I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We’ve left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc…

But we need to spread out.

Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.

A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from ‘the bird site’ (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk’s new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.

We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.

I’m a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:

https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105

The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting ‘off the record’. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.

And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.

I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It’s the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn’t really register with me until I spoke with this person.

https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3

Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:

https://kbin.social

We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.

Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.

TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.

I invite correction and clarifications.

EDIT: Adding further sources below.

Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207

Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible

Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d

Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media

Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618

And a cartoon to boot

https://cutie.city/@nuz/110602855304673785

  • It hasn’t even been two weeks. Let people get used to the platforms.

    Difference instances are showing up slowly, so maybe instead of saying everyone needs to split up before communities and magazines have had a chance to mature even in the slightest, we slow down a little bit and support the hosts and developers we have now.

    Or perhaps, look for new instances and report back on places folks can migrate to.

      • If you use reddit as an example, they have hundreds, thousands of subreddits.

        We aren’t anywhere close to even a hundred nature magazines.

        Allowing people to be comfortable for a month won’t cause any long term damage.

      • I do wonder if it would be healthier for the fedditverse for instances to really narrow their magazine/community footprint. I.e. “This is an Anime instance” a “Science instance” etc. Making off-topic magazines could either be discouraged or outright banned.

        Not looking forward to having dozens of “news” and “technology” magazines sharing the same stories,

        • That’s fair but what if, say, the “news” instance dies/goes offine or something along these lines, isn’t all the content it hosts going to be lost or become inaccessible? Not sure how the whole thing works but it’s something that’s been concerning me. With redundant communities across multiple instances at least the whole topic won’t go down with any single instance.

        • I sort of think instances forming around distinct communities is what the Fediverse’s early architects had in mind, but it just doesn’t seem to be turning out that way. Users are not frequently self-segregating by ideology (e.g. lemmygrad) or interest (e.g. startrek.website). Even beehaw is not really specific enough to be ideologically distinct. Lemmy.ml is even less so, despite the devs/admins politics, and lemmy.world or lemmy.ca aren’t even trying. Neither is kbin.social, to be fair, but imho that’s okay. It’s just a fact to deal with.

          Without the expected behavior, you end up with one of two options. On one hand, you hope that the admins of tiny instances are superstars and populate their /c/'s or /m/'s to attract a following against all odds and force the projects back on the roadmap by having all the fans of a niche community or all the people interested in a specific viewpoint post mostly or entirely on the relevant instances /c/ or /m/. On the other, you have the discourse dominated by a few busier instances when their new “subs” populate more quickly. The latter, while not ideal, is not as bad as true centralization and, importantly, it seems to match actual behavior and it might be useful for front-end devs of apps and sites to make choices that work with the user behavior as best they can, like optional auto-aggregation of identically named communities.

            • The person above wasn’t talking about that. They were talking about fragmentation. For example, I am subscribed to three different Formula 1 communities/magazines, one in kbin.social, another in lemmy.ml and another in lemmy.world. There is no difference between them, other than the site they’re hosted. I know that I can participate in all of them, and I have participated in all three. But I’m still unsure how should I participate. If I find an interesting article, should I post it only to one of them? To which one? Or crosspost it to all? (btw, lemmy has an option to crosspost, but kbin doesn’t) And if the topic is posted in several communities, should I comment in one or in all of them? Maybe should I encourage people to migrate to the larger community? Or maybe we could solve the problem by creating a unified community!

            • My point was there is going to be a lemmy.ca gaming community, a Lemmy.World gaming community, a Lemmy.ml gaming community, a beehaw.whatever gaming community, kbin.whatever gaming community, plus another dozen. It will be hard for any of them to take off because users are split.

      • Frankly I think we need more people before we can start getting concerned about things like that. If we’re trying to make the Fediverse a viable alternative it has to be appealing and easy enough to use that people want to use it. If we don’t get that right this whole thing is doomed from the start

        • The fastest way to get kbin.social defederated is if you try to build it into reddit with everyone participating from the same instance.

          As for not being concerned, many in the fediverse watching us roll in are concerned. Not because they don’t like redditors, but because everyone is going to one of 3 or so places.

      • Can magazines migrate instances like users can? (even ignoring federation concerns, at some point it’s going to be much easier to scale this thing if the more popular magazines can spawn off to their own instances)

        • No but once the magazine/community has been created it doesn’t really matter which instance it lives on because any user from any instance can post, comment and mod in that magazine.

            • If they want to “avoid censorship” (aka put things online they know others find offensive) then those instances should just never turn on federating from the beginning. Because then they cry afoul later when they can’t blast their messages to other instances anymore.

              • There’s all sorts of reasons to be nervous about federation - say you’re starting a community dedicated to Falun Gong or some other subject the Chinese government despises and are worried about moderators of larger instances coming under pressure to shut it down.

                But yes, it does seem like the best way to manage that is to start it off on an instance you control from the get-go.

          • Ah, didn’t realize that.

            So what happens if the instance it was originally created on goes offline, or defederates from the instance that you’re on - does it disappear, or does it carry on as if nothing happened? What about if all of the mods’ instances go offline?

            • If an instance goes offline (based one what recently happened with beehaw defederating some instances), other instances will still keep copies of old posts and comments, and any new comments on the old posts stay just on whatever instance made them and don’t copy to others.

            • Yes communities can only be created on the same instance as the user creating it. But, a user can have an account on more than one instance to create communities and then assign their main account on any instance as a mod.

        • It’s an idea I’ve seen floated, and personally would appreciate, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no Magazine or Community migration for kbin or Lemmy.

          Incidentally, I’m commenting from a Lemmy instance, to a kbin Magazine on kbin.social, and subscribing to RedditMigration on kbin.social was pretty seamless, at least as seamless as any other non-local Lemmy Community. OP is right in that spreading out is a decent idea. It’s not really necessary for everyone to be on the same instance.

          Another way to address the problem of corporate takeover and ensuing enshitification is form non-profits, co-ops, or other organizations to actually “own” the instance. My home Mastodon instance has started down this path already.

        • If this is implemented it’ll be good for the communities to be able to go where they want, but there’s a good chance it can become a source of drama if the net result is smaller communities choosing to migrate to larger instances.

          Also, the logistic behind large magazines spawning their own instances only make sense if there’s an option for users to subscribe to an entire instance. AFAIK that’s impossible right now (or I don’t know how to, if anyone know please tell me), so that is something to keep in mind.

      • I believe there is a healthy relationship between instances and magazines, actually: the way in which topical forums tend to be “hive-mindy” fits well with Fediverse instance culture. The difference is that instead of Reddit-scaling leading in the direction of “locking down” topical discussion to be a bureaucratic game of dancing around every rule, because all users are homogenous - just a name, a score, and a post history - you can have “this board is primarily about this” but then allow in a dose of chaos, affording some privilege to the instance users who already have a set of norms and values in mind and pushing federated comments out of view as needed, where you know the userbases are destined to get into unproductive fights.

        This also combats common influencer strategies applying bots and sockpuppeting, because you’ve already built in the premise of an elite space.

        There’s work needed on the moderation technology of #threadiverse software to achieve this kind of vision, but it’s something that will definitely be learned as we go along.

    • It’s right to say that instances are showing up slowly, but there is definitely a centralization occurring. According to fediverse.observer, kbin.social has 43k users, and the next most populated instance in the US only has 104 users.

      Ernest, developer of kbin and who runs kbin.social, has spoken about the difficulties in running kbin.social with the spike in users. If people are willing to sign up on smaller instances or migrate over, that could help distribute the load.

      Or, like me, learn about VPSs and domain names and Linux commands from zero knowledge to get their own instance stood up - but it took a bit and I’m still running into issues here, so I can’t necessarily recommend it for someone who has a life to attend to. :)

      • Cool! I hadn’t really known how to find other kbins! I’ll scope them out and maybe try hopping on another one.

        I guess it’d have been nice if OP had provided a list of alternatives people could become aware of.

    • Well said. I’m also hoping we eventually get a tool to migrate accounts from one instance to another (or maybe link accounts from multiple sites so they show as combined data together). That way I don’t lose everything if the instance I go to just shuts down one day, who h did happen to Mastodon often in the beginning iirc.

  • Hey, I think there’s a lot of truth in that. I don’t want to force anyone to stay here ;) I believe that kbin can be a stepping stone to a wider fediverse, which is great. However, I’m trying to keep the entry barrier as low as possible so that everyone can find their place here. The rest will come with time. Currently, we’re working with contributors to make setting up and maintaining your own instance less of a nightmare, and it should change for the better soon.

    https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/p/485886/This-happened-quickly-Lemmy-is-now-the-second-biggest-platform-next#post-comment-855115

    ps. The queue of deleted accounts will be processed with the next update.

  • I’ve found it really beneficial joining an instance that’s hosted locally to my country and/or city. Not only can you take advantage of the “Local” filter to literally see local posts in your area, but you also get an amazing ping so everything feels super responsive.

  • Hey! Hey hey hey! No! I JUST moved away from Reddit! Now you’re telling me I need to move into an even smaller place than this? Can we space out our social media crises a bit? I’m still winded from the Dutch douchebag buying Twitter.

  •  Alex   ( @alex@geddit.social ) 
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    1 year ago

    The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.

    No, that’s completely wrong. You’re scaremongering. There was no such offer.

    There is no confirmation of any financial contracts, or moderation arrangements and Eugen Rochko/Gargron has stated he doesn’t know anything about any secret deals.[1]

    From @supernovae@universeodon.com:

    The nda wasn’t because of some absurd agreement but just the fact they’re launching a new project and we’re getting access to engineers and product team to discuss what the relationship could be. And they went well.[2]

    There was a call to talk about engineering, moderation, safety, support for user privacy controls and how federation would look like. (and more)

    There was no deal signing or any bullshit like that - that’s all fake news.

    The nda is because none of this stuff is released and it’s up to meta to share details or admins to join the ongoing calls to learn in advance of launch what is going on.[3]

    We don’t know, what we don’t know. So i initiated contact and meta obliged. Because the product isn’t released yet, there is an NDA.[4]

      • kbin should have something in place that if server/instance A meets XYZ requirements and has a curated set of federated magazines enabled that are common among “anchor” instances (or whatever you want to call them) that anyone trying to register should be sent off to a random instance that is underutilized. i believe mastodon has/had something like this early on.

        i haven’t been actively advertising kbin.run, but it has taken about a week since deployment (after some initial growing pains and the occasional glitches after pulling down new code changes) to get to about 52 registered users kbin.fediverse.observer.

  • When I joined kbin.social it was the only kbin instance. Or at least the only one that was actually online at the time.

    When there’s a way to migrate accounts I’ll definitely look into moving somewhere else, though, for the sake of load balancing if nothing else.

  • People need to just chill out and touch some grass.

    Like how long have you been on the internet? If the whole federation thing can be bought out by a company and ruined, then it’s a failed experiment and we move on to the next thing. It’s a tale as old as the internet itself, cool grassroots thing gets popular, sells out, destroys itself, repeat every few years.

    For now, kbin and lemmy are working, but don’t think this will last forever or won’t get tested. Either the concept is good and it will stand the test of corporate takeover, or it won’t and we try something else.

  • For those who are interested in a different Kbin instance I joined Kbin.cafe the other day. It’s very small right now and has some good hardware running it I believe. Not many magazines/communities but of course we can browse others from any instance.

    It runs smoothly too since low traffic. I love the fediverse!

  • I may move on to a private or semi privately run instance in the future but I’m definitely a fan of kbin over Lemmy and the current state of self hosting kbin is a mess. When things have gotten better on that front I will look at moving on and expanding the fediverse.

    • Yeah, that’s one of the things kinda holding me back for now as well.

      Edit: I fnally gave it a shot. It turned out to be pretty easy. I just followed the admin guide on kbin’s codeberg at https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/wiki#admin-guide and scrolled down to the “Install with Docker” section.

      Did this on an M1 Mac that already had Docker Desktop set up, so basically I skipped the first four subsections as not relevant and went straight down to the “Clone repo” subsection. (After cloning the repo, there is a section on getting docker-ce set up for Linux/GNU that I skipped).

      I simply did “docker compose build” and didn’t explicitly need to build fresh images. Then I ran “docker compose up” and the system was up.

      Going to https://kbin.localhost … told me that I forgot to build my npm or yarn assets. Whoops!

      Since I didn’t want to mess around with yarn on the host system (though that probably would have worked if I tried) I just found the kbin-php container id by checking the list from “docker ps” and then used “docker exec -it [kbin-php-container-id] /bin/sh” to log in with a shell. Then I ran “apk add yarn” followed by “yarn install” and “yarn build”

      After that everything worked.

      Somehow I missed seeing the configuration section, and so I created an admin user by registering a new user through the UI, and then running “docker exec -it [postgres-contanier-id] psql -U kbin kbin” to connect direcly to the database. Using psql I executed “update “user” set roles=”[‘ROLE_ADMIN’]“, is_verified=true where id = 1;” then logged out and logged back in get recognized as an admin.

      Finally I went ahead and created the random magazine through the UI.

      Something is still off. The UI works fine and anything locally is good, but I can not seem to subscribe to magazines on other instances or even search for them from my own kbin.local - they just comes up empty. Not sure why this is happening but I’ll update as soon as I learn more!

  • I won’t downvote bc I think this is a genuine question OP is presenting, but I disagree with people splitting quite yet.

    People will naturally find their pockets as the Fediverse grows. The benefit is that it’s already decentralized, so you have that option.

  • The cynic in me screams that this post is to stir up FUD because someone at BigSocial is shitting their pants right now… :D (/s?)

    But yes, you have some valid points but stretching too thin is not going to get us anywhere and will just result in people leaving due to lack of content. Remember that divide and conquer is a valid tactic too, so having many small instances isn’t going to magically shield us from Bad Things ™.

  • I actually started with an account on Fedia.io before coming here, but they’re down like 90% of the time and I fear it might be too much for Jerry (operator of that instance) to keep up with, at least for now. But having an account on multiple servers that I can bounce between when such things happen has been nice.