You can make the same argument in the event of bring any child into this world. Does the world need more children? Is the human race on the verge of collapse? No, infitate growth isn’t sustainable.
But the argument of “money better spent on other stuff” is hard to actually enforce. I’ve seen arguments against advancing in space travel because of coastline marshlands being eroded, and how important that is.
I think the take away is, what’s important to one person, is hardly ever important to another person. In this instance, the lady really wanted to have a child of her own to experience that. But bring any child into this world on purpose is always an act of selfishness.
Some people say they don't want to join the Fediverse or Mastodon, because they think the UI sucks. As a front end developer, a designer-kind of a person who creates user interfaces, I agree. Most of the web clients on the Fedi are horrendous, even Mastodon by default. There's lots of room for improvement.
We should really focus on how to make it more pleasing to the eye, more modern and more pleasant. This should not be a nerd network, just for geeks to geek out. This is not IRC or BBS.
As long as Mastodon for instance looks like it's designed by a back end engineer, contains font-awesome icons, looks like 2010, and stuff like that, being open and free is not good reason enough for many. I'm not bashing it, Mastodon is not the worst out there, in fact in my honest opinion Mastodon user experience is far better than Akkoma or Calckey for example. It's also more accessible than many modern UIs, for example my visual impaired wife prefers the Vanilla Mastodon UI over my #BirdUI modifications, she has some small tiny improvements of her own like distinguishing the colors in the action buttons as they have no proper contrast in any of the default themes. But that's it. She likes it as it is. So it cannot be that bad. However, it could be better overall.
#OpenSource doesn't mean the product should look like it's created in a basement by a math teacher. For some people Mastodon UX is sufficient (it even is for me, I like it enough and it doesn't prevent me from using it), but it should be WORLD CLASS. I don't say the answer is #MastodonBirdUI but it should be something much more modern and minimal than the current default UI. Pixelfed's developer is a designer oriented, Pixelfed is indeed an example of an awesome Fediverse app experience throughout the web and apps. That is how it should be.
Today, I will be slightly less available as I am in the final stages of taking care of all the formalities, and I also had to handle a few personal matters. Starting tomorrow, I will be back at full capacity again. When this succeeds, in the next releases, I will focus more on frontend and accessibility.
I’m in the post-ban blackpilled mode right no so please forgive me. I know reddit is falling apart but it isn’t happening fast enough. Is there any hope that the whole site will be destroyed? I really just want the whole site / app completely destroyed and thew Vichyite mods unable to have their power trips anymore.
I'm more satisfied with my experience here personally. I don't scroll for hours, I read a couple articles, maybe comment on them and move on. If I come across something interesting that isn't already posted in my community here, I'll actually post it because it might actually get some engagement.
One reddit, my post would either be removed by overzealous mods or generally ignored. I had one instance where I posted a question on r/askScience. I searched before I posted but couldn't find a post that asked the same question. A mod removed it saying that it was too similar to other posts. When I asked which post it was similar to, the mod said "You need to search for yourself, we aren't librarians" then muted me for 10 days so I couldn't respond. The sheer ego trip of the matter just appalled me. I thought that a community about scientific inquiry would be a bit more open, but nope - just as toxic as every other sub.
This article is posted from me with a kbin account, on a kbin magazine:-). The true beauty of the fediverse is that you need not care - like if I had a gmail account and you had a yahoo one, you could still receive the message despite being on entirely different servers.
Various Lemmy instances are part of the fediverse, and run the Lemmy code (various scripting languages - Rust, Actic, Diesel, Infero & Typescript). Each admin can do whatever, like modify the sourcecode, mess with their personal databases, etc., which can lead to different Lemmy instances using different versions of the sourcecode, which happened a few weeks ago and led to problems connecting when a new version became incompatible with the old.
Kbin is not a Lemmy instance though - it is a completely different implementation built from the ground up, in PHP & PostgreSQL - but it still uses ActivityPub so it can share with Lemmy the same as any Lemmy instance could. Meta (Facebook) will similarly implement ActivityPub in some manner and so also be able to communicate across the Fediverse. (Also as people are saying, Kbin also has implementation to share with Mastodon too while the Lemmy code does not.)
Unless an individual Lemmy - or a Kbin - instance wants that to not happen, i.e. to defederate, which is a whole other matter.
So:
instance = a particular machine (lemmy.ml or lemmy.world or beehaw or whatever);
Lemmy = code, or Kbin = different code, running on that instance, affecting what/how/etc.;
fediverse = everything that shares messages, like if one day a decade from now Reddit (may the spez have been fucked over MANY times before that day:-P) was forced to adopt ActivityPub and become a member in order to stay relevant, then it would become a part of it as well;
defederate = a specific blocking of messages from one instance to another (not necessary 2-way)
So if you thought of yourself as a Lemming/Lemmon/whatever before reading this comment, it is probably better to start thinking of yourself in terms of being a fedizen now - a member of the wider fediverse. You always were, you just did not know that yet:-).
Plus isn't there a link to donate to the original developers on all Lemmy instances? The "Support Lemmy" one I mean, unless an admin has modified the source code to remove that I suppose, and continue to do so each time they receive an update. That seems to bother many people as well, even being on a different instance that the original creators do not administer personally.
You could write to the author and ask them to edit the work:-).
Squabbles has an interesting list of media related to it fwiw - like this article mentions: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky, Lemmy, and Squabbles, and the honorable mentions section says how it focused on text-based social networks (nothing about an API) but adds TikTok, LinkedIn, BeReal, and even Pinterest... but still no Kbin (or Tildes, or Discuit, etc.). Nor is it really wrapped up into Lemmy / the Fediverse.
Lemmy describes itself as “a link aggregator for the fediverse,” which to the average person may as well be gibberish. Essentially it’s a community discussion board in the vein of Reddit, based on a free and open platform like Mastodon and Bluesky. You register to a server – or host your own – but can interact with other servers with no issue.
Other articles add mention of like Discord, and even Y Combinator's Hacker News for article aggregation purposes.
Kbin just simply is not considered a major player, it seems. It is not blazing any new trails, nor has celebrity endorsement like Bluesky. At best it seems considered to be "just another instance of Lemmy", and at worst forgotten entirely, whereas at least Beehaw seems to stick in people's minds for some reason.
That said, I have seen one article that mentions Kbin: https://www.maketecheasier.com/best-reddit-alternatives/, which also mentions Beehaw and Tildes and Squabbles, and yet neglects to mention Meta even though the article says that it was posted earlier this month (it also did not mention some other smaller ones such as Discuit). So that is something, at least - as in even if all articles seem biased in various ways, that one at least acknowledges Kbin:-).
Articles that mention kbin though are extremely few and far between. I think I've only seen it twice actually - I just posted one of them separately, and there the author does mention it while explaining basically that Lemmy is better.
Kbin is like this best non-Lemmy fediverse instance that you've never heard of, for the average person:-).
I would like to suggest that developers consider as much flexibility when trying to interact with links/handles from off-instance and off-kbin (e.g. lemmy) as possible. I would like for it to work on lemmy in a similar fashion....
@curiosityLynx The name is written out fully automatically when I click "Add comment"; kbin, the instance where I am, will put full identifier automatically. But on posting it only shows the "id name" without "instance part", but links to the account. Like in this situation with your name. My guess is, the person is still tagged correctly and only the HTML link name is shown in the browser.
I just wish it would link to the actual post or reply directly, instead the person. With the ability to preview on mouse hover (just like how it works on person accounts, at least for me on the desktop browser). This would make discussions more clear.
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain things, but It's been about a month since I've started the process of creating a magazine to support the reddit/discord community I've helped mod for the past 4 years... but I've noticed that zero posts show up in google search....
@raphael I didn't know the instances would copy the messages. Interesting! I think search engines need to be redesigned to respect robots of the origin instance then. If they are not designed for this, it surely looks local. That's kind of a mess then, from search engine perspective.
Strange enough, if I search with my search engine based on SearXNG the terms "final fantasy site:kbin.social", then it finds a few links. They are only based on tags or person, not the actual content. So maybe use tags, if you want to get indexed anyway.
If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit....
What beehaw has done with limiting the creation of communities has worked well, since the ones they created have been pretty active.
Not all instances need to be that strict, but might be good to have a place to propose a community, why they’d be a good mod, and type of initial content they plan to post themselves before it grows would help until the user base is bigger to be able to sustain random free for all creation of communities. Some places just exist with nothing posted at all, so you’re not sure if even the person who created abandoned it from the get go.
Reddit front-ends access Reddit data in a way that is now bound by much stricter rate-limiting than ever before.
Popular instances may be usable for a short time until their limit is reached, then they will 429 like everyone else.
If you, personally, host a Reddit front-end instance, you are still affected, you are just less likely to reach the limit as quickly as public instances.
The hottest topic in the #Fediverse right now has to be #Threads, formerly known as #P92 or #Barcelona, the alleged #Twitter killer by #Meta, and what'll happen when it federates with the rest of the Fediverse. So without further ado, here are my thoughts about this.
So why did Meta announce Threads to include #ActivityPub?
Well, it certainly wasn't because they needed a ready-to-use federation protocol. Threads itself will remain a centralised, proprietary, corporate silo with exactly one instance. I mean, when #Tumblr announced to include ActivityPub, this didn't come with the announcement that everyone will be able to run their own Tumblr instance, remember? It just meant that their silo will be able to connect to Mastodon & Co. and quit being a walled garden.
It's more likely that Threads was planned to get ActivityPub support because at least the EU is going to force online services to become interoperable in some ways. And some big corporations are growing cautious of the expected "or else!" So if Meta wants to offer Threads in the EU, Threads will have to be able to connect to something not owned by Meta. So they've decided to include ActivityPub because a) it's ready-to-use, b) it's free-to-use, c) it already has lots of projects and instances and users to connect to, d) it's something Meta has heard of, and e) it isn't Dorsey's #ATproto.
I mean, they could also have played it safe and included #OStatus just to have something they'd theoretically be able to connect to without running into nearly as many renitent netizens opposed to Meta. It'd still pass the #DigitalServicesAct. But they probably don't even know that OStatus exists.
That said, I currently wouldn't be so certain that Threads will actually add ActivityPub. It has never been Threads' unique selling-point. That'd rather be Twitter-like microblogging without Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey at the helm plus one-click registration for Instagram users. Marc Zuckerberg has never wanted to have his own Mastodon. He has always wanted to have his own Twitter. And now that the real deal is on its deathbed, he finally can.
If ActivityPub integration was actually only planned as appeasement towards the EU, it has become completely unnecessary when Threads blew a raspberry and flipped two birds at the #GDPR with its iOS app that phones all your most private data home to Threads and Instagram and Facebook to be sold to the highest bidder. Because of that, Meta is banned from offering Threads in the EU altogether. Why appease to the EU when you're banned there anyway?
So there wouldn't be any reason to be surprised if ActivityPub never came to Threads. After all, #Bluesky has talked big about decentralisation and federation and even the "invention" of #NomadicIdentity (which was actually invented in 2011 and first implemented in 2012 on Red Matrix, known as #Hubzilla today). Bluesky was announced long before Threads. Bluesky was launched long before Threads. And just like Threads, it has yet to deliver. As of now, it's just another centralised, monolithic silo, and third-party developments are the only reason why it isn't entirely a walled garden.
I guess even Jack Dorsey had to realise that it's complete non-sense to create a technological platform for decentralised social networking that's only compatible to itself, save for connectors developed by third parties without his consent. I guess he must have realised just how big and wide-spread the ActivityPub-based Fediverse is and how rapidly it's growing. Decentralising Bluesky now would be like introducing a replacement for e-mail that's completely incompatible with e-mail itself.
In fact, I think that Dorsey had launched the Bluesky project and placed high bets on it before he even knew that the Fediverse existed. And when he found out about the Fediverse, there was no way back anymore. Not without being punished by his investors.
Marc Zuckerberg, on the other hand, knew about the Fediverse when he greenlit Project 92, now known as Threads, for one of its earliest announced features was interoperability with the Fediverse via ActivityPub. That's another difference: He didn't want to compete with the Fediverse, he wanted to connect to it. Whether he actually will, now that one of the main perks of doing so has vanished due to Meta being Meta and the EU reacting accordingly, remains to be seen.
But even if ActivityPub came to Threads, that wouldn't mean that Zuck embraces the Fediverse. He won't. Even if they all used ActivityPub, the Fediverse as we know it now would be direct competition for Threads.
Threads won't tell its users about Mastodon, Akkoma, The Project Still Known As CalcKey, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc. That'd be like Microsoft officially acknowledging that Linux-based operating systems are nice, too, if installed stand-alone instead of Windows. That'd be like Apple officially publishing a list of the top five greatest Android phones with Samsung on #1.
Threads won't tell its users how to migrate to another Fediverse instance. That'd be like Microsoft officially publishing a tutorial on how to wipe your hard drive and replace the Windows on your computer with Ubuntu.
And Threads won't add migration functionality to elsewhere in the Fediverse either. That'd be like Microsoft installing an exporter for personal data on everyone's Windows machines on the next patch day that makes it easier for you to keep your data when replacing Windows with GNU/Linux on your machine.
For a while after ActivityPub has been activated, practically nobody on Threads would make use of it, especially not to connect with users in the rest of the Fediverse. They simply won't know that this rest of the Fediverse exists, much less who exists there. If any connections will be established, they'll be in-bound.
Even these first connections won't come to pass by someone discovering a cool Threads account in their Mastodon timeline. Instead, someone will stumble upon Threads accounts either because they're on Threads themselves or because the addresses of these Threads accounts are published somewhere on the Web, e.g. someone adding their Threads ID to their blog or their website. They'd end up connecting by copy-pasting that someone's Threads ID into their search field.
After these first connections have been established, it will still take very very long for the Threads users to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Threads. No, really.
For comparison: Many of you came into the Fediverse through mastodon.social. And I dare say that a great deal of those of you did not know anything about decentralisation and instances and all that stuff at that point and instead believed that they had joined another centralised walled garden like Twitter. Someone has told me a while ago that some people who came in through mastodon.social took three months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised, that many of the toots in their timelines come from someplace else than mastodon.social.
It takes new Mastodon users even longer to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. From my experience, that's often three to six months. There are three major ways for Mastodon users to find that out.
One, you stumble upon a post that mentions Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon, and that mentions that they're Fediverse projects and connected to Mastodon.
Two, you post something that implies or out-right claims that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and someone comes and tells you otherwise in the comments.
Three, you discover weird-looking posts in your timeline that can't possibly come from Mastodon with way over 500 characters, strange-looking mentions, strange-looking hashtags etc. If you inquire whoever wrote that post about it, they'll tell you they aren't on Mastodon, but on an instance of another project which is nonetheless connected to Mastodon.
It'll be very similar on Threads, but on a much greater scale with a much bigger timeframe. I guess many Threads users may spend years without even encountering a post from outside. Most will spend many months. And I'm not talking about actually noticing that the post in question did not originate on Threads.
Unless Threads will actually slam account IDs with non-Threads domains on them into its users' faces, I think one element that Threads users will notice will be hashtags which Threads doesn't have, but which I don't expect Threads to strip out entirely like Mastodon strips out any and all text formatting. Thread user: "Hey dumbass, this ain't Twitter, Threads doesn't have hashtags!" External user: "But Mastodon has them. I'm on Mastodon and not on Threads." Thread user: "What's Mastodon, and WTF are you doing on my timeline then?!" External user: "[Fediverse explanation noises]" And even this will only lead to one more Threads user knowing about the rest of the Fediverse. Out of hundreds of millions.
The difference between mastodon.social and Threads is that new arrivals on mastodon.social are left uninformed about what Mastodon is and how it works to make on-boarding easier than if they were educated about decentralisation and instances and other Fediverse projects and then left to choose the project and the instance themselves. Threads users, on the other hand, are left believing that, beyond being a centralised silo, Threads is a walled garden with no connections to the outside world whatsoever. To be fair, it is one right now and will remain one for the foreseeable future. mastodon.social doesn't try to pretend to be a walled garden. And Mastodon itself only does so a little by hardly, if ever, acknowledging the rest of the Fediverse.
If Threads users should actually set out to discover the rest of the Fediverse and make connections to there, the impression they get from the Fediverse won't be too positive. That's because two out of three Fediverse instances will be inaccessible to them due to having blocked Threads altogether. From the point-of-view of a Threads user who has always put full trust and faith into all Facebook/Meta products and never used anything decentralised before, believing that even e-mail is a Microsoft or Google or Yahoo! product, the Fediverse will appear as nothing but a bunch of entitled arseholes.
It certainly won't help that the [Fediverse explanation noises] won't include, "This is all just hackish amateur stuff rather than professional corporate software development, and we're lightyears from your features, but it does its job." Instead, users from other Fediverse projects will mention ("brag about") the features that these other Fediverse projects have that Threads lacks. Hashtags, for example. Let me show you them.
It gets even worse if someone on Threads happens upon someone on something else than Mastodon. In comparison with Akkoma, Threads pales more. In comparison with what's-still-but-not-for-much-longer-called-CalcKey, it pales even more. And now imagine what'd happen if someone on Threads met someone on Hubzilla. Or /kbin. "Whaddaya mean, you're talkin' to me from a Reddit clone?! How's that even possible?"
Okay, so those Fediverse people aren't just entitled, they're also snooty braggarts who claim that their stuff that was developed with a budget of zero is allegedly better than Threads that was developed with a several-billion-dollar budget.
Let's just say that even if the Threads users discovered the Fediverse beyond Threads by-and-by, they wouldn't be too keen on connecting to what's left of it that they can actually connect to. The biggest chances will be if it'll be possible on Threads to share Follow Friday posts from Mastodon in such a way that it isn't too obvious that they come from Mastodon. Since Mastodon mentions don't include domains, they might pretty well pass for mentioning Threads users, and the Threads community will believe that Follow Friday was invented on Threads. Also, out-right celebrities on George Takei's level of fame if they reside on instances that don't block Threads. But otherwise, no chance.
'sup? So, I am a beginner that has an old Samsung laptop from 2013 with an i3 4005U, a GeForce 710M, 500GB HDD (I will probably upgrade it to an SSD, but not for now.), 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3L RAM (the same for the HDD, will probably upgrade to 8GB some time.). It currently has Windows 10 Home but Linux is probably lighter (right?)...
Apart from Ubuntu/Fedora (which are Snap/Flatpak heavy), I think you would be OK with any Linux distribution. I have a Intel Atom N270 and 2GiB of RAM happily running Debian Bookworm and KDE (with an SSD) your talking about something with far more power.
For me the considerations are as follows.
RAM
You've listed 4GiB of RAM, looking at my PC now (Debian Bookworm, KDE Desktop, 2 Flatpaks, Steam Store and Firefox ESR running), I am using 4.5GiB of RAM.
2.9GiB of that is Firefox,
~800MiB is Steam of which 550MiB is the Steam Store Web Browser.
~850MiB is the KDE desktop
Moving to XFCE or LXDE would help you reduce the Desktop RAM usage to 400MiB-600MiB, but you'll still keeping hitting memory limits unless you install an addon to limit the number of tabs. Upgrading 8GiB in would resolve this weakness.
I get by on the Netbook limiting it to 3 tabs or steam.
Disk Storage
You've listed 500GiB of HDD Storage, this means you want to avoid any distribution which pushes Snaps/Flatpaks/Immutable OS because the amount of storage they require and loading that from a HDD would be insanely slow.
Similarly I would go for LXDE or KDE desktops, both are based on creating common shared system libraries so your desktop loads one instance of the library into memory and applications use it. As a result such desktops will quickly reach 1GiB of RAM but not increase much further.
Also moving from a HDD to SDD would give noticeable performance gains, the biggest performance bottleneck as far back as Core 2 Duo/Bulldozer CPU's was Disk I/O.
GPU
The biggest issue will be the 710M, I don't think NVidia's Wayland driver covers this era so you'll be stuck on X11. Considering the age of the GPU and the need for the proprietary driver, personally I would aim for Debian or OpenSuse the long release cycles mean you can get it working and it will stay that way.
From a desktop perspective, I would install KDE and if it was slow/tearing I'd switch to Mate desktop.
KDE has some GPU effects but is largely CPU drawn, it tends to look nice and work
Gnome 3 choses to use the GPU even when its less efficient so if it doesn't work well on KDE it won't on Gnome.
Mate is Gnome 2 and works smoothly on pretty much anything.
Cinnamon is Gnome 3
XFCE is like Mate is just works everywhere, personally I find Mate a more complete desktop.
So most of us "old timers" now have been on kbin for almost a month (or more), and kbin has been around for longer. And.... we've started to have an issue and I'm not sure if y'all have noticed: early on some people went around to claim some magazines either with the intent to pass it off later, or simply to squat and ideally...
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....
Wouldn't every viewed copy anywhere then be a saved copy of the original post? Does that distinction even mean anything when it's still posting specifically to the original instance?
If I reply in a Lemmy.world thread, I'm still posting on Lemmy.world even if I'm viewing from Kbin.social.
As a comparative example to old and dying social media, it would be like finding a link to a celebrity's Twitter comment on Reddit and you saying you saw the person saying that on Reddit, which would be extremely misleading to anyone listening, thinking that the celebrity had posted it on Reddit.
I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek with my nostalgia there, with some truth to it as well, but if anything it’s something intangible. KBin and Lemmy haven’t developed a culture yet, in my opinion a lot of damage has been done to online culture by the big centralised social media networks, and it remains to be seen if something good emerges here or whether the toxicity of modern social media creeps back in.
I personally wouldn’t worry about the political beliefs of the Lemmy developers, it’s open source software, anyone can use it and run an instance. Each instance sets its own content and moderation policies and decides who it federates with. There are over 1000 instances. The developers have made it clear that they don’t want their instance to be seen as the default one and discouraged people from registering there during the influx from Reddit.
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
So I'm on the /r/Disneyland mod team and we decided to move here to @Disneyland / !Disneyland during the blackout. We're still directing users here in the subreddit's sidebar, although the mod team collectively decided to reopen the sub on Reddit after the admins started threatening mods directly.
There were a couple options floated when we were considering the move:
Make our own instance. Traditional forums like MiceChat have survived for decades; we'd effectively be a fediverse version of MiceChat. The main subject would be Disney, but we'd have Disneyland communities, WDW communities, Marvel communities, Star Wars communities, etc. This was shot down because we didn't have the funding, time, manpower, or legal expertise to host things ourselves at any kind of scale. All us mods have day jobs and we don't want to take on a full-time admin role; other Disney subs likewise didn't seem terribly excited about joining in. Shout-out to /r/startrek for starting https://startrek.website and /r/Android for https://lemdro.id/, but it wasn't in the cards for us.
Join a Lemmy server. This was before Lemmy.world existed, so our options were limited. We basically had Lemmy.ml, Beehaw.org, or sh.itjust.works. We disagree with the admins of Lemmy.ml on a fundamental level; Beehaw doesn't allow new communities; sh.itjust.works was maybe doable but we didn't want to deal with that URL for a Disney-themed community. Waiting for a new general-purpose instance to appear (what Lemmy.world became) just wasn't in the cards since I wanted it to be open during the blackout.
Join kbin.social. At the time, there were no other Kbin instances - fedia.io didn't exist yet. But Kbin seemed very flexible (direct Mastodon integration is a plus!), the admin team was just Ernest (but he had a good head on his shoulders), it was my personal fediverse site of choice, and it was growing quickly. At the time we made the call, federation didn't work as expected but it was promised to be fixed (and it has been; we now federate rather broadly).
We've gotten some organic activity on the Disneyland magazine over here on Kbin, which is nice because it shows we don't need to keep the community on life support. The big downside to Kbin (and Lemmy!) is that mod tools basically don't exist; it's going to be tricky without AutoMod long-term. Once Kbin has an API it should be trivial to remake AutoMod for Kbin though, assuming the API has moderation actions.
Content quality and the rate of submission has clearly plummeted. /r/all has become stagnant, and completely filled with memes and shitposts. Comment quality has amazingly gotten even worse (4chan level in a lot of cases), and there are definitely less participants on threads.
In comparison, I've found commentary in the fediverse to be more active, engaged, and positive than Reddit has ever been - and I was there since before Digg. My kbin feed, with a bit of tweaking and expansion out to other instances, is more useful by far than Reddit ever was, and it's activity level is beginning to match what used to be common on Reddit.
I think that Reddit was banking on not having a competing centralized corporate entity to absorb their users, and that it would prevent a Digg style exodus from their site. And to some extent, they were right - users, primarily readers still came back to reddit and have continued to do so because it's still the easiest place to find content on the internet. But, as you can see from the slow heat death of /r/all - that's changing.
What Spez didn't count on was that their moderators and content creators - the real engine behind Reddit - would leave. He assumed the thrill of having a large audience would be enough of a carrot to keep them participating while he made the site more difficult to use. This was a significant miscalculation, as anyone who's ever run a forum knows. Only about 2% of your users on a site will post, which means that if you alienate that 2% by any significant amount, you'll see a following degradation of non-participating readers as the content dries up.
Huffman should have realized this, as in Reddit's early days, he and the other admins on the site would regularly post with sockpuppet accounts to keep the content flowing enough to maintain readership. This mess is clearly of his own making, and one that he personally should have anticipated given what he and the other admins had to do to build the community in the first place.
But what's more interesting to me is what this (and the Twitter debacle) has done to illustrate the flaws of relying on centralized media. It's created a discussion about the wider internet and an interest in expanding it that hasn't been really talked about since the last decade. There was no reason to expand out from the centralized services as long as they were working well, fairly, and with an eye towards fostering their communities. It's when they moved into looking at their users as profit centers, and their moderation of content as a means of social control that it became clear that this contract of social responsibility had been broken.
And when that contract was broken, it broke the soul of Reddit's community. Nobody wants to contribute to Reddit, because Reddit isn't about creating a good space for the internet community to grow anymore. It's about how much money it can make Spez, and most of us really don't feel like working for him for free.
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.
Since lemmy terms a "community" as the same thing as a kbin magazine, but community can also have a more expansive meaning, for clarity I will refer to lemmy magazines and use community in it's more expansive scope.
rpg@foo.bar isn't a real thing obviously but is your standing for an rpg magazine on any other instance.
rpg@lemmy.ml and rpg@kbin.social appear to be two separate magazines, hosted on two difference instances, and owned and moderated by two separate groups of people, but about the same topic - role playing games. If you ignore the instance part of the name, then they have identical names - which makes sense because they cover the same topic.
There is a UX issue on kbin where the instance part of the name is hidden, but there are also kbin styles that fix this.
Getting fixated on the identical name part is getting hung up over a minor technicality. Remember that reddit has a similar issue with very similarly named subs, where you might have /r/X and then /r/TrueX and /r/XOriginal - something that was encouraged by reddit's own policy, where instead of getting involved with a mod of a sub they would just encourage you to make your own sub.
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
I think this is legitimate. This was solved on reddit with multireddits but kbin doesn't have an equivalent yet.
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.
Good point. Even if kbin/lemmy don't support it, maybe we can get multimagazines working first at say an app level (like in Artemis).
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.
I wouldn't as that's not what that view is for. You want to view a multimagazine that covers a given topic like rpg rather than see your own subscriptions.
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.
They can go as far as to mod magazines in another instance. How are they thus foreigners? This is the point of federation - that equal standing to view, post, contribute, moderate, etc across instances.
If there was a server set up just to host groups, and the rest were for users, that would make sense.
From a centralized, non-federated point of view.
There's no central place for hosting these communities.
Because there is no need for that. I'd point to the example of r/blind - they continue to maintain their sub on reddit but officially the community is also available on their own lemmy instance as well as through their own website. One community, but not centralized anywhere.
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.
With federation, you don't have to go that far. Communicating across instances works automatically and you only need one account to do so, as opposed to creating a new account on each forum.
I immediately grew tired, trying to find all of the communities related to my interests so I can subscribe to all.
I'd recommend you check out some of the older posts on @RedditMIgration as there are lots of links to community (not magazine but community in the broader sense) run websites that try to solve this by listing all of the magazines on instances.
This is probably simpler and more fruitful than searching manually.
You can search the Fediverse from one instance using the Magazines tab in Kbin to find places to sub, or sub to communities you find in all feed etc?
This is the first thing. I think this might not always be turning up everything due to the delays with federation. While we might be able to agree that this is good enough, I think another reasonable person can look at this and say that there's room for some technical improvements.
Is the issue to do with the duplication of communities at present
This is the second one. As others have also pointed out, reddit has the same issue so it's not unique to federation (tho this person seems to get hung up specifically on the precise naming to make it federation specific). I think we can adapt the reddit solution (multireddits) to here as well though to solve this (i.e. come up with a scheme for multimagazines).
But I'm not switching between instances
This is the third one, but I think this is not valid. As you say, one can choose to have multiple accounts on other instances, but it's not needed to participate on the other instances. This person says it's their choice to have the other accounts - but then makes a big stink over the effort of having multiple accounts. Like if it's that much trouble then just don't do it.
long term there does need to be tools to allow communities to migrate base from one instance to another
I thought that this might be an issue but actually I raised this point and it wasn't responded to.
The fourth one is that this person seems to consider kbin.social its own distinct platform - which doesn't make sense in light of federation - and seems to prefer centralization in general (despite seeing the good from multiplexing BBSes), but I'm waiting on a response as to why this should be the case. Like what are the specific arguments to prefer centralization to a single server or a single instance?
It does occur to me however that if a paid shill were to try to promote a centralized service over an open source federated one, a way to win folks over might be to present oneself as a highly experienced technical person with direct expeirence in both kinds of systems, but who ultimately prefers centralization and has good technical arguments to back it up, including pointing out flaws or gaps with the existing federated system. And also insist that more people flock to the single overloaded flagship instance, perhaps causing it to overload and die off.
Not saying for sure that this is the case here, but food for thought.
Woman receives uterus transplant, delivers healthy baby: ‘We did it’ (livenowfox.com) en
In May, Mallory became the first patient to give birth via uterus transplant outside of a clinical trial.
Reddit Refugee here venting (kbin.fedi.cr) en
I’m in the post-ban blackpilled mode right no so please forgive me. I know reddit is falling apart but it isn’t happening fast enough. Is there any hope that the whole site will be destroyed? I really just want the whole site / app completely destroyed and thew Vichyite mods unable to have their power trips anymore.
Still yet another article listing Reddit alternatives, but surprisingly this one mentions both Lemmy & Kbin (kbin.social) en
https://beebom.com/reddit-alternatives/...
Yet another article about Reddit vs. Lemmy vs. others: "Discussing Three Reddit Alternatives After Reddit's API Decisions" (kbin.social) en
https://hackernoon.com/discussing-three-reddit-alternatives-after-reddits-api-decisions
make URLs for communities, users etc as flexible as possible (kbin.social) en
I would like to suggest that developers consider as much flexibility when trying to interact with links/handles from off-instance and off-kbin (e.g. lemmy) as possible. I would like for it to work on lemmy in a similar fashion....
I just wanted to leave this here (reddit.com) en
Yep, this is what the future of awards on Reddit looks like
How come there is very little Kbin SEO for individual posts? Also, what are tags/badges? (kbin.social) en
Maybe someone smarter than me can explain things, but It's been about a month since I've started the process of creating a magazine to support the reddit/discord community I've helped mod for the past 4 years... but I've noticed that zero posts show up in google search....
I think the rush to recreate communities is a bad idea. (kbin.social) en
If you recall reddits growth many of their communities evolved as offshoots of a single generic community. This made it easier for people to see discussions they normally would not get involved in, and once the posts in a similar category reached critical mass it moved to a sub Reddit....
Rip Teddit (kbin.social) en
Today I just noticed, after trying to convert a reddit link (from this sub!), that teddit is no longer working....
A distro and desktop environment recommendation for an old laptop (Read all of it, please.) (kbin.social) en
'sup? So, I am a beginner that has an old Samsung laptop from 2013 with an i3 4005U, a GeForce 710M, 500GB HDD (I will probably upgrade it to an SSD, but not for now.), 4GB 1600 MHz DDR3L RAM (the same for the HDD, will probably upgrade to 8GB some time.). It currently has Windows 10 Home but Linux is probably lighter (right?)...
Seizing/Claiming inactive magazines? (kbin.social) en
So most of us "old timers" now have been on kbin for almost a month (or more), and kbin has been around for longer. And.... we've started to have an issue and I'm not sure if y'all have noticed: early on some people went around to claim some magazines either with the intent to pass it off later, or simply to squat and ideally...
It is not Lemmy or kbin, it is the fediverse. (kbin.social) en
I don't think many people understand that if they use Lemmy or kbin, they are posting to the fediverse. There are other platforms and will be more to come. Referring to a post on "Lemmy" or "kbin" is like saying you saw a post on your Windows or Mac computer....
Is there 'etiquette' for choosing which instance your migrated subreddit is hosted on? (kbin.fedi.cr)
This question may be moot but it’s something I’ve been thinking about. I’ve only recently jumped into this brave new world so you’ll have to forgive my ignorance....
Reddit braces for life after API changes (techcrunch.com) en
Reddit and its communities are preparing for a life after the platform's API changes forced popular third-party apps to shut down.
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?