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r00ty Admin

@[email protected]

I'm the administrator of kbin.life, a general purpose/tech orientated kbin instance.

What’s the fediverse’s answer to email? And everything else we use?

The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders....

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Oh it totally used to be easy. You needed to know about DNS and MX records and how to configure sendmail and you were good to go (optional IMAP/POP3 retrieval too).

Now, it's SPF, DKIM, DNSSEC (needed for strict DKIM), DMARC ensure you have good certificates for secure smtp/pop3/imap and even then if you have a funky domain (like most instances do) outlook/gmail will probably reject you into spam.

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I don't think that is an EEE attempt on email. What is (I think) an indirect EEE (I mean we'd be mad at them if they didn't do it) is requiring strict adherence to DNSSEC/SPF/DKIM/DMARC. With the requirements changing very often it's hard as a regular guy running an email server to keep your mail from ending up in spam folders on the big providers.

What I want to know though, is why does my mail from a domain with properly configured SPF/DKIM/DNSSEC and DMARC end up in spam, and so much spam not? :P

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I think the last few messages make it far more likely to be a man, until then I wasn't sure myself. But yes, this level of crazy is not limited to a single gender.

In this case, it does warrant a police report. But, that's just my opinion.

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I'll sue ya, I'm gonna take all your money. I'll sue ya, if you even look at me funny.

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What's wrong with ChewingLlama9435?

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And yet I'm reading and replying to your message.

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Is it sluggish on other kbin instances? I think a lot of the problems with federation right now is the sheer load of users on the instances with the most popular communities and that's causing timeouts and errors in federation. While many many instances are just one user.

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I think the reminder is just what it says. It's unlikely you will ever have all the historical content from a remote instance's community. So that message is just telling you that. It's the same on lemmy when connecting to a remote community.

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You don't see anything if someone doesn't subscribe to it.

If you follow someone on mastadon from lemmy/kbin in theory you'll get.. Something. Not sure how it works exactly. If threads federate then the same will be true of threads users.

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If you search someone by @user on kbin at least there's a follow option. Whether lemmy has the same and where it puts stuff I cannot tell.

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Your email address (personal identifier) is right there in the from field. And in many cases, in the header there might be your IP address.

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Here is the information I have on your user ID as an operator of a remote instance.

1: Your username and home instance (and a separate link to your profile page on your home instance)
2: Your avatar
3: Your about info
4: Date/time of your last activity (but that I think will be the last time you were seen by my instance, interacting in a community I also have here), so not shared really.

I took a look at the json returned from your home instance, and again the info is profile page, username, information required for communication between instances with the only PII present being the username, the about and an icon and image.

Here's why I'm going to say this isn't likely to be a problem as such. This is the same as on reddit, if I look at a post a user makes I can click on the user and get access to this level of public information. Also under GDPR and DPA based on advice from the ICO data sharing isn't forbidden, but the minimum required to fulfil the function of that sharing should be sent. I think the above data meets that. There isn't information we don't need to work a distributed network like this.

I think the point about making a privacy policy visible is a good one. It should make it clear how the network works, and what kind of information is shared with federated instances (and also available to the public, the user query is publicly available). But the data that is federated is the same as is publicly available.

Now I do feel like there's the scope for a lot of manual work. For example, federation sometimes means that edits/deletes don't make it. It can be caused by problems on both sides of the connection. So if you want all your data deleted. Sure I could delete all posts and your user info here. And even make requests to the home instances that they delete them too. But, some might remain on remote instances, and I don't know who would be responsible for that. Some grey areas remain.

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Our point is, sharing the information required to make a network like this work is allowed provided you're not sending information not required. If you right a post on a community that is shared the information about you (user id, avatar etc) is required to render that message on other federated instances. In the same way as when you send an email the from address is required so that people can reply to the email.

If we were sending IP addresses and data on your browsing preferences to other instances, there would be an argument because it is not required operate the federated network (although you know the corporate players are all justifying their sharing of exactly that data and more). But we don't do that.

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Yes, definitely and this has prompted me to write one up for mine. Even though right not it is just me, I am open to having around 100 active users on my instance. So this should be clear I think.

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The ICO have a template. But now I need to go through and see what data is collected and check/adjust retention where relevant (http logs for example).

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You can test an instance like this.

Find a local user on the instance and get their page (https://instance.tld/u/username).

In linux:

curl -X GET -H 'Accept: application/activity+json,application/json' https://userlink

If the result is html they have not patched, if it is json, they have patched.

curl -X GET -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://userlink

Will return json all the time on all instances.

I patched my kbin instance to send just the latter until it's resolved everywhere.

Tourist who allegedly carved names into Rome’s Colosseum says he didn’t know the ‘antiquity of the monument’ | CNN (www.cnn.com)

The tourist who was filmed apparently carving his name into a wall of Rome’s 2,000-year-old Colosseum late last month has sent a letter of apology to the local prosecutor’s office, his defense lawyer told CNN on Thursday....

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Damn, inflation has gotten worse than I thought.

r00ty Admin ,
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There needs to be a space blocked by a pillar with "409"

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Now I'm imagining epic battle simulator. 100v100 lawyers.

r00ty Admin ,
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I felt like that guy had some reasonable complaints. But in general complaining that you have to setup and configure web server like this.. I don't know. Yes, having a neat docker fast setup is convenient, but you do need a bit of skill at setting stuff up to run a server I think. So, perhaps if he doesn't want to do some sysadmin work maybe a new beta level piece of software isn't the best choice and did the right thing by no longer running an instance.

kbin is overall IMO fine, it has a learning curve and is a bit new. Currently most federation issues are resolved or resolvable. To be fair some of them were caused by issues with lemmy (since fixed, but not taken up by all instances) and (cough) a certain lemmy instance in particular blocking kbin in general. This kind of thing is going to make unavoidable federation issues. When I couldn't connect to lemmy instances properly my messenger processes were restarting all the time. Now? Not "crashing" nearly as much. By crashing, it's just that when a critical level error happens the process stops, and is reloaded right away. It doesn't mean they stop and messages are no longer processed.

Having said that the backend and especially server admin panel need work, a lot of work. But, these things are being worked on all the time.

Just my £0.016

r00ty Admin ,
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My biggest issue right now is the difficulty finding communities in remote instances. Searching for !community doesn’t work and I’ve heard you’re supposed to paste the entire web adress but that doesn’t seem to work either. Puzzling since it’s so simple on Lemmy.

So, if the community is already present (someone has subscribed already) on your kbin instance, when you click magazines it will be there and typing part of the name will filter the list and make it show.

If the community is not yet on your instance, you click the search button at the top of the kbin screen and in that search box type the whole [email protected] and it should find it and auto subscribe you to it. From then on it should be in the list above.

I agree this was less than intuitive and when I first setup my instance I really did wonder why I couldn't find anything to subscribe to.

In terms of terminology. I think it's because kbin is trying to place itself as a halfway house between the threadiverse and microblogging. There's going to be a learning curve and things are constantly changing.

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What were you looking for, I'll look on mine. The search I am talking about (if not in magazine list) is the magnifying glass at the top right in the area with your user name.

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Worked fine. First line of the returned info was "Senaste nytt om Lemmy-instansen Feddit.nu!"

https://kbin.life/m/[email protected] nothing there yet. In theory if you liked something over there it would arrive there though.

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Yes, exactly that. And posts have already started appearing in that magazine.

Also yes, I see that user. I think it was already cached because I see some comments from them show up too.

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Sure, you can do that. I think I have the answer though. Both sh.itjust.works and feddit.nu have the issue where they return html when they should return json if the Accept header isn't a very specific string. There's a patch for the nginx config to solve it available but it seems they've not applied it yet.

You can test any instance for this by doing the following.

Find a local user on the instance and get their page (https://instance.tld/u/username).
Find a linux (or any OS that has it) with curl installed and type the following:

curl -X GET -H 'Accept: application/activity+json,application/json' https://userlink

If the result is html they have not patched, if it is json, they have patched.

curl -X GET -H 'Accept: application/activity+json' https://userlink

Will return json all the time on all instances, and I've patched my kbin to use this Accept header until all are fixed.

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I have pull requests for other changes to do with federation. I have a branch with this change in, but I've so far not made it a PR because I didn't consider we should need to change this, and also because there was a patch on Lemmy's side already available. Lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org are all working correctly now for example.

But if this is going to go on for long, I may well turn it into a PR too and see what people think.

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On the one hand, this is indeed what is happening now, the largest instances for lemmy and kbin are taking the vast majority of the new users. I think though that this is because people are signing up before they know what they are signing up for.

I think the point stands that while these large servers can handle the load while still federating fully, it's not a real problem. The problem with classic centralised systems can be seen with reddit right now. People are leaving because they are enforcing changes on people and there is no alternative. Whereas here, if these larger instances decided to place some draconian measures, people could simply say "no thanks" and sign up elsewhere. That is not compromised by having huge instances. I don't think these things can end the fediverse though.

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There really needs to be a fediverse primer that everyone can read before signing up. It would make all this stuff clear.

About Instagram's "Threads" and people's concerns about privacy

I know that many people are concerned about “Threads” privacy policy and are all screaming “WE WILL BLOCK THREADS”. I honestly can’t see how it’s going to gather any personal information since Lemmy, mastodon etc. doesn’t collect any information at all. Like, how can you gather information about user, if he...

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On the flip side, if we federate freely with them the result is the same (and probably worse).

First of all, if you can access all federated resources (I think it's more aimed at mastadon, and connections with the lemmy/kbin will be limited. But I've not looked at what threads is offering yet) then we've already seen what people as a whole do. Just check the flagship instances lemmy.world and kbin.social. People just flocked to the biggest servers. Well, now the biggest server will be threads.

But then the existing users. They will have friends saying "Oh you know, I signed up on threads it's great" and they can say oh, well I'm already on mastadon and you can add me at [email protected]. And now they're connected.

Since the majority of new users will be on threads, not most connections users have are on threads.

So, if and when it turns out Meta remove federation for whatever reason (there are so many they can choose from) the people still on mastadon instances (and maybe lemmy/kbin/etc to a lesser extent) most of their friends are gone. Now the fediverse people will stay. But normal users? They'll sign up for threads and move on.

I'm not convinced there's a winning route once they're in. But, maybe I'm just the pessimist.

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Kinda depressing because it's only a matter of time before it happens with lemmy/kbin. Personally after the way reddit behaved after the API business, I was just happy I could go somewhere away from this corporate anti user atmosphere.

I mean, it's plain obvious you can't run a single service that can handle twitter or reddit levels of users without trying to get some money back. But you can have hundreds, or thousands of hobbyist size instances that spread this load. I think it's a nice escape personally (looking at the traffic my instance gets, I do wonder how this would scale to real reddit numbers though).

But, the majority of people won't think like that (and that's not a criticism), they will go where the people are. Large companies with marketing budgets that are pre-established in social media will get the users.

What would be the problem if Threads federated with Lemmy&co in the future?

I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it...

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This part:

Email protocols: Microsoft supported POP3, IMAP, and SMTP email protocols in their Microsoft Outlook email client. At the same time, they developed their own email protocol, MAPI, which has since been documented but is largely unused by third parties. Microsoft has announced that they would end support for basic authentication access to Exchange Online APIs for Office 365 customers, which disables most use of IMAP or POP3 and requires significant upgrades to applications in order to continue to use those protocols;[23] some customers have responded by simply shutting off older protocols.

From the EEE wikipedia page has given me PTSD.

I was required to implement this (IMAP with OAuth2) "simple change" but for a server backend service that checked an inbox to perform certain actions. That was certainly fun. In the end the solution wasn't that difficult, but finding it and working it into legacy code...

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And you don't need to look too far to see it now. The majority of people posting on the threadiverse come from lemmy. world and kbin.social. Why? Because they were already the established "big instances" and they went there.

The average user will just go to wherever is the biggest and that will be threads. And when they have the majority of new take up and most people on the other side have the majority of their contacts inside the threads world, then they don't need us any more.

This is just the way a corporation operates. Source: I work at a multinational corporation.

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While I doubt this is as much of an issue for us, as it is for mastadon (the interaction is possible, but not really common I think) the following part:

We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good.”

Is the best argument for defederating from them right from the start IMO. They're forcing their privacy policy on people that might not even have read it just because they interacted on a submission that happened to originate in threads.

Now, I know everything we do here is open. But I don't think it's OK in a moral sense to suck up data from users other than your own to be sold to advertisers. I doubt we have much legal power but we do have the power to stop delivering the data to their door.

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That's true, but given the numbers it is far more likely to happen the other way I'd expect.

In the long run it probably isn't their plan. They likely want to start gobbling up mostly mastadon (I'm guessing that is their target audience, I never had a twitter account or used mastadon) users to their service. Federation is just a recruitment tool I suspect.

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I think the people that are on fediverse applications because they want to get away from these corporate operated megaliths aren't likely to go anywhere. But that's not all the current users, it's probably not even most of the current users. Those people are likely to move if all their friends are there and they cannot see each-other any more via mastadon.

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That's not how I understand it'll work though. Each instance is moderating their local users. So they will need to have moderators enough for their own users. The home instance can moderate their users and those actions propagate. Remote admins can moderate remote users but, they will only effect their own instance. I could be wrong, I've not used mastadon. But for kbin/lemmy I've seen edit/delete messages coming through from the owning instance.

If other instances choose not to honour deletes and edits from moderation, then yeah they need to moderate themselves. But I think that's going to be a rare case.

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Eeeeeeeeh, how can you launch something you know is going to blow up like this and not be prepared to moderate?

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I like this kind of protest. Using their own rules against them. But, you know admins are going to do something. r/PICS are keeping up the good work where others have folded and I salute them from the fediverse.

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kbin.life checking in.

r00ty Admin ,
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Message received at kbin.life

r00ty Admin ,
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Bring your best code to airlock 3.

r00ty Admin ,
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Get back to shower thoughts!

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Well there's no question more people were on the threadiverse on the 1st July onwards. My little corner of the threadiverse was getting around 3x or more the normal server to server messages. The bigger instances of lemmy and kbin were struggling under the pressure.

And since then it's been busy compared to before (I think at least). But that doesn't mean people aren't doing both.

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No no no. You see it IS a reduction. See, they were going to increase the price with inflation. But instead they didn't. So, kind of a discount!

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Not quite no, otherwise the load wouldn't be shared. How it works is that when you subscribe to a community (or instance) from that point on any comment, post or interaction is sent to the server you are on, and vice-versa. That way each server serves their users and the servers swap interactions with eachother to allow a certain level of scaling.

Now Lemmy I think doesn't download files (images etc), but points to the original instance, so it's really just the actual posts and comments (which will gradually add up over time). But Kbin, downloads the images and media too. That way, they take the download pressure too.

I've been running for less than a week with around 50 communities. The media storage is up to 5.5GB. Adding whole instances I'm pretty sure would increase the rate it rises quite a bit.

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I've not looked, possibly you can and make a more curated experience.

Currently just me on my instance (others welcome, but it doesn't appear in fedidb for whatever reason), and I have the capacity to handle the data so far. I'm not that concerned.

Anyone opening to users though should expect to get a lot of incoming data.

If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.

If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.

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It made no sense to you.

r00ty Admin ,
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Yes. How I understand it they're trying to run a curated safe space over there but are finding current moderation tools insufficient to moderate the influx of users on certain instances. I believe it was connected to those with no registration verification.

They've said they don't want to do it, and once they're feeling able to take better control they will re-federate.

And, that's entirely their call. If their users want access outside of their walled garden they can make an account elsewhere. If people currently defederated from them wants access, join an instance still federated.

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