this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
29 points (100.0% liked)

/kbin meta

639 readers
1 users here now

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

founded 1 year ago
29
/kbin - Just Reddit Things update (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
12 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hey, once again, I welcome the newcomers. It's great to see new faces here :) It seems that we've managed to resolve the server issue. Unfortunately, I had to temporarily disable certain features, such as content auto-refresh. It will be restored at the beginning of next week after the infrastructure change, so you'll get to experience kbin in its full glory then :) Currently, I'm working on a few critical things that I want to finish by Monday:

  • Infrastructure improvement, optimization related to high traffic
  • Admin guide - creating a new instance
  • Fixes in notifications for post replies
  • Attend to the new mod reports
  • As soon as possible, I also want to get back to Codeberg Issues, private messages etc - there are many new topics there. Thanks to everyone for the that!

Some time ago I had an issue with bots, so registration process it might not be done perfectly. If the emial didn't reach or wasn't received in time, after a while and additional verification, the account will be manually activated.

If something important happens, please email me through the contact form - it's the fastest way to reach me. Now I'll get back to my tasks, and I wish you a great time exploring the fediverse :)

At some point, the registration will also be temporarily disabled. Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.

Have a great weekend!

rel: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/417417/Alright-it-was-a-long-night-for-me-But-I-m

top 12 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First up, thanks for your hard work!

Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.

As things are currently developing, it is almost a certainty that all reddit alternatives on the fediverse will get absolutely hammered on the 12th.

I know you are working on an infrastructure update. I just sent you a few bucks via buymeacoffee to support that. However, it could well be possible that the new infrastructure will also become overwhelmed during the days following the 12th, requiring another update in short notice.

At some point, things might become really expensive.

What I'm trying to say is: Don't be hesitant to ask for donations. I think many of the users here right now are acutely aware of how important the next few days are going to be for the post-reddit fediverse ecosystem. Growth needs servers, servers need money and I'm sure many users would be willing to to chip in.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@zombiepiratefromspace Thank you, I really appreciate it! I will try to keep kbin.social alive for as long as I can. However, not at any cost. What is more important to me is the future decentralization, which is beautiful in the fediverse. That's why there is an emphasis on providing instructions for creating your own instance, even though kbin is still far from a stable release. I believe people will manage with a little support from me on Matrix... :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Well said, the dream really is for people to start hosting their own instances instead of everyone just coming here.

Also, as the number of federated instances increases isn't it going to cause exponentially more overall traffic since every instance will have to start pinging others in order to populate the landing page, it's gonna be quite a web with many requests instead of just one as it'd be on reddit or other centralized sites?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you link me to a brief explanation on how the fediverse/instances work?

It is something I am still not fully grasping. For example can there but duplicate magazine names on different instances or is kbin.videos link to all the same threads regardless of instance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Each instance is it's own independent website, but with the ability to also export content to other websites using the same communication protocol (ActivityPub). So, if you create a community on kbin.social, let's say, to use your example, [email protected], then that is a singular community that lives here on this website, kbin.social.

Someone on another website, let's say lemmy.ml, can create their own videos community, which would be [email protected]. They're as independent from each other as r/videos on Reddit and a Facebook group also called "Videos" would be. Only, here on kbin.social, you can choose to subscribe to the videos group on lemmy.ml, and see what people are talking about there. In doing so, you're requesting that lemmy.ml forward all future content posted to [email protected] to kbin.social, and you're requesting that kbin.social populate your personal timeline with that content that it receives.

Similarly, if someone on lemmy.ml wants to see what people are talking about in your [email protected] group, they can ask lemmy.ml to do the same.

Importantly, these websites will also pass along local posts and replies intended for remote communities back to the hosting server, so that things stay in sync.

But they remain totally separate websites. They're just separate websites that pass content back and forth between each other, at the behest of their users.

A lot of people have voiced some consternation about this in the last couple of days, as I guess they feel some angst around missing out on discussions on topics they care about, because they might be taking place in communities they're not following. But I don't see this as an issue. Not only, as many people keep pointing out, are there multiple groups covering the same topics on Reddit, just with different names, that people don't object to, but in large subreddits a majority of posts never even get seen by subscribers, because they just don't gain traction in the short amount of time necessary to reach 'Hot' before something else does. In this distributed model, there is the potential for average people to actually get their posts engaged with, and for a single space to be dominated by a handful of power users. Now, each instance can have its own set of power users on a topic.

It's also trivially easy to share posts between groups, as lemmy -- though, as far as I've found, not kbin -- has a cross-post button, just like Reddit. So, anything from small groups that will interest big ones can be pushed up and anything from big groups that people may want to discuss in a quieter space can be passed down with relative ease.

After all, what's the real value in being commenter # 72,641 on a post that's reached the top of r/videos? No one's going to even see your comment, let alone respond to it. And the OP definitely won't notice it. But if you're commenter # 72 in a group of 200, then there's meaningful engagement to be had.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I appreciate the link but that really doesn't explain much to me.

I understand different instances allow for decentralization. But how are they connected or are they connected? Do I see other instances on kbin.social?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I thought this explanation by /u/buried_treasure does a great job explaining this in an easy to understand way.

You will naturally be aware that there are many different systems on the internet, run by different companies. And these systems are generally incompatible with one another.

For example, you can't use GMail to compose and send a post to Twitter. You can't log on to Facebook and read content from Reddit (unless somebody has copied it there). You can't watch Youtube videos via Flickr. And so on.

All of this seems obvious - they're completely different systems. Why on earth SHOULD you be able to interact with them from elsewhere?

A few years ago some people decided that even though this was obvious, it wasn't the way the internet HAD to be. They developed a protocol (which is just a set of instructions for computer programs to talk to each other over the internet) which they called ActivityPub, and then basically said to software developers "here it is. We think this could be a cool way of getting different systems to interact with each other. See what you can do".

In the 5 or 6 years since then, lots of software developers HAVE tried to see what they can do with ActivityPub. One well-known example of a system that uses it is Mastodon. It's a system that is similar to Twitter.

Another couple of ActivityPub systems that are becoming popular right now are Lemmy and KBin. They are Messageboard systems, roughly similar in concept to Reddit.

There are many other ActivityPub systems, for example Pixelfed (which is a bit like Flickr, so for hosting photos), Peertube (yep you guessed it, videos), Friendica (like Facebook) and far too many others to list. Collectively, these systems and any others that use ActivityPub call themselves "the Fediverse".

OK - so what? These are just wannabe competitors to the big boys: Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, right?

Not right! The magic of ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that they can all interact with each other.

So you can log on to Mastodon and subscribe to Lemmy groups. That would be like logging on to Twitter and subbing to your favourite subreddit. And then being able to read the posts from that subreddit right there in Twitter.

You can log on to KBin and follow users on Peertube. Imagine being able to follow and view content from your favourite Youtube streams from right here in Reddit.

That's the real beauty of the Fediverse - every system knows how to talk to every other one. The other clever bit about it is that because ActivityPub is a publicly-defined protocol, no one company can own it and take it over. It's almost impossible for a billionaire like Elon Musk to take over Mastodon, or for Lemmy admins to decide to shut out third-party APIs. Because the system has been built from the very beginning to be open, and shared, and communal.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Are you comfortable with saying how much this instance costs to run? Or even just a ballpark of how much you think it would cost per-user?

A few subreddits are having a discussion later today about hosting our own "official" instance collectively and we're trying to figure out how much each option would cost.

So any kind of data would be fantastic to help me convince them to choose Kbin. ;)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That’s so exciting 😊 You guys should consider opening donations when you do. I’m sure people will want to help you guys out

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@EnglishMobster Sure, it's no secret. Everything I do is transparent, and I want others to benefit as much as possible from it. Kbin was designed with small instances in mind. Of course, there are optional components like Redis and Rabbitmq that increase the requirements a bit. It's hard for me to assess the impact on users at the moment. I've been maintaining my Polish instance (karab.in) for over a year with these two hetzner vps - 6eur-9eur/month + ~2$ s3 storage.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

@ernest @EnglishMobster Do you have an open Collective I can direct people to? I also love the #Accessibility work you put into this already! I hope it continues, as a screen reader user.