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:
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
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.
Magazines having a chance to mature is going to lead to people being further entrenched on one instance.
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.
100 nature magazines would get pretty niche.
Brb, just going to create m/aardvarks, m/african wild dogs, m/anteaters, m/antelopes, m/ants, m/armadillos…
You know who’s uncomfortable? The person behind the scenes keeping the server afloat while you make yourself comfortable.
The real message here is that you’re not going to move.
I didn’t expect everyone to get the message, so you do you.
Jesus Christ, stop being such an abrasive jerk.
Has he requested this?
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.
Auto-aggregation with an option to disable it locally, maybe?
This happened a good amount on mastodon and was very helpful. It’s part of why I’m on Midwest.social right now
That’s what I think too. There’s going to be a dozen gaming communities in their own instance and none will really take off. To get it going there needs to be one.
You don’t have to be on the gaming instance to participate in the gaming instance.
You can participate in the gaming magazine on kbin.social even though you have moved elsewhere.
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!
The solution is to stop thinking that moving to a new instance means that you need to create these things all over again. You move your account to a smaller instance and then participate where you like.
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.
This will be something to regret when a community wants to avoid censorship or move before the closure of an instance.
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.
If you want to create a community, can you only create one in your instance?
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.
Another option if you want to mod a community on another instance is just having someone from the instance in question create the community for you and assign you as a mod, then remove themselves. Slightly more convenient? But potentially inconvenient too.
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. :)
tbh before reading your comment I had no idea that there are other kbin instances
Thanks for your honesty because some people here are receiving this post like they should move to a new country.
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.
This is the most rationale response. A lot of people suffering from mental illness will bog themselves down in theory and never focus on the practically of what they’re saying. This is one of those examples. Just be glad people are using the platform and let it grow organically. If you’re convincing users “they’re doing it wrong”, they’re just going to give the finger and probably leave. What’s great about decentralization is we, as individuals, can choose how we use it. If you want a big server? Join one. If you want a small one? Join one. It really is that simple. Try to ignore people who tell you otherwise.
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.