

Rentlar,

KBin has been appealing to some over Lemmy because of the similarness to Reddit and less of a learning curve due to federation.

I’m a proponent of spreading out but it does have its faults as of current: fractured content across many similar communities, more server management needed (though less cost per server). Discovering other instances from your own is harder, defederation and server politics and bots in some cases.

I like how it is in Lemmy hopping between servers, but honestly some don’t like to that and that’s fine. People on the largest servers should definitely support the server admins financially if they can.

Gargleblaster,
@Gargleblaster@kbin.social avatar

You can move to another kbin instance and still participate here.

shadowtux,
@shadowtux@kbin.social avatar

I fully agree with you. The thing is that with /kbin that it's not ready to be fully used yet and there's quite a many growing pains still. I've tried to self host and been on couple of other instances and it's not been working well on different levels compared to kbin.social that has been working quite great since registration. My end goal is to self host it for my self sometime in the future but not yet.

Gargleblaster,
@Gargleblaster@kbin.social avatar

I didn't say to self host. Just move over to something like kbin.cafe, which has far fewer users than kbin.social and you can still see, comments, and post over here.

Varyag,
@Varyag@kbin.social avatar

I already have a few accounts on different Lemmy instances but you might have a point there. I'll see about other kbin instances, although this one is already cozy for me. Hopefully won't run into federation issues when going to another one like this very one had in the week of the Rexxit.

llama,
@llama@midwest.social avatar

Don’t do the work of monopolizing for them! The great thing about the fediverse is that we can all spread out and it doesn’t really affect the user experience but it sure makes it a lot harder for wall street to buy a large portion of the network.

ColonelSanders,

I actually started with an account on Fedia.io before coming here, but they're down like 90% of the time and I fear it might be too much for Jerry (operator of that instance) to keep up with, at least for now. But having an account on multiple servers that I can bounce between when such things happen has been nice.

FreeBooteR69,
@FreeBooteR69@kbin.social avatar

Nothing wrong with having accounts across instances. I use lemmy.ca as well as kbin, a few across mastodon, not a big deal with me to be honest.

Grimpen,

Heck, I’m reading and replying from Lemmy.ca, and subscribing to a kbin Magazine was relatively painless.

I’ve been meaning to set up a kbin account so I can compare, but Lemmy has been good enough that I haven’t bothered yet.

Either way, thanks to Federation, kbin & Lemmy aren’t really competing like Digg and Reddit back in the day.

Awwab,
@Awwab@kbin.social avatar

I may move on to a private or semi privately run instance in the future but I'm definitely a fan of kbin over Lemmy and the current state of self hosting kbin is a mess. When things have gotten better on that front I will look at moving on and expanding the fediverse.

abff08f4813c, (edited )

Yeah, that's one of the things kinda holding me back for now as well.

Edit: I fnally gave it a shot. It turned out to be pretty easy. I just followed the admin guide on kbin's codeberg at https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki#admin-guide and scrolled down to the "Install with Docker" section.

Did this on an M1 Mac that already had Docker Desktop set up, so basically I skipped the first four subsections as not relevant and went straight down to the "Clone repo" subsection. (After cloning the repo, there is a section on getting docker-ce set up for Linux/GNU that I skipped).

I simply did "docker compose build" and didn't explicitly need to build fresh images. Then I ran "docker compose up" and the system was up.

Going to https://kbin.localhost .. told me that I forgot to build my npm or yarn assets. Whoops!

Since I didn't want to mess around with yarn on the host system (though that probably would have worked if I tried) I just found the kbin-php container id by checking the list from "docker ps" and then used "docker exec -it [kbin-php-container-id] /bin/sh" to log in with a shell. Then I ran "apk add yarn" followed by "yarn install" and "yarn build"

After that everything worked.

Somehow I missed seeing the configuration section, and so I created an admin user by registering a new user through the UI, and then running "docker exec -it [postgres-contanier-id] psql -U kbin kbin" to connect direcly to the database. Using psql I executed "update "user" set roles="['ROLE_ADMIN']", is_verified=true where id = 1;" then logged out and logged back in get recognized as an admin.

Finally I went ahead and created the random magazine through the UI.

Something is still off. The UI works fine and anything locally is good, but I can not seem to subscribe to magazines on other instances or even search for them from my own kbin.local - they just comes up empty. Not sure why this is happening but I'll update as soon as I learn more!

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