this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Magazine dedicated to discussions about the kbin itself. Provide feedback, ask questions, suggest improvements, and engage in conversations related to the platform organization, policies, features, and community dynamics. ---- * Roadmap 2023 * m/kbinDevlog * m/kbinDesign
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Thank you very much for this insightful, lengthy reply. I think it’s a great feature. My initial concern was ensuring continued engagement in the early stages of this experiment. I got very excited yesterday when everything seemed to open up and there was content out there, and got concerned when I woke up this am when Beehaw pulled the lever to shut out some instances. They are well within their rights. Just want to make sure this whole community isn’t going to croak before it gets a chance to find out what’s it’s defacto rules are
Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though...it's kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
Technology -- and the efforts of open source developers -- got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone's willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.
And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They're all embedded within an ActivityPub "container" that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don't really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub "container" as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it's all the same stuff, and you just need the application you're building to interact with the right parts.
That's why you can do things like follow people from entirely different "platforms" on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here's someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here -- it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing -- but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one "platform" into another.
The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I'm sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.
Last thing I'll say because I'm way too wordy...one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I'm on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that's optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I'm content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It's great!
I completely agree! The potential is absolutely there and so far I can't see how corporations will ruin it this time. However, I'm trying to be cautious, because I recall how excited people were for blockchain to revolutionize everything, only for that to turn out worse than useless. Granted, the problems there were fairly evidence from the beginning and there were plenty of naysayers. The Fediverse is too new and obscure to get the same kind of scrutiny yet, I think.
If everything goes as I think it could, we may look back at the 2010-2025 years as the first true 'dark era' of the information age.
@buffaloseven do you mind if I pick your brain? Why does kbin have microblogs AND threads, and why do some magazine have only microblogs? Is that an admin choice?
I'm not super-familiar with the inner workings of kbin yet; my gut reaction is that if a magazine only has microblogs, it's because nobody's made threads in it yet? I don't think there's an option to prevent threads in a magazine.
@buffaloseven thanks :)
It's definitely possible to actively use this place without wrapping your head around the how of it, but it's unfortunate that it's part of the experience, which is intimidating to new users. Hopefully Lemmy and Kbin become more mature and easier to use from the start without using your brain.
I actually don't think it's unfortunate, but mostly because the technology needs a shakedown period. Having some barriers that will keep out less technically savvy, or even just the less motivated to learn, allows the people that are more invested to work out the kinks and build something valuable.
Think of the coming months and years as the incubation period that Reddit had before the great exodus from Digg made it a much more mainstream place on the web. The only reason all of the people fleeing Digg went to Reddit is because it already existed with its own community that was (mostly) able to help absorb and train the incoming waves.
We've seen the same thing on Lemmy and Kbin, where people that had already been around are helping others adjust. Eventually the user experience, the differences and similarities between instances, probably some consolidation and splits of communities between and across instances... all of that will be happening as more and more people join.
(If I'm being honest, I would be perfectly fine with some of these barriers remaining in place forever. I don't necessarily need to interact with a billion people to meet my news, hobby and curiosity needs.)
It's possible to use this place without developing an understanding of how it works, but you'll experience a lot of friction if you end up in some kind of edge case.
Like, with the Twitter migration, it became clear that a lot of people's mental model for federation was actually a mainframe/terminal model, which makes questions like "Why can't I search posts on [other site]?!?" make sense if you don't recognize that [other site] is a different website. Once you grok that, it becomes like asking why you can't search Facebook posts from etsy. But the mainframe model actually posits that there's a singular place (called "Mastodon" to Twitter migrants, and "Lemmy" or "kbin" for newcomers from Reddit) that you're accessing via some kind of dumb terminal, and certain things (discovery, defederation, etc.) will just appear fundamentally broken when viewed through that lens.
Beehaw is big enough to be self-sustaining -- they don't allow users to create subforums there -- and it only takes a few hundred active users to actually create a self-sustaining community.
They have thousands.
At the same time, they only have like 10% of active Lemmy/kbin users. The rest of us will also be fine. People are mostly just irked because they have very active gaming and technology forums, and people are still habituated to seeking out the biggest community on a topic and treating it like it's the only one that matters.
This is an opportunity for everyone else to understand the importance of not relying on single points of failure -- this is the fundamental lesson behind the Reddit and Twitter migrations that people mostly haven't really processed yet -- and to subscribe to multiple manageable communities on topics they care about, and to treat them as communities, and not just a faceless content stream.
Ooh, a learning experience. That’s a great way to frame it