This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573...
Kbin is pretty good for this. Every magazine has two tabs: one for microblogs, and one for threads. The administrator of the magazine can choose relevant hashtags, and all federated posts from the fediverse containing the hashtags will show up in the microblog section. People end up in kbin communities just by making themselves discoverable with hashtags, they don't even need to know what kbin is.
There are, as far as I can tell, two problems:
There's no combined view showing both posts and microblog. As a consequence, the microblog is often neglected.
Federation doesn't work well - you only see these posts if you're viewing it from the same kbin instance as the one you're visiting from. In effect it's basically only useful for kbin.social at the moment.
Still, both of these things seem like they could be resolved, and it's a very neat solution. :)
For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?
For me, aside from picking initially between kbin and Lemmy and then picking an instance (and the whole concept of instances), it was not having an algorithmically created feed. It took a bit to wrap my mind around since all of the social media apps and sites I was used to (and still use) provides this.
I was confronted with building my own feed by topic of interest (aka community or magazine) or else.face a firehose of all content from all local or federated instances. I mean, I did it, so it wasn't that big a barrier, but it still required effort and conscious decision making on my part just to set up the thing to be usable. It's probably one of the reasons why I don't use Mastodon that much, because it's easier to join/subscribe to topics in kbin and Lemmy (at least in my experience). Mastodon seems to be for following individuals and organizations, and that's even more work (for me).
Sorry I gotta run for work, don’t have time to say much other than “Yeah, the impeachment was total bullshit.” I think it makes Clinton trashy person, not that it impacted how he ran the country. It was a grift, but that’s all they’ve ever got.
Given my PTSD and my understanding of trauma, it’s very likely that my thinking would not necessarily be changing at this time had it not been for the #MeToo movement—not only because of the new lens it has provided but also because of how it has offered new avenues toward the safety that comes from solidarity. Just four years ago, in an essay for this magazine, I wrote the following: “Sure, my boss took advantage of me, but I will always remain firm on this point: it was a consensual relationship. Any ‘abuse’ came in the aftermath, when I was made a scapegoat in order to protect his powerful position.” I now see how problematic it was that the two of us even got to a place where there was a question of consent. Instead, the road that led there was littered with inappropriate abuse of authority, station, and privilege. (Full stop.)
Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern. I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot. (Although power imbalances—and the ability to abuse them—do exist even when the sex has been consensual.)
But it’s also complicated. Very, very complicated. The dictionary definition of “consent”? “To give permission for something to happen.” And yet what did the “something” mean in this instance, given the power dynamics, his position, and my age? Was the “something” just about crossing a line of sexual (and later emotional) intimacy? (An intimacy I wanted—with a 22-year-old’s limited understanding of the consequences.) He was my boss. He was the most powerful man on the planet. He was 27 years my senior, with enough life experience to know better. He was, at the time, at the pinnacle of his career, while I was in my first job out of college. (Note to the trolls, both Democratic and Republican: none of the above excuses me for my responsibility for what happened. I meet Regret every day.)
“This” (sigh) is as far as I’ve gotten in my re-evaluation; I want to be thoughtful. But I know one thing for certain: part of what has allowed me to shift is knowing I’m not alone anymore. And for that I am grateful.
I—we—owe a huge debt of gratitude to the #MeToo and Time’s Up heroines. They are speaking volumes against the pernicious conspiracies of silence that have long protected powerful men when it comes to sexual assault, sexual harassment, and abuse of power.
Here is the answer on the Polish instance directly from @ernest, kbin's creator. For reference, he was being accused of being a gun lover based on the name of the Polish instance "karab.in" and "magazines," as well as his Monty Python profile pic with a gun in it.
Here are the relevant sections from Ernest on the origins of both kbin and magazine:
Hey, I'm the admin of kbin.social. The name "kbin" comes from the Linux "/sbin" directory - I've mentioned it multiple times before. The name of the Polish instance - karab.in - does indeed reference a rifle, but it's just a play on words, and it was actually chosen through a survey among other domains. It's simply easy to remember and sounds nice in Polish. There's no place for nazi bullshit on my instances.
On the other hand, the name "magazyn" refers to the virtual edition of a late 90s gaming newspaper :D
So I have a situation. I really want to switch to Linux as my main gaming/production OS but need the Adobe suite as I am a graphic designer. Adobe is the golden standard for this industry (and likely to always be) so while Gimp and Inkscape might work, they are not feasible for my career. I also know that there will be...
The problem is, sometimes while you might be open to using certain software, the people you need to work with and collaborate make that hard. For instance, Early 2000’s, I was tasked with making some weekly magazines. I used Scribus. The people at the printer, of which I had no control over unless I wanted to foot the bill, made life pretty damn miserable because I wasn’t using whatever adobe product they were used to. Things worked, but it was a time that I would much rather leave in the past as I can’t describe the frustration caused.
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
tangentially could make sense considering that karab.in is one of larger instances. the word used in polish ui is “magazyn” which means magazine like storage space or newspaper, the weapons term is diminutive of the former
i think that kbin was supposed to be a open/federated clone of wykop[.]pl, which in turn was more similar to digg than reddit
Was banned from the sinusitis subreddit for telling (apparently a mod) that a deviated septum absolutely can cause a sinus infection. He got upset and banned me- and even denied my ability to respond to the ban....
True, but if someone were to be banned in one community they can always join and make comments in another similar Lemmy community (or similar magazine on kbin). If they get banned on one instance, they cam join another instance. The Fediverse makes it easy to still contribute even if one avenue is closed.
As far as I can tell, there hasn't been any moderator overreach on Lemmy/kbin. Maybe everyone is starting off on their best behavior. Or mods are aware that the atomized nature of the Fediverse means they have only so much power or influence. Also, it could just be the communities/magazines I'm in but there haven't been a lot of heated arguments.
Lemmy is AGPL v3.0. From what I understand, that means anyone running Lemmy (or a fork of Lemmy) needs to make their source code public, even if their code changes are strictly to support their own network infrastructure.
it really doesn’t matter though, as a corporation only needs to implement an interface to Lemmy via ActivityPub protocols; in other words it they could write a completely closed-source backend to use for profit and as long as it can poop out the correct data structures over ActivityPub to allow Lemmy instances to understand it, it will work.
This already happens as we can see and subscribe to kbin magazines, and Mastodon users can be @'d and IIRC can reply to comments via Hoot (or whatever they call it). Kinda wild, but it also leaves the door open to literally whoever.
I think the real interesting question is will a large corporate player be able to maintain a captive userbase? None of the doomsday scenarios play out in their favor unless they can capture users and communities - because then the usefulness of the whole thing rides on their server being available. At that point it’s reddit with more steps - they can do what they want.
I am curious about the fediverse outside of lemmy. Is there any good documentation or recommended services? I’ve seen talk of mastadon, matrix, and kbin but I don’t understand how use them with my current Lemmy account....
It’s not guaranteed that every federated app integrates with every other federated app in a particularly useful way. You kind of need to take it on an app by app basis:
Kbin and lemmy integrate very well. “Magazines” on kbin show up as communities in lemmy. You have almost certainly already read and responded to posts and comments from kbin users, and you may have subscribed to communities on kbin.social, the largest kbin instance. Interacting between the two is pretty much seamless.
Mastodon and Lemmy integrate, but less completely. If you’ve seen a post full of #hashtags and with an @thecommunity@instance mention, that’s probably from a mastodon user. I’m not sure how a lemmy user can initiate contact with a mastodon user, but a mastodon user can at-mention a lemmy community as if it were a mastodon user and doing that will create a lemmy post. Comments on the lemmy post look like replies to the mastodon toot.
Other fediverse projects will interact in varying specific ways, and you need to figure each pair out individually.
ActivityPub has actors and activities. These are very broadly defined - yes, a user is an actor, but so is a magazine in kbin. A like, a thread, and a microblog are all activities. These come from an actor, and they are sent to and cc'd to other actors in the fediverse.
NNTP, however, is not actor to actor, it's server to server, to my understanding.
In practice, the way this is implemented here, it's not that much of a practical difference, but it's interesting to know.
The other difference is that NNTP servers would forward messages to their other known NNTP servers, essentially creating a distributed network of information. Per the ActivityPub protocol however, no instance is obligated to do that on ActivityPub. The only obligation for forwarding is if a) The values of to, cc, and/or audience contain a Collection owned by the server (e.g. followers is a Collection) AND The values of inReplyTo, object, target and/or tag are objects owned by the server. So basically if I receive something from lemmy.world user actor, to lemmy.world community actor... Even if kbin.social hasn't received it and errored out, I have no obligation as the.coolest.zone to send it out to them.
In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...
Hey, it's the fediverse! Make your own instance and your own magazines on there, and if there are like-minded folks who appreciate your moderation, your instance will grow. You'd generally not have to depend on the whims of other mods or admins that way, but have nearly full control over your own safe space.
No. That's what the instance block will do when we get it. Right now with the domain block, the point of it is for example, say you hate imgur.com. Why? Doesn't matter, you just do. You can block the imgur domain so nothing from imgur, regardless of where it's posted, will appear in your feed on kbin. If I post a picture linked from imgur on m/gaming, you won't see it when you browse that magazine.
If you try to block an instance with that same method, posts and comments still come through fine. I've blocked a bunch of European instances due to language issues but the posts still sometimes comes through regardless (and many other people have commented saying the same over the last month, hence why we'll be getting a proper instance block soonish).
“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media...
With Mastodon being a German non-profit company, it’s natural that Germany is also well-represented with a federal instance social.bund.de, instance for the state of Baden-Württemberg bawü.social (both since 2020), world’s largest public broadcasters ARD ard.social and ZDF zdf.social, and AFAIK the first news publisher to officially launch its own instance, Heise social.heise.de. There are probably loads of other instances and accounts I’m missing.
PS: The production company behind ZDF Magazin Royale (late night comedy and investigative journalism show, think Last Week Tonight ) is also running a private instance edi.social and a public instance det.social, named after the Mainzelmännchen.
The only correction I would make is that Kbin does let you follow communities from other instances (even Lemmy instances).
Until a couple weeks ago, it would show local magazines first... but if you dug deep enough, after all the local magazines were listed it would start listing remote communities across Lemmy/Kbin.
It's changed very recently to always sort everything by subscriber count, with an option to toggle between local magazines and everything on the threadiverse.
As far as "I tried to go to posts I knew existed but weren't showing up" - like everywhere else on the fediverse, someone needs to follow that content first. So the reason why they saw their Mastodon content is because someone followed their Mastodon account from Kbin. When they searched for things that didn't appear, it's because nobody on Kbin was following those accounts.
If they searched the full @[email protected] and hit "follow", then future posts would appear in the microblog tag and be searchable.
Kbin is still community/magazine focused at the moment. It integrates better with mastodon, allowing you to follow people etc, but it seems to really be about pulling mastodon content into the magazines as much as possible. For instance, there is no way to view a feed of just the posts of the people you follow, AFAIU. I’m not aware of there road maps on this though.
Platform diversity is valuable for the fediverse, as no platform can make everyone happy, so two platforms having the same general feature (as lemmy and kbin do already with communities/magazines) is not only not a problem but a good thing.
Blocking individual communities / magazines is also possible on kbin. But I guess some people just want to cry for the sake of crying. The only thing that doesn't quite work is blocking actual instances, which the GUI supports, but it does not actually block communities from that instance.
So I went looking for lemmy communities and kbin magazines on lemmyverse and found https://lemmy.world/c/language_exchange (not going to link to the lemmygrad version; tankies who explicitly worship Stalin and Mao and deny the Tiananmen Square Massacre and other horrors don't deserve any sane person visiting their instance).
It seems however that the person who made it failed to put anything in the sidebar.
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:-).
I have an account on kbin. Recently I saw a post across my feed in which a magazine that I follow (that's based on a Lemmy instance) was celebrating over 1k subscribers. When I visited, I saw only 240 or so....
I have an account on kbin. Recently I saw a post across my feed of a magazine I follow (that’s based on a Lemmy instance) was celebrating over 1k subscribers. When I visited, I saw only 240 or so.
Hey, folks. I’m new to this whole Fediverse thing. One of the things I’ve been most excited try out is the whole cross platform aspect, where you can follow peertube/mastodon/lemmy accounts from the other sites. I have my reddit account mostly switched over. I went through and found (I think) all of the communities I follow...
Kbin is a parallel project to Lemmy in the Fediverse, one which launched some months ago. Lemmy has been around a couple of years. Both Kbin and Lemmy structure content similarly to reddit’s subreddit topics, where Kbin calls them “magazines” and Lemmy calls them “communities.” Topic threads are nested chains of comments and replies with inline media and a 10k character limit. Instances of Kbin and Lemmy can and do interact, with users from either community participating transparently in posts and discussions.
In a technical sense, Kbin is implemented in PHP, where Lemmy is implemented in Rust.
Kbin is also able to interact more closely with Mastodon instances, users and content. With an account on a Kbin instance, you can follow, boost and reduce Mastodon content, in addition to up voting or down voting it.
Kbin also natively displays a user reputation score which is similar to reddit karma, as the net value of boosts less reduces. Up and down votes are (seemingly) not tracked in the aggregate. Lemmy does not expose these stats in the default UI, though there are API endpoints that return this dats
A final distinction (at least that I know about) is that Lemmy exposes an API for 3rd party access and supporting 3rd party apps. Kbin does not yet have a pu loc API, though I understand that one is under development and is currently under review.
So to answer your question: no, i don’t believe there are no apps for Kbin yet, but app developers have indicated their intent to support Kbin when it is more mature.
Lemmy for Mastodon - A new account dedicated to promoting the Lemmy communities and instances that make the most sense in your Mastodon feed (mastodon.social)
This is shameless self-promotion, but part of a working theory I have that Mastodon users have more to offer Lemmy than your average Reddit user. See my other post about it here: lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/2174573...
What do you think some of the fediverse's primary stumbling blocks are?
For those that have poked around other fediverse stuff beyond Lemmy, and been around the spaces awhile, what’s stuck out to you as stumbling blocks, or basic user experience fumbles? Which parts do you think may be technical, and which may be cultural?
DS Shooters part IV: Metroid Prime Hunters, Dead'n'Furious, GoldenEye 007
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/3629866...
Lemmy might, MIGHT have a small bias towards the left (lemm.ee)
What does kbin mean? Why is kbin.social called that?
Is it just random letters arrived to by keyboard mashing like a lot of federated websites seem, or is there any thought behind it?
I want to switch to Linux but there are a few major hurdles.
So I have a situation. I really want to switch to Linux as my main gaming/production OS but need the Adobe suite as I am a graphic designer. Adobe is the golden standard for this industry (and likely to always be) so while Gimp and Inkscape might work, they are not feasible for my career. I also know that there will be...
Biden calls China a 'ticking time bomb' due to economic troubles (ground.news)
What made you choose your instance?
Following the spirit of spreading across the Fediverse (and because my main instance is down so many times, because diverse reasons) I’m intrigued about the joining instance process, because I honestly don’t know what criteria to have in order to join another one if I ever want to do it....
11 year old account deleted today. Final straw.
Was banned from the sinusitis subreddit for telling (apparently a mod) that a deviated septum absolutely can cause a sinus infection. He got upset and banned me- and even denied my ability to respond to the ban....
It’s going good so far 🤞🤞 (i.imgur.com)
fediverse services - links
I am curious about the fediverse outside of lemmy. Is there any good documentation or recommended services? I’ve seen talk of mastadon, matrix, and kbin but I don’t understand how use them with my current Lemmy account....
What's the fundamental difference between Fediverse/ActivityPub/Lemmy and the Usenet?
After reading a bit about Usenet, it seems to me as if the whole Fediverse seems to be just a reinvention of Usenet....
Be wary of spiteful Reddit users (kbin.social)
In the past week and a half, I've noticed Reddit behaviors starting to try and poison all of the places that people are taking refuge in to get away from the toxicity, myself included. They've started to DDoS Lemmy for a while, which is a Reddit thing to do and what they're notorious of doing whenever they feel they don't like...
The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media (www.bbc.co.uk)
“As the social media landscape ebbs and flows, the team at BBC Research & Development are researching social technologies and exploring possibilities for the BBC. One part of our work is to establish a BBC presence in the distributed collection of social networks known as the Fediverse, a collection of social media...
Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives? (www.pcmag.com)
Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives? (www.pcmag.com)
A writeup in PCMag!
Lemmy's active users appear to have stabilized over the past two weeks
According to lemmy.fediverse.observer/dailystats...
deleted_by_author
Where can I find people to practice speaking Polish?
I am going abroad in 2 weeks to Poland and I want to practice the language… So where can I find people who know the language?
Still yet another article listing Reddit alternatives, but surprisingly this one mentions both Lemmy & Kbin (kbin.social)
https://beebom.com/reddit-alternatives/...
Why does it seem different platforms of the fediverse are not so good at communicating with each other? Is this something that will eventually improve? (kbin.social)
I have an account on kbin. Recently I saw a post across my feed in which a magazine that I follow (that's based on a Lemmy instance) was celebrating over 1k subscribers. When I visited, I saw only 240 or so....
Following Mastodon accounts from Lemmy?
Hey, folks. I’m new to this whole Fediverse thing. One of the things I’ve been most excited try out is the whole cross platform aspect, where you can follow peertube/mastodon/lemmy accounts from the other sites. I have my reddit account mostly switched over. I went through and found (I think) all of the communities I follow...