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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Maybe on your instance - it’s your loss. But admins have a choice - defed from them and lose access to all those users and having actual content worth looking at, or federate with them and actually grow your network into something that has enough going on to make people interested. As it is, I use Threads right now. I strongly prefer it to Mastodon. Kbin comes close, but has less content to idly scroll through. If no Fediverse site I use supports Threads, I’ll keep on using it.


  • I’m not at my computer, so please excuse any mobile issues. I’m in favor of the move, because it will help to simultaneously connect and decentralize communications across the platforms. Say what you will about Facebook (you’re probably right), but if they’re that bad, then it seems logical to me to connect to their federated service even more aggressively.

    The more we push our content (and by extension the Fediverse content that kbin aggregates), the less impact their algorithm can have. The more we go out of the way to expose their content, the harder we make it them to curate/censor/suppress any voices. And if, when comparing two Fediverse instances or softwares, we find that what’s been pushed to them is different, we the users can call it out to news organizations (or make it public ourselves).

    And yes, I know I’m making the arguments for supporting private companies in adopting open-source. It’s about being able to audit what companies we don’t trust are doing.

    In addition to that, I’m currently a Threads user. Anecdotally, there’s a lot of wholesome content on there that I appreciate, and what limited advertising is there is nowhere near as obtrusive as Reddit or the main Facebook platform.




  • kbin finally has notifications not throwing an error every time I try to check them, so that much is nice now. I’ve actually had no problems with the Reddit software on my phone, and I’ve unsubbed from most of the communities I was part of there which moved across to lemmy. That choice has really trimmed my experience down to a more focused one nicely. I’ve also gotten done turning federation back off as I want it to be, and my user block list here is getting pretty long, blocking out the spammers that come across my feed.

    Of course, because kbin is still one of the smallest sites related to the ActivityPub protocol, there’s limited content here compared to Reddit, Then again, there’s also less content on all of PeerTube (let alone a single site) than there is on YouTube, and I’d take a shot at saying that even Threads has the largest Mastodon community beat by a country mile, let alone what Twitter still has.

    So basically, I guess I’d say I’m not a refugee, I’m just doing as I did with Facebook when it first launched after MySpace and Friendster - keeping my options open and looking around.














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    There’s still chaos in terms of instances and softwares. Until we all settle on one software that does the job, and until we have a way to have a single community again, Reddit remains the superior option. There is only one r/RPG, it works on Highlander rules - there can be only one. How many groups in the Fediverse named m/RPG or c/RPG are there? Why must each user be forced to answer that question?

    That’s what would fix things for me; make the federation 100% behind-the-curtain so that I don’t have to think about it. I don’t care about the backend, I’m not hosting, the value to me is ad views only, not cash. I’d argue a solid 80% of users on corp-owned social media wouldn’t understand even if you simplify it. The fediverse/threadiverse is not a drop-in replacement for Reddit. Until it is, I’ll keep one foot in spez’s yard. If Meta’s Threads product does become an ActivityPub community and solves this issue, I’ll move there
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  • What issues have you specifically noticed with this?

    The issue I’ve noticed first and foremost is that there is more than one identically named group. Don’t tell me that rpg@kbin.social, rpg@lemmy.ml, and rpg@foo.bar are different communities. They’re identically named communities. I’d rather have as false positive of a gun user’s instance with threads about rocket-propelled grenades, rather than having to go to each group to browse. Don’t tell me to just use the “subscribed” view. That doesn’t pick up everything in a topic, nor does it help me to find those - again, identically named - communities on other servers. Whenever a new server comes online with an RPG community, they’ll be in their own corner. They can participate as foreigners with another group, but that’s not theirs. There’s no central place for hosting these communities. If there was a server set up just to host groups, and the rest were for users, that would make sense. I immediately grew tired, trying to find all of the communities related to my interests so I can subscribe to all. I did that back in the day, joining forums and setting up a personal homepage with frames. In theory anyone can join any group, but they have to find it first.

    If devs and leaders of the ActivityPub community are going to continue pushing the idea that everyone can talk to everyone else, we absolutely need some form of community merging for identically-named communities. For instance, a kbin.social user should be able to subscribe to cooking and see posts from cooking@*.* , not just cooking@kbin.social. That’s a UX issue just as much as a technical one.

    I wasn’t around this far back. Can you elaborate on this a bit? What’s the issue with “having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes” ?

    Back in those days, BBS mail was less “email” and more “text stored on server”. To get all of your mail from multiples, you had to connect to each of the servers in sequence, download your mail, and then read it offline and reply (any good BBS software would remember where itwas from, and offer to call back and send each message). Multiplexing meant that you could have a BBS in the NYC area, it would be able to contact and download from one in, say, PA or wherever, and they could each download threads and messages, aka federated content. The pain has been massively reduced over time, and I’m glad. My next point bounces off yours:

    This I remember well. Sounds like you are trying to create an account on each instance and are constantly logging out of one and into the next to keep up on the latest posts and comments. This … is not really the way to do it.

    You’re right, except in cases where I want a different psudonymity; my choice. In this case, I can’t check for new posts in, continuing with the same example, rpg@*.* without checking the group from each federated server. Posts are neither mirrored nor transcluded. That’s the point I’m getting at. I should be able to just open up m/rpg and have it cover all compatible groups.

    Don’t confuse terms. kbin.social is an instance, the platform is kbin the software.
    Actually it’s well understood that kbin.social is getting too large and it’s not good for instances to get this big in general - so it’s kinda a good thing that other instances haven’t exploded as much. See https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/122067/Jim-is-invading-the-finer-things-club-aka-kbin-social-is and

    I disagree with your latter point. kbin.social has hit a reasonable mass of users to have a strong local community and become a platform unto itself, running on kbin software. I’m not interested in a smaller community. I joined Reddit because it was the largest single-site community on the Web. I want the monolithic community, and I accept the costs that incurs, including ads or ad-first design. Right now, the fediverse is just fragments at the foot of the tower of Babel, each speaking a separate tongue, even if some are intelligible to others.

    I don’t care about the difference between Mastodo, kbin, & Lemmy. They’re web software which are trying to replace a monolith, and have seen imited success. I don’t care about political leanings. I’m talking about a UX issue. If you want to defed from a site, and receive no more content, then so be it, that’s the right of an Admin.

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