What issues have you specifically noticed with this?
The issue I've noticed first and foremost is that there is more than one identically named group. Don't tell me that rpg@kbin.social, rpg@lemmy.ml, and rpg@foo.bar are different communities. They're identically named communities. I'd rather have as false positive of a gun user's instance with threads about rocket-propelled grenades, rather than having to go to each group to browse. Don't tell me to just use the "subscribed" view. That doesn't pick up everything in a topic, nor does it help me to find those - again, identically named - communities on other servers. Whenever a new server comes online with an RPG community, they'll be in their own corner. They can participate as foreigners with another group, but that's not theirs. There's no central place for hosting these communities. If there was a server set up just to host groups, and the rest were for users, that would make sense. I immediately grew tired, trying to find all of the communities related to my interests so I can subscribe to all. I did that back in the day, joining forums and setting up a personal homepage with frames. In theory anyone can join any group, but they have to find it first.
If devs and leaders of the ActivityPub community are going to continue pushing the idea that everyone can talk to everyone else, we absolutely need some form of community merging for identically-named communities. For instance, a kbin.social user should be able to subscribe to cooking and see posts from cooking@. , not just cooking@kbin.social. That's a UX issue just as much as a technical one.
I wasn't around this far back. Can you elaborate on this a bit? What's the issue with "having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes" ?
Back in those days, BBS mail was less "email" and more "text stored on server". To get all of your mail from multiples, you had to connect to each of the servers in sequence, download your mail, and then read it offline and reply (any good BBS software would remember where itwas from, and offer to call back and send each message). Multiplexing meant that you could have a BBS in the NYC area, it would be able to contact and download from one in, say, PA or wherever, and they could each download threads and messages, aka federated content. The pain has been massively reduced over time, and I'm glad. My next point bounces off yours:
This I remember well. Sounds like you are trying to create an account on each instance and are constantly logging out of one and into the next to keep up on the latest posts and comments. This .. is not really the way to do it.
You're right, except in cases where I want a different psudonymity; my choice. In this case, I can't check for new posts in, continuing with the same example, rpg@. without checking the group from each federated server. Posts are neither mirrored nor transcluded. That's the point I'm getting at. I should be able to just open up m/rpg and have it cover all compatible groups.
I disagree with your latter point. kbin.social has hit a reasonable mass of users to have a strong local community and become a platform unto itself, running on kbin software. I'm not interested in a smaller community. I joined Reddit because it was the largest single-site community on the Web. I want the monolithic community, and I accept the costs that incurs, including ads or ad-first design. Right now, the fediverse is just fragments at the foot of the tower of Babel, each speaking a separate tongue, even if some are intelligible to others.
I don't care about the difference between Mastodo, kbin, & Lemmy. They're web software which are trying to replace a monolith, and have seen imited success. I don't care about political leanings. I'm talking about a UX issue. If you want to defed from a site, and receive no more content, then so be it, that's the right of an Admin.
The Future of the Threadaverse. Is a Lot More Growth a Good Thing?
I’m a recent refugee from Reddit and a very long time social network user. When the Apollo app announced its demise, I joined kbin.social and beehaw.org and love these new networks. The discussions seems much more reasoned and friendly. I do miss some of the more esoteric groups such as music theory and jazz. I’m sure they’ll be created as the threadiverse (kbin and lemmy) continue to grow. In this case, growth will be good. Is there, however, a point where these new networks get too big?
Imagine 56 million daily users (the current figure for Reddit) using the threadiverse platforms. If they were divided evenly into groups of 10,000, that would be 5,600 instances. Surely, such growth would take years, unless Huffman pulls another catastrophic move such as making you pay to be member and having to view ads as well. Even if he did, I doubt Reddit would completely go away. It would join myspace and AOL in the backwaters of the Internet.
Back to my point. Let’s say there are 20 million daily users. Magazines on kbin and communities on lemmy would have 100’s of thousands or even more that a million subscribers. The subreddit r/worldnews has 32 million subscribers. There could also be 100’s of thousands of magazines/communities. Reddit has 2.8 million subreddits. I know communities are tightly limited on beehaw.org, only being added when there is sufficient interest and support for them. On kbin, it appears any member can create a magazine. I could be wrong. Lemme.ee also allows members to create communities without restriction as far as I can tell.
Assuming there were enough instances to support such a volume of users, would that be a good thing or would discussions turn into flame wars, vitriol, and personal attacks? Even if such things were kept under control would threads become full of pointless or uninformative comments that kept you from reading quality posts. I don’t know one way or the other although I suspect, at some point there would be such a thing as too big. Most likely, it will take years for the threadiverse to grow so there’s plenty of time to plan and implement mechanisms to handle it.
So, couple years ago i started to learn about tech, programming and self hosting services thanks to redditors ( not reddit the evil corp ), and found lots of communities where they pointed me to good resources but then ended up allocating more time to learning programming to switch career into that field and finally got it....
I know I like tech stuff and I know i can get passionate and raise my skills on my own, but I could not find any good "beginner level" resource that didn't step from a simple nice to get drawing of how things should be, to a complex mixmatch of services and settings that leaves me in doubt of what do i have to do in my instance....
Thanks for the link, i'll check it out as i get back home...
Since you are on the same journey and know about any group chat or communities that are noob approachable, i'm all ears
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.
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.
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.
It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....
Technically depends on the instance. The Fediverse supports free expression in the sense that you can spin up your own instance and say whatever you want. Flip side, any other instance can de-federate with your instance if they don’t want to listen to your BS^1.
For instance, my instance^2 would probably police my ability to use slurs. Which is fine. I certainly am a member of some groups for which slurs exist, and if some asshole started spewing that BS in my house, I would express myself by kicking them the f*ck out. Likewise I chose an instance where I can be comfortable, and not have to deal with being harassed for who I just happen to be. My choice of an instance is largely founded on its Code of Conduct. In exchange, I extend the same courtesy to others on my instance.
It’s almost like a social contract…
Anyway, point being, as a consequence of different instances having different Codes of Conduct (even if just minor changes), you will technically be bound by both the CoC of your home instance and the home instance of the community/magazine.
maybe I'll eat my words later but I doubt it'll be quite as big. I think a lot of people are underestimating just how little the average person cares, or knows to care. Been through the twitter migration, the reddit migration, and in both instances it wasn't really a migration, it was more like a few people split off the main group and found a nicer home for themselves. And honestly, I think that's enough.
I think a LOT of folks overlook point 2. Kbin.social was a halting mess for a few days during the Blackout, because they had to enable Cloudflare to keep the servers from imploding on themselves. There still aren’t that many kbin instances yet, and more instances is how you handle large influxes. The platform needs time to stabilize before large groups of Redditors come over.
Looking at Fedidb.org the Fediverse Network Statistics, I'm seeing about 98,000 Active users as of the 27th. That's at least 50k new users this month. Welcome to Lemmy, fellow migrants!
Some bots can even be helpful, like if they were to repost content that we like to know about. But yeah, it can also put things on unequal footing like person A doesn't like person B so makes 50 bot accounts that downvote them everywhere they go and no matter what they say. Then again, a group of 50 people could also accomplish that without bots, or like 5 people each with 10 alt accounts (but like, otherwise normal & active). Also, someone could spin up their own personal instance and join the federation and infiltrate the entire network that way (I mean in a way that even an instance admin could do nothing about, b/c they are the admin for it). As the federation grows, I expect to see full-on brigading, and infiltrations, and yes even Russian trolls.
Then again, there's an important difference: Reddit has 2000 employees and can barely hold that website together - most of them have got to be like public relations, advertising, accountants, HR, interns and the like - whereas the Lemmy/kbin codebase is open source, so we can expect to see contributions from people who care and are knowledgeable, much as Reddit had mods who did the same, tirelessly devoting hours of their weeks (often per day even) to improving the place. Now that Rexit happened / is happening, expect to see the pace of improvements to increase. :-)
There are tons of ways - e.g. is there an account that has existed for a whole day and the only thing it has ever done is downvote posts? That's a bot. Perhaps similarly for up-voters, although lurkers exist so perhaps only question those with a captcha rather than straight-up remove. If such measures remove the easiest-to-detect bot spammers, then it would be too exhausting for one person to have like 1000 bot accounts - they'd have to do nothing but make posts all day long just to keep them alive! - thus it would limit their influence.
-Time to spread out! Federation is working. Create a 2nd account on a non-kbin.social instance. The Fediverse works better when we federate.
-Lots of group building! These ex-redditers really know their shit!
People in /r/redditalternatives are talking about a "Reddit 2.0" What website would fill that role? (kbin.social) en
On Reddit at reddit.com/r/redditalternatives, people are talking about a "Reddit 2.0." What do you suggest?
ELI5 resources for publishing self hosted services (kbin.social) en
So, couple years ago i started to learn about tech, programming and self hosting services thanks to redditors ( not reddit the evil corp ), and found lots of communities where they pointed me to good resources but then ended up allocating more time to learning programming to switch career into that field and finally got it....
PSA: while upvoting exists, to get the "move closer to the top" effect that reddit's upvote had, you need to click boost (kbin.social) en
a small difference, but important to how people use the site
Unlike previous attempts at trying reddit alternatives (like Voat), kbin and much of the lemmyverse doesn’t seem to be plagued with extreme far right buffoonery. (kbin.social) en
It’s one thing to have differing views, but I’ve seen enough attempted reddit migrations to be relieved that the popular communities in the fediverse so far haven’t been about crazy racist stuff or other extreme right bullshit....
It was fun while it lasted! (kbin.social) en
Lemmy and kbin are gonna get all jacked up in the next couple of days. It was a good ride until everything settles down!
Call to action - renewed protests starting on July 1st (reddit.com)
The latest from /r/ModCoord.
Lemmy & Kbin reaching 100k active users within days. (fedidb.org) en
Looking at Fedidb.org the Fediverse Network Statistics, I'm seeing about 98,000 Active users as of the 27th. That's at least 50k new users this month. Welcome to Lemmy, fellow migrants!
Christian Selig: I want to debunk Reddit's claims, and talk about their unwillingness to work with developers, moderators, and the larger community, as well as say thank you for all the support (reddit.com) en
Edit: archived link, (alternative)...