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:
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
It hasn’t even been two weeks. Let people get used to the platforms.
Difference instances are showing up slowly, so maybe instead of saying everyone needs to split up before communities and magazines have had a chance to mature even in the slightest, we slow down a little bit and support the hosts and developers we have now.
Or perhaps, look for new instances and report back on places folks can migrate to.
Magazines having a chance to mature is going to lead to people being further entrenched on one instance.
I do wonder if it would be healthier for the fedditverse for instances to really narrow their magazine/community footprint. I.e. “This is an Anime instance” a “Science instance” etc. Making off-topic magazines could either be discouraged or outright banned.
Not looking forward to having dozens of “news” and “technology” magazines sharing the same stories,
That’s fair but what if, say, the “news” instance dies/goes offine or something along these lines, isn’t all the content it hosts going to be lost or become inaccessible? Not sure how the whole thing works but it’s something that’s been concerning me. With redundant communities across multiple instances at least the whole topic won’t go down with any single instance.
This happened a good amount on mastodon and was very helpful. It’s part of why I’m on Midwest.social right now
That’s what I think too. There’s going to be a dozen gaming communities in their own instance and none will really take off. To get it going there needs to be one.
You don’t have to be on the gaming instance to participate in the gaming instance.
You can participate in the gaming magazine on kbin.social even though you have moved elsewhere.
The person above wasn’t talking about that. They were talking about fragmentation. For example, I am subscribed to three different Formula 1 communities/magazines, one in kbin.social, another in lemmy.ml and another in lemmy.world. There is no difference between them, other than the site they’re hosted. I know that I can participate in all of them, and I have participated in all three. But I’m still unsure how should I participate. If I find an interesting article, should I post it only to one of them? To which one? Or crosspost it to all? (btw, lemmy has an option to crosspost, but kbin doesn’t) And if the topic is posted in several communities, should I comment in one or in all of them? Maybe should I encourage people to migrate to the larger community? Or maybe we could solve the problem by creating a unified community!
I sort of think instances forming around distinct communities is what the Fediverse’s early architects had in mind, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Users are not frequently self-segregating by ideology (e.g. lemmygrad) or interest (e.g. startrek.website). Even beehaw is not really specific enough to be ideologically distinct. Lemmy.ml is even less so, despite the devs/admins politics, and lemmy.world or lemmy.ca aren’t even trying. Neither is kbin.social, to be fair, but imho that’s okay. It’s just a fact to deal with.
Without the expected behavior, you end up with one of two options. On one hand, you hope that the admins of tiny instances are superstars and populate their /c/'s or /m/'s to attract a following against all odds and force the projects back on the roadmap by having all the fans of a niche community or all the people interested in a specific viewpoint post mostly or entirely on the relevant instances /c/ or /m/. On the other, you have the discourse dominated by a few busier instances when their new “subs” populate more quickly. The latter, while not ideal, is not as bad as true centralization and, importantly, it seems to match actual behavior and it might be useful for front-end devs of apps and sites to make choices that work with the user behavior as best they can, like optional auto-aggregation of identically named communities.
Frankly I think we need more people before we can start getting concerned about things like that. If we’re trying to make the Fediverse a viable alternative it has to be appealing and easy enough to use that people want to use it. If we don’t get that right this whole thing is doomed from the start
If you use reddit as an example, they have hundreds, thousands of subreddits.
We aren’t anywhere close to even a hundred nature magazines.
Allowing people to be comfortable for a month won’t cause any long term damage.
100 nature magazines would get pretty niche.
Brb, just going to create m/aardvarks, m/african wild dogs, m/anteaters, m/antelopes, m/ants, m/armadillos…
You know who’s uncomfortable? The person behind the scenes keeping the server afloat while you make yourself comfortable.
The real message here is that you’re not going to move.
I didn’t expect everyone to get the message, so you do you.
Jesus Christ, stop being such an abrasive jerk.
Has he requested this?
Can magazines migrate instances like users can? (even ignoring federation concerns, at some point it’s going to be much easier to scale this thing if the more popular magazines can spawn off to their own instances)
It’s an idea I’ve seen floated, and personally would appreciate, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no Magazine or Community migration for kbin or Lemmy.
Incidentally, I’m commenting from a Lemmy instance, to a kbin Magazine on kbin.social, and subscribing to RedditMigration on kbin.social was pretty seamless, at least as seamless as any other non-local Lemmy Community. OP is right in that spreading out is a decent idea. It’s not really necessary for everyone to be on the same instance.
Another way to address the problem of corporate takeover and ensuing enshitification is form non-profits, co-ops, or other organizations to actually “own” the instance. My home Mastodon instance has started down this path already.
No but once the magazine/community has been created it doesn’t really matter which instance it lives on because any user from any instance can post, comment and mod in that magazine.
This is the most rationale response. A lot of people suffering from mental illness will bog themselves down in theory and never focus on the practically of what they’re saying. This is one of those examples. Just be glad people are using the platform and let it grow organically. If you’re convincing users “they’re doing it wrong”, they’re just going to give the finger and probably leave. What’s great about decentralization is we, as individuals, can choose how we use it. If you want a big server? Join one. If you want a small one? Join one. It really is that simple. Try to ignore people who tell you otherwise.
It’s right to say that instances are showing up slowly, but there is definitely a centralization occurring. According to fediverse.observer, kbin.social has 43k users, and the next most populated instance in the US only has 104 users.
Ernest, developer of kbin and who runs kbin.social, has spoken about the difficulties in running kbin.social with the spike in users. If people are willing to sign up on smaller instances or migrate over, that could help distribute the load.
Or, like me, learn about VPSs and domain names and Linux commands from zero knowledge to get their own instance stood up - but it took a bit and I’m still running into issues here, so I can’t necessarily recommend it for someone who has a life to attend to. :)
tbh before reading your comment I had no idea that there are other kbin instances
Hey, I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I don’t want to force anyone to stay here ;) I believe that kbin can be a stepping stone to a wider fediverse, which is great. However, I’m trying to keep the entry barrier as low as possible so that everyone can find their place here. The rest will come with time. Currently, we’re working with contributors to make setting up and maintaining your own instance less of a nightmare, and it should change for the better soon.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/p/485886/This-happened-quickly-Lemmy-is-now-the-second-biggest-platform-next#post-comment-855115
ps. The queue of deleted accounts will be processed with the next update.
Thanks for all the hard work!
Hey! Hey hey hey! No! I JUST moved away from Reddit! Now you’re telling me I need to move into an even smaller place than this? Can we space out our social media crises a bit? I’m still winded from the Dutch douchebag buying Twitter.
You can safely ignore him and people like him. Do what works for you. Don’t get bogged down in theory. It’s no substitute for experience.
I’ve found it really beneficial joining an instance that’s hosted locally to my country and/or city. Not only can you take advantage of the “Local” filter to literally see local posts in your area, but you also get an amazing ping so everything feels super responsive.
How did you find one that local to you? I’d love to do this as well! I’ve been kicking around just hosting one myself but I leave for vacation in 5 days so that’s probably not a project for right now, lol.
I randomly saw someone post from @aussie.zone and the name grabbed my attention. I was actually considering starting my own one for Australians but didn’t need to bother. Perfect timing!
aussie.zone was the first place I landed upon discovering the fediverse, but after hunting in vain for a dark/night-mode option I decided to keep exploring, and the interface/theming here is actually usable.
I’ve since learned that client-side UI/CSS browser extensions for Lemmy are a thing so that’s always an option, and hopefully we’ll start seeing RES-style extensions in the future.
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.
Wrong. Stop fearmongering. There was no such offer. At least do your research and get your facts straight before you make claims you can’t back up.
There is no confirmation of any financial contracts, or moderation arrangements and Eugen Rochko/Gargron has stated he doesn’t know anything about any secret deals.[1]
From @supernovae@universeodon.com:
The nda wasn’t because of some absurd agreement but just the fact they’re launching a new project and we’re getting access to engineers and product team to discuss what the relationship could be. And they went well.[2]
There was a call to talk about engineering, moderation, safety, support for user privacy controls and how federation would look like. (and more)
There was no deal signing or any bullshit like that - that’s all fake news.
The nda is because none of this stuff is released and it’s up to meta to share details or admins to join the ongoing calls to learn in advance of launch what is going on.[3]
We don’t know, what we don’t know. So i initiated contact and meta obliged. Because the product isn’t released yet, there is an NDA.[4]
From stux@mstdn.social:
i did not attend the meeting, did not sign a NDA and i do not get ‘financial support’ from Meta or any related company.
I put quite some work in to pay for it all. [5]
I didn’t say there was deal-signing. I said they wanted to talk ‘off the record’.
I’m reporting what I heard on Mastodon.
And that was referring to Instagram, not Meta.
This is all ridiculous semantic arguments. Yes, you did say there was a deal. Now you’re trying to walk it back.
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.
Firstly, the last time I checked, “a monetary offer” is what person might otherwise call a deal. If you propose to give me money for something, that is a deal. And as I stated multiple times with proof, no such deal was made. You really don’t like being wrong, do you?
Instagram and Facebook are owned by Meta. Meta is the controlling entity (Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, among other things). Whatever you choose to call it, Instagram or Meta, it is the same company. Potato, po-tah-to. They are in essence the same thing. But let’s be factual: It was Meta, not Instagram who approached those admins and again your information is wrong. this article specifically says Meta, so this does this, and this, and this too
What you “heard” was rumours and fear-mongering. You have not offered one single solitary shred of proof. I have offered several to the contrary.
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.
I’ve been thinking about setting up a single-user instance of kbin for myself. Maybe this is the kick in the pants I need to finally get around to it.
I have my own pixelfed server running
Ugh, I’ve found it difficult to get it up and running. Need to throw more time at it but I thought the docker containers would “just run”.
That is also holding me back. I am hosting tons of stuff myself, all dockerized, but I was not able to get kbin up and running yet. I wish someone would manage the images, so we can just pull, edit a .env and run / upgrade it.
For me the whole process always hangs at a step that seems to have something to do with the php setup. I tried on different servers, even created a fresh Ubuntu 22 LTS and still had the same problem. I am sure I am doing something wrong (probably editing something incorrectly in the settings), but the process it not as easy yet as it is for the other services I am hosting at the moment.
Same, though I’m lazy enough that I was waiting for linuxserver.io to have a kbin image. I haven’t looked at the documentation yet, but if it’s straightforward enough…
Centralization is a result of social behavior. People naturally gravitate towards the place where others are.
Like, the internet wasn’t centralized by corporations. It was centralized by the users. And it will always happen. It’s a very predictable pattern of human behavior.
And that’s why we need to constantly remind ourselves to spread out while staying connected (the precise function of federation)
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.
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!
