(Reminder: if you have shared the original version in a public post with an old version up, replacing it with this one might be more helpful.)
I want to preface, if you see a mistake in the image or have something helpful to add, go right ahead! I still have the layered files for this, so edits can be made very quickly. I chose to handwrite the text to avoid font copyright infringement.
Feel free to share this poster as you wish, especially on Reddit. All I ask is that you respect the license and don’t remove my socials at the bottom. If anyone’s addition is included, I’ll credit them, and if this gets added onto (or translated) by someone else later, they can add their info as well.
I hope someone can find it useful with the subreddit blackouts right around the corner.
I want to thank the Beehaw admins so much for their amazing work!
(Poster edited; I spotted a duplicated word, mrmanager@lemmy.today noted the lack of whitespace; current version is slightly larger and has been spaced out. You can still request the 800x2000 size, but know it is a little squished.)
(Edit 2: Removed defederation part as it’s not really required. The email analogy blackcoffee@beehaw.org suggested has been added, thanks!)
(Edit 3: Here’s another version making the interconnectivity a bit clearer and mentioning some cool-looking reader apps that have been suggested! Also made the image slightly longer for ease of viewing. I might do some small cosmetic changes tomorrow)
(Edit 4 is here with the date updated towards the bottom. This version contains a reminder to verify your email, lets people know why mlem isn’t showing up on App Store searches, and added fedia.io to Kbin instances. Some colors have been changed slightly to be more mobile friendly, as this is written and edited from a phone tablet. If you have a hard time reading this because of the changes, please let me know. Thank you all for the help and tips!)
I wouldn’t bother with the concept of de-federation in a beginners guide. One of the most confusing bits of the fediverse to new users is picking a server. For most users, the one they pick doesn’t really matter, but talking about defederation makes it sound like a really important choice.
Edited; the defederation bit probably shouldn’t be the reason why someone picks a server (my original thought was that someone who is LGBTQ probably won’t have to worry about seeing phobic content from another instance, for example), but chances are if the rules make a place inviting to a group, conflicting (or illegal) instances will probably be defederated anyways.
Alright so this seems a good a place as any to ask dumb questions… This almost feels like the 90’s and using the internet for the first time 🤣
So, I’m viewing this post on lemmy.world, but the content itself is from beehaw.org, simple enough. What happens if beehaw.org is unavailable, let’s say permanently shut down, right now? Is the past content still available on other instances or does it just poof? Could I still view this post one day, week, month, year after a shut down? Could I still comment? The image itself I see is hosted directly on the beehaw instance so that obviously depends on a stable instance.
If an instance shuts down, they’re supposed to send a “self destruct” notice to all other instances to delete their content, but technically speaking, instances do not have to listen to these notices. Thus, it’s possible that deleted or unavailable content still remains available on some platforms.
And what about user accounts ?
Lemmy’s source code shows that user account deletion means the hosted instance will purge and redact all of that user’s content and send a notice to other instances as well, but since it’s federation, nobody is required is to listen to these commands, although the vast majority will.
The concern which has been raised about this is also what happens if one of those other instances is down when the purge message goes out. It’s a risk of a federated system like this, that because there isn’t a single source of truth, that instances fall out of sync with each other and content is semi permanent… That’s also one of the strengths of a federated service, so I think that should also help foster a better community.
so you’re saying that even if a post started on a specific instance (like beehaw, for example), and then got deleted from the main source, other instances would still be able to see it? kind of like the light from a supernova reaching us a million light years away?
No. Each instance hosts its own contents.
Thank you for your work! I wonder if this could be updated to include join-lemmy since it just points people to kbin.social. That might be confusing if they’re trying to find a Lemmy server or well, simply other instances in general!
Thank you, I didn’t expect this to take off like it did! I explained in another post here why I didn’t name join lemmy for the guide, but the thread is getting pretty long. There are instances listed on there fairly high up with descriptions that suggests the instance hosts and permits illegal content (the instance is not FMHY or related to piracy as I also noted), and I wouldn’t feel good about recommending the website because of that. browse.feddit.de didn’t have anything of that nature on their list as far as I can tell by scrolling for a few minutes, and it also tells you which instance hosts the community.
If you mean the instance that promotes itself as NSFW allowed and “shota/loli/cub friendly”, it’s my understanding that fictional drawings of that type are not illegal, at least not in the states (presumably laws vary between countries on this). It’s certainly not something I’d ever want to be within 10 feet of, but there’s an ocean between that and actual child abuse materials (and the instance in question does explicitly ban such materials, per a quote of the rules I saw in another thread about this). I don’t think it necessarily follows that people into the former must also be child abusers, same as I don’t think furries are automatically into beastiality.
But nevertheless I agree it’s… not a good look at all for that to be front and center on the join page. It could have and should have been removed a while ago - it’s been up long enough I believe the Lemmy devs must be aware of it, so I’m suspecting they just don’t care.
I think the join page also made generally offputting by Lemmygrad and arguably even Lemmy.ml, too, frankly, and since those are the lemmy dev’s instances, there’s no fixing that until and unless they end up just outnumbered.
tl;dr: I support you not linking join-lemmy, but I wonder if we have an alternative site that people can use to browse and choose an instance somewhere? If not, could someone make one?
Edit: an alternative would be especially helpful since redditors, lacking a direct link, will inevitably just google “lemmy” and immediately find the join-lemmy page anyway.
Thanks for the reply; regardless of whether it’s actually legal wherever a person is/where the server’s hosted (Canada has stricter laws pertaining this type of stuff, not sure if it would cover what’s going on there), it still has a definite ‘ick’ factor I am not comfortable with, and I’m glad to know I’m not alone I’m thinking that! The ideology of the Lemmy devs and the Lemmygrad instance are also highly questionable at best, and while there’s not much we can do to keep the join Lemmy site off of the Google results in the short term, not spreading it further is a good idea.
There’s not another easily accessible mobile-friendly actual directory I know of; I put the browse community page as a next best thing. I think I vaguely recall finding some all-Fediverse-instance site, but that is was very broken, crowded, and unusable on mobile.
I’m not code-savvy at all myself; I’d really love to see another, more filtered directory that would be more appealing to the average person!
Is lemmygrad actually run by the devs? I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this.
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but is Kbin just another Lemmy instance or a whole separate thing entirely?
Thanks for the guide!
That is not a dumb question.
kbin is it’s own thing, originally it couldn’t talk to Lemmy. It can also have its own instances. Today it can talk to Lemmy and Mastodon and should be able to talk to anything else that talks to them. It also has its own communities, and people on Lemmy can access those as if it were another Lemmy instance.
Thanks for the info!
all the weirdly specific cat subreddits if I don´t have a my r/catloaf idk what I’m going to do.
Here’s one for you buddy:
thank you kind sir/madam/everything in between.
Here’s one for you!
I like this style! Kind of reminds me of a whiteboard. It’s neat!
Thank you so much!
As someone who is brand new here, I agree with the others: the de-federation part confused me. But the email analogy was easier to grasp. Otherwise thank you for this!
Needs a bit more whitespace to not be a wall of text in my opinion. But looks good in general!
Good point! I can easily resize and add more space.
Looks better already :)
Important note for kbin (and fedia.io): if you sign up and fail to click that confirmation link, I think you’re basically SOL. So don’t make the same mistake I made! Click that confirmation link, it expires in an hour!
Darn, but thanks for the note. I’ll put a reminder to confirm emails on tomorrow’s edit, even for Lemmy; since email is used to recover passwords, no email + lost password = lost account, and that’s not fun!
You’re still able to recover your password, you just still can’t log in afterwards
I know people have said mastodon is like twitter, but what’s kbin? Do I want all three?
Kbin, Mastodon, Lemmy, and others are all “federated apps” connected to ActivityPub. They are just different UIs to connect to it, so you can see posts and content from one on the others.
Mastodon is a UI inspired by Twitter.
Lemmy is a UI inspired by reddit. It is more stable but less feature rich. You can get native apps just like with reddit, such as Jerboa (similar to rif).
Kbin is a UI inspired by reddit. It is more feature rich and less stable (said to be, anyway).
They are all speaking the same protocol though. So while you can load Mastodon posts in this Lemmy ui they might look … off. Similarly you can load things in Mastodon from kbin etc and they too might seem weird. It’s because they’re not giving the same context you might get viewing that content in the UI it was made for.
These are all still new with Mastodon being the one most widely adopted already. So expect better features and bug fixes to roll out over time. Especially with so much more demand now, I’m guessing many old 3PA devs have already been working out new tricks for ActivityPub.
What’s 3PA?
third party apps.
I think you give some really important information for people to get their head around it. I’ve never seen it explained like that. Even further, I feel like there should be ELI5 without trying to use terms like protocol for non-tech people.
Very nice! Perhaps it would be a good idea to spell out that you can subscribe to any community in the Fediverse no matter what part of it you signed up on, kbin or any instance of Lemmy?
I know that’s not absolutely accurate, but it’s close enough.
Good point! I won’t be able to edit for a few hours, but in terms of it not always being accurate it is definitely possible in the vast majority of cases.
Really like it, sadly I don’t think the people I’d share it with would be willing to read through it. I’ll try with word of mouth for now and use this as a backup.
So, is kbin a lemmy instance? If so, how do I log in over there? I’m registered here on beehaw, so how do I access/vote on kbin content?
gotta say, as a somewhat technically-inclined person, I don’t like this fediverse stuff.
@komnenos@beehaw.org @unsunny@beehaw.org kbin isn’t a lemmy instance, it’s a lemmy “competitor”
kbin is a software you can install on your server just like you can install lemmy, or mastodon, or pixelfed, etc…
if you want to interact with a post/profile/community/… on another instance, the usual way is to just take the link to the post, and paste it into your instance’s search bar. this’ll bring up the post in your instance where you’re logged in!
that’s what i just did with your comment: i don’t use either lemmy or kbin on my instance, but i saw your comment on beehaw, so i copied the link, pasted it in my akkoma search bar, and was able to reply to the post, even though my instance doesn’t even have support for user groups/communities
kbin in a separate software from lemmy. The same way that Mastodon is different but still federated.
Long winded explanation but hopefully it clears a few things up…
There is a protocol that allows two or more things to talk to each other. That is called ActivityPub and things that speak that protocol can work together. The things in this case are the servers which you register your account with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
You can have two different things (kbin and a Lemmy instance) and they can work together despite being different. They are differently written programs in different programming languages. The ActivityPub federation thing allows your Lemmy instance to ask to be sent all posts and comments from another server “just to have” as a local copy which you can then read on your server. If you comment, vote, or post on your server’s “local copy” then your server sends that update back to the original server so they can update their records.
The content being downloaded from a remote server is like 1 person looking at everything over there. At that point, you and everyone else on your server can look at your local copy which is quick (if your server is not overloaded). The remote server can better handle lots of users from where you are at because your server is taking on the “user interaction load”. This way, the user load is distributed to remote servers where the users do their interactions and the smaller “like 1 person” transactions are sent along when necessary.
The way things work on the Lemmy side is that you can see other communities by using the search function or by clicking on the communities button and clicking on all. You will see all communities that your server “knows about” (including communities hosted on this specific server). It automatically downloads all content from remote servers that it “knows about” (and it does so frequently) but that is driven by you first asking the server to get things from a specific server if necessary.
You can ask for things by searching for a specific address starting with a ! character. Wait a few moments and search again and you should be able to see that the content was retrieved for you. (You can search by a more granular term like the server address itself if necessary.) At that point, you can interact with that community in expected ways (like subscribing to that community to see updates from them).
The link you need is on the right side of any community page you view. Examples are technology@beehaw.org and kbinMeta@kbin.social
Once everything is set up and working, the server you log in to will automatically gather posts and comments from “the fediverse”, show it on your screen, and send along any comments or votes you make back to “the fediverse” for others to see.
That all being said… kbin is a bit overloaded at the moment and is not quite sending updates to other servers. When they have that sorted, you should be able to interact with them. Refer to the following post from chaorace for more information.
Saving this for when I need to explain to people the differences.
Absolutely! I feel like it sums everything important up cleanly and easily digestible.
It’s great. I agree with the removal of de-federation, I don’t see how that’s important at this stage. And since you mention kbin.social, why not also point people to https://join-lemmy.org/?
I will be removing the de-federation part and putting the email analogy in its place, I agree it isn’t really important enough to note. The reason I don’t add the join lemmy site is that they list at least one instance that seems to invite illegal activity/content, and that didn’t take long to find in the directory, so I feel it would be irresponsible to mention it. I scrolled through browse.feddit.de for a few minutes and couldn’t find anything that obvious, so I added that one. It says where a community is hosted, too, so that might help someone!
Are you talking about FMHY? One of the devs of Lemmy even moderates the piracy sub and said it’s one of his main motivation for even developing Lemmy
(I can’t reply to zekus@beehaw.org for some reason, just loads endlessly)
It’s not FMHY, and the piracy sub appears on the feddit.de list I posted. Good to hear it’s being moderated!
I did’t knew I could use a mastodon accout and created a new one here on Kbin. I’ll like to know more about that, if it’s possible (yet, I know I can use my mastodon account to subscribe to content from other platforms and see it on my mastodon’s activity feed)
What’s the difference between kbin and Lemmy? I saw something about Lemmy having ‘baggage’ and kbin being a newer iteration?
Kbin is a different application, another content agregator suitable for leaving Reddit. The thing is, since we all use the same protocol to communicate (ActivityPub), these two completely different applications can talk to each other :)
Does this mean we can also technically communicate with Mastodon?
Yup!
amazing, that sounds incredibly cursed
Alright, but functionally, for a reddit refuge, which one is “better”?
Edit: and what’s Mastodon?
I think kbin has the better feature set currently, but the dev describes the platform as being in “early beta,” so IDK if it’s ready for serious usage yet. Mastodon is a Twitter-like site. I think Redditors would like Calckey better if they’re going for a Twitter-like platform, as Calckey also has threaded comment replies (though theirs is different from Reddit’s).
I honestly think that kbin is “better” but it wont be really better until they can bring back federation properly as they have had to introduce cloudflare that seems to be breaking federation. Once that is up you should be able to view between regular kbin and lemmy instances you choose. I just think kbin is set up better.
I guess we’ll have to see which one is better in the coming weeks/months. But since you can see all the content anyways, I think more important is picking an instance that suits you.
Mastodon is a micro-blogging platform, just like twitter. There are many instances and it’s also federated, so it doesn’t matter which instance you register your account at.
They’re functionally very similar but are two seperately developed pieces of software. The lemmy devs are tankies and many would prefer to completely avoid using something from them. I don’t believe there’s anything to worry about, as the devs can’t control individual instances.
undefined> tankies
oof. Is there reason why people choose to set up, or use a Lemmy community over kbin then?
I didn’t know about kbin before making a Lemmy account, and Lemmy is the one being spread around Reddit as an alternative site. It then only comes up through an occasional comment on certain communities (meta ones) that the Lemmy devs hold particular views, it’s easy to browse a lot of content without finding that out. That’s probably the major reason.
Same. Lemmy is a more appealing name than however we’re supposed to say kbin.
