I just need a little more time. There will likely be a technical break announced tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Along with the migration to new servers, we will be introducing new moderation tools that I am currently working on and testing (I had it planned for a bit later in my roadmap). Then, I will address your reports and handle them very seriously. I try my best to delete sensitive content, but with the current workload and ongoing relocation, it takes a lot of time. I am being extra cautious now. The regulations are quite general, and I would like to refine them together with you and do everything properly. For now, please make use of the option to block the magazine/author.
Multipile Things I noticed as a creater of this thread:
can I close comments ?
can I hide comments ?
can I pin a response?
can I quickly see from what server peope are interacting?
I am no coder but would love to support you with all the work that is done.
At least some of the costs can be taken of your shoulders:
All the things you mentioned are in the roadmap. However, we can either do it quickly and potentially encounter issues in a few weeks or months, or take a bit more time for a more thorough approach. I've decided to move away from playful prototyping. From now on, every change will be tested before it's approved for kbin.social - it's no longer just my code (https://lab2.kbin.pub/). I'd like to close this thread for you... but can we just agree not to respond in it anymore? ;p
I don't think closing threads is a great idea or in keeping with how this all works. I think it'd be nice to be able to mute a thread as an individual, but by its nature these discussions are open and shared with many instances. If we close it on kbin.social, other kbin instances, lemmy instances, and even places like mastodon and pixelfed could keep discussing, if I understand activity pub correctly.
In such important tasks, I would like to engage in community-driven development. When I start planning these tasks, I will come to you with my whiteboard and sketch out the individual stages. Together, we will look for the advantages and disadvantages of such a solution, the weak and strong points. This is to jointly make a decision on whether the change makes sense on kbin.social but also in the perspective of the entire federation. It can be a great fun ;)
Let's all agree that of its many issues, locking/deleting open threats to targeted minority groups and pro supremacist propaganda meant to hurt or influence vulnerable people was NOT a drawback of the Reddit experience.
Yes, it's a difficult thing to enforce a subjective line of a basic standard of decency, but it's also what a society is and one of the main reasons we gather as people. The quality of a group is shown in how they accommodate the weakest and most vulnerable among them.
If we aren't prioritizing a way to send this CHUD and people liked them to the hypothetical edge of town, to be sure they can't bombard the young person struggling with their gender identity with targeted hate at their weakest moment, then what are we doing here?
Could you clarify what you would do in cases like this? Censor based on misinterpretation of the clickbait headline, even if it does not contain hate content at all?
A friendly reminder; Please don't forget to take your time and step away from Kbin whenever you need a break. Your mental health is just as important, if not most important, for the project to succeed.
Everyone appreciates your effort here, ernest. Spez hasn't gotten 92 upvotes on a comment in years lmao despite Reddit having millions of users, it really shows how the difference.
I joined kbin recently and I'm kind of concerned about the implications of this. I don't support those posts at all, but who gets to say what's worth banning and what not? Wouldn't that go against the decentralized nature of the site? Or is it the specific instance that magazine is on that has the authority to ban what's inside? How does all of this work?
Edit: my bad, I got kbin and kbin.social mixed up. Noob mistake.
kbin.social administration controls only what is published on kbin.social, and what content from elsewhere kbin.social users can see. An user banned from kbin.social can make another account, on another site and start recreate there his banned community. kbin.social will be able to ban this remote user and remote community, but this restricts only what kbin.social users can see.
Exactly the same for another /kbin or lemmy site - just replace the domain name accordingly.
While I kind of agree with you in being concerned about who gets to control what we see and don't see and the censorship aspect, there is also "the paradox of tolerance" to be considered and maybe in that light it is correct to not tolerate that subs intolerance.
Wouldn't that go against the decentralized nature of the site?
No, it's exactly the opposite. The entire point of a decentralized federation is that while yes, the admin is in complete control of what content is allowed on his or her own instance, users who don't like what the admin is doing can just spin up their own new instances.
Ernest can ban this type of content if he likes. Others can take the kbin software and make a new instance where it's welcome. Ernest can choose not to federate with that instance if they continue to push content that's against his rules, but Ernest doesn't have the power to dictate the direction for hundreds of millions of users' experience like a certain centralized site's mad CEO or admin board does.
What would be against the nature of ActivityPub is if Ernest built something into the software to prevent it being used for types of content he doesn't like, even on other instances.
The Fediverse is decentralized. The individual instances are not. Decentralization means that there's no one person or organization with power over the entire network, but people absolutely can and should moderate their own instances. If you don't like the moderation policies of once instance you can move to another.
The regulations are quite general, and I would like to refine them together with you and do everything properly.
I have been wondering how instance-wide moderation will end up looking on kbin, once you've had a chance to get a team in place for that. While it is (I assume) a "generalist" instance, it's important to keep in mind that you can't please everyone. Trying to have too broad of an audience will just result in retaining those with a high tolerance for toxicity (usually highly toxic themselves), while everyone else leaves in favor of better-managed spaces.
Communities in general, and particularly on the internet, need to understand what their purpose is, and be proactive about filtering out those that are incompatible with that purpose. This doesn't mean judging those people as wrong, or "bad people", it just means recognizing that not everyone is going to get along, and that some level of group cohesion needs to be maintained.
Agreed, that's part of my problem with generalist instances. They're so broad that they serve multiple communities with differing expectations, and it forces admins to take sides.
I think there is value in having both generalist and specialized instances, and the big landing spots for new users should probably strive to be more generalist. As you point out though, there are limits to how broad of an audience one can practically cater to.
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.
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
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
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.
We (meaning the whole fediverse, all instances) need to be de-federating that crap immediately.
Nothing good will come from having Facebook streaming into here in anyway whatsoever.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
Also, if Facebook is allowed to "work with" the development of the fediverse at all, they absolutely will eventually destroy it for profit. And "working with" it absolutely includes them federating with it.
When their vast resources are taken into account, and their existing userbase also, they would rapidly become the main instance (or collection of, but probably just one) of the whole fediverse. Once that's them, they can use that position to dictate terms pretty hard.
Before you know it, everyone that would eventually have come here are there instead, and they're now the fediverse. They can also fork the software and leverage their Dev teams to make their fediverse vastly more polished... No donations needed on their fediverse, less bugs, everyone you know is already over there... Seem familiar?
How does that effect us who aren't there, how isn't it just the same thing as now? Our fediverse dies off because the users leave, instances close down through lack of population/need, before you know it there's nobody here and the idea just dies.
The Fediverse as a whole needs to be a separate place so that people can leave places like that.
The beauty of the fediverse is precisely that it is not monolithic. Each instance can be different, have different policies and decide who it wants to federate with. Some instances will federate with anyone, some with most, some with a few, some with none.
The claim that that the fediverse needs to be a monolithic whole, where all instances walk in lock-step with each other is entirely at odds with the fediverse philosophy.
this argument makes sense only if you're talking about defederating instances. It doesn't make sense here. The problem is not whether we want the users of meta's instances. The problem is whether we want a huge corp be part of the fediverse. And why are we talking about it? Because people are trying not being naive and believing that meta is here because they liked the ideas of a federated network and want to participate. Meta will cause more harm than good as it has already happened in the past in different technologies/projects.
This conversation has been going on Mastodon for a while now. The problem kind of boils down to the following: there are people who think Meta is a bad actor and having the literal entire rest of the fediverse defederating is the best way of dealing with that. And there are people who also agree that Meta is a bad actor, and think that partial defederation is the best way of dealing with it.
Its really hard to come (read: impossible) to come to a consensus on this, because part of the argument about what is a better tactical approach depends on knowing how Threads implements things like account portability, and this is currently unknown. Most people even assumed that Threads would not implement this at all, but Adam Mosseri just announced that this is an important feature, so who even knows.
It's an unpopular opinion here, but I truly think Meta joining is being a little blown out of proportion.
The fediverse is simply not valuable enough to EEE. We're a tiny niche of nerds who all have ublock installed. Meta wants a low effort solution to eat Twitters lunch, and saw bluesky do well.
We could even see this as an opportunity to grow. You can join mastodon AND find famous people to follow. Thread users themselves may realize the moderation sucks and go elsewhere.
Defedrating at best makes Threads roll back their activitypub use...and their millions of users are in a walled garden again. We did it fedi!
The only thing naiive is the people in here thinking that defederating from Meta accomplishes anything whatsoever.
Oh boo hoo, meta's instance is shinier than ours, doesn't that mean users will leave? Yeah, look around, they already will and are leaving for Meta's platforms, they have more users on Threads in 24hrs than the Fediverse has had in it's entire life.
the defederation has nothing to do with "reducing meta's number". The reason to defederate is so you're not playing their game with their own rules. Fediverse will gain absolutely nothing by playing meta's game.
Everyone keeps talking in analogies like "playing their game" because if you said "we gain nothing by getting a ton of free content from Threads users" it would sound ridiculous.
I mean, I'll give you a non-analogy argument. That "ton of free content from Threads users" is not desireable. In fact, if early reports are anything to go by, Threads is already largely populated by brands and thoughtfluencers, all in a race to the bottom to capitalize on mindshare in a new, unexplored space.
IMO, neither that content nor those users would be beneficial for the fediverse in the long run.
Kbin, ~57,000 users in a few months
Threads, ~10,000,000 users in a day
I don't think you understand the scale of the dynamics at play. Quantity != quality, but even if Kbin were to take all of Reddit's market share, there would still be orders of magnitude less content than Meta/Twitter.
i'm not here for the ton of content that meta will produce. If I wanted this content I would had been there in the first place. It looks like somebody else is in the wrong place and is dreaming of a fediverse full of brands trying to promote their products and the influencers pretending they are real life advertisements.
No, I'm just not willfully blind to the fact that social networks are only valuable when people use them. Reddit wasn't great because it was a niche forum with a handful of decentralized tech enthusiasts, Reddit was great because it was a big non-gatekeeping umbrella that welcomed everyone.
sure. But reddit was very far from what FB and instagram are. The culture that FB and/or instagram bring with them, is something that if I liked, I would had been there already
Here's the thing. No matter what the Supreme Court says, a corporation is NOT a person.
Facebook/Meta can't be welcomed, it is a construct without feeling. It is a massive profit-driven engine with no sense of fairness or ethics.
Anyone who uses Facebook can be welcomed, provided they make accounts and instances. But to allow a profit-driven engine like Meta to run an instance? That's not a good idea.
I’m neither in favor nor against defederation, I’m fine letting the community make that decision. But if you think this is the argument being made you haven’t been paying any attention at all.
If this were just some problematic instance (or a group of them, even) I'd entirely agree with you, but this is Facebook, the damage that they're almost certainly planning and are entirely capable of requires (at least in my opinion), a different solution.
Please note that I'm suggesting this as an entirely unusual solution to a very unusual problem. Not as some sort of standard practice.
You haven't articulated a problem, let alone described how this particular solution solves it. Meta building a better version of your platform that siphons away users is a problem regardless of whether or not you federate with them / regardless of whether their platform is even built to support activitypub. Federation has no bearing on that one way or another.
I don't want content stemming from a place that's controlled by advertisers and other large companies. If we're federated with Meta then that means your decentralized independent instance would still have advertiser driven, heavily capitalist and consumer manipulative content domineering and running through its veins.
That's a specific thing that I've read many people enjoy getting away from when it comes to joining the Fediverse.
Fully agree. The reason I'm here is to escape corporate shitfuckery. if you expect anything other than more shitfuckery from Meta you're either a shill or hopelessly naive.
Take time for yourself, I don't think anyone's going to blame you for that. And honestly, I don't have any issues with the current state of Kbin, there's a couple bugs here and there but it's entirely usable otherwise. Finally, I think giving yourself a deadline to resolve personal issues might be counterproductive and make you more stressed than you should be. It sounds like you're already taking steps to help spread the workload around, I would just keep spending a little bit of time helping out the team do some stuff you can't do until you're able to get a better work life balance or something.
I guess I'm trying to say, things are great to me and I imagine you're getting that unfortunate side effect of only having people who have something to complain about reach out whereas everyone who has everything going well isn't saying anything. So, in my opinion, you can stay to course (as long as it isn't killing you mentally) and I don't think the site is suffering any for it.
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