Since Kbin was still at what Ernest refers to as a proof of concept stage when the project reached peak popularity, and I think at the time (and probably still) it was really not particularly easy to run an instance of. That's probably part of the reason why so many of the early Kbin instances died off.
According to FediDB, the biggest instances other than kbin.social are Karab.in and Kbin.cafe. Karab.in is run by Ernest who also runs kbin.social - it's just the Polish instance. As developments are happening fast (see !kbinDevlog), it's to be expected that instances not run by Ernest lag a little bit behind in development.
It seems the administrator of kbin.cafe is @barista. I'm not sure how actively maintained it is.
Considering the fast pace of development, I think it makes sense for the time being to either use kbin.social or an mbin instance.
I want to say thanks for helping but I sort of feel you ignored the body of my post where I say I fled kbin.cafe for its inactive admin. Just checked now and they are still inactive. On the other hand I have also missed things while reading before. I guess I'll be staying where I am at until a new Kbin instance opens up ¬_¬ I feel very odd about using Mbin given some of the drama I have seen occur over the split (my admin on kbin.run did not get involved in any of the drama for what it is worth, though), and having gotten no say in the switch, but I also appreciate the decentralization of the Fediverse and refuse to get comfy in the flagship because then I'll never move and will be part of the problem keeping it centralized. Thanks anyways.
Oh shoot - I read your post, but then I just skimmed it again after checking fedidb and lost track of the context.
I think the point still hold that kbin is not at a point in its development where it makes too much sense for people to open independent kbin instances. By the way I understood it, mbin seeks to patch some of these problems, while the kbin development is focusing on improving the infrastructure on a deeper level. The drama is a bit silly, but I think forking is not always a bad thing and the differences in development between kbin (deep changes to the code base) and mbin (patches to make things work) are enough to justify parallell developments for the time being.
It's also worth noting that not a single new kbin instance has been created since September this year - I think for now you're unfortunately not likely to find an actively maintained instance beside the two run by Ernest.
Nah the instance as in general. And the people there are smallbrained for all flogging to one instance (wich is administrated worse than reddit) come from a monopoly doing shit, go make a new one that does the same… Clownshow.
And the people there are smallbrained for all flogging to one instance
I know you're from ani.social yourself, but you're telling that to kbin.social, THE main kbin site that according to fedidb has 23 times the active user count of the next biggest kbin/mbin instance (not counting artemis.camp since it's dead, but that one was 1/12 of kbin.social's size). We're really doing the same thing even more.
According to https://fediverse.observer, these are largest threadiverse instances by MAU (but pay attention to different method of counting active users between instances...):
The mods of world delete comments against their opinions even if it’s just sourced facts without any opinions. It’s also very tiresome how so many people tend to comment “enshitification, capitalism bad, the person of the article is a fascist, they should unionize ” or some doomer or far left take on any topics. Even when talking about videogames
I disagree with this completely, from my time there, Ive met really cool people there, and you will always find assholes and nice people on these platfroms, doesn't matter if it's Kbin, Lemmy or Reddit (no stranger here), and Lemmy.world is like the biggest instance on he fedsiverse with the most users at the moment, with kbin.social probably the next biggest, it will be a huge loss for both the sides if we don't get this federation or whatever issue this is fixed.
You are taking this massive “if” and building a whole policy of preemptive panic around it:
I don't see how it's a "massive 'if'." If it was just some fringe possibility, I wouldn't be so concerned, but the thing is that I don't see any realistic scenario where we don't become dependent on Meta for microblog activity. If 99% of microblogs come from Threads, that's exactly what's happening. To give an example that's more relevant to the thread aggregation side of Kbin, if Reddit were to federate and we didn't defederate, Reddit would make up 99% of the thread activity we see, we'd get used to that, and we'd be completely dependent on them to maintain that. With how desperate people seem to be for a quick boost in activity that they'll just take whatever Mark Zuckerberg offers as if there are no strings attached, I don't see how we just end up fine if Threads is to ever leave in the future. If Threads becomes most of what we see, we'll be dependent on them, and if Threads then leaves (which they have incentive to do), much of who we have right now on these platforms will join Threads after getting used to the activity, and getting new users will be much more difficult.
And if we don’t and we defederate, we’ve just cut off potentially interesting conversations with interesting people based on ideology.
That's definitely true. Again, What Meta is essentially offering is free activity on a silver platter. What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached. Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do. It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached.
Let's look at the strings
Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
Correct, and it's a fact that's horrendously bad for an organization that's going to harbor a vast majority of the content on the fediverse.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. The main issue I see is everyone getting used to the 50x boost in activity that Threads provides and then Meta removing that by defederating, pulling people to Threads when they wouldn't have gone there otherwise. Allowing ourselves to become dependent on Meta lets them get users they wouldn't have before and kill the growth prospects of platforms like Mastodon, both of which they have incentive to do.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
You are basing it on the idea that Threads federating is a temporary move designed to advertise Threads. It's a theory. But seems unlikely. If Threads goes away again, I suspect that the current Fediverse userbase will, by and large still be here.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
Let me clarify. When I say, "The people who are currently at this point…," I mean the people who right now feel that they need to interact Threads. If they do, they're probably there. My issue is that if people are dependent on Threads for the vast majority of microblog activity, more people will feel that they need to keep that interaction with Threads. I'm not seeing how this is some far fetched theory more than it is straight up inevitable. If activity increases by 50x because 98% of the content is now coming from Threads and most of whom people are following are on Threads, more people will feel the need to stay connected. I don't see how it could be otherwise. This means that if an instance wanted to defederate from Threads for any reason or if Threads defederated themselves (which they have tons of incentive to do later down the line), tons of people would leave.
To give you an example, imagine if kbin.social was to defederating from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml due to unhappiness with their moderation. Obviously, defederating from any instance is going to lose you some users, but those two instances harbor a massive portion — probably a large majority — of the content on the threadiverse. Tons of people would leave kbin.social for the simple reason that most all of the activity that they were used to would be gone otherwise.
Now, with Threads, there is some resistance in the fact that Meta is a massive for-profit corporation. Many people won't move to Threads on principle. However, this is countered by the extremely strong pull factor of the sheer percentage of activity Threads would harbor. If people get used to all of that activity based on Threads and are following mostly Threads accounts, tons of those people will leave an instance should that instance defederate later on or jump ship from the fediverse to Threads should Meta cease federation. And among those who don't leave, there will likely be a lot less motivation to post after such a drop in activity and interaction.
I don't see how dependency on Meta for the vast majority microblog content could possibly be a good idea. If Kbin were to implement a silencing feature like what Mastodon apparently has, where Threads content would be invisible outside of Threads users that you've followed, I think that'd be fine. That way, people could intearct with a few Threads accounts they're especially interested in as opposed to the public microblog feeds being 99% Threads and us being dependent on Threads to maintain the activity of those feeds. But just letting them flood our microblogs seems like an extremely dangerous idea that's wholly unnecessary, and I haven't been convinced otherwise.
And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads.
What if the defederation happens in the other direction? Defederating an instance is a lot like banning a user, and I'm not sure if there are any mainstream social media sites that I haven't heard abuse their ban system. If other instances start becoming more popular because people want to use them to talk to Threads, that gives Threads a lot of power over which of those instances are allowed to thrive. In the worst case scenario, it could easily kill an instance if too many of their users were there for Threads and Threads decides to cut them off.
A fediverse that is popular because it can talk to a centralized app doesn't sound like a particularly healthy fediverse to me.
Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances.
The issue is, how does defederating not promote leaving for Threads or instances that federate with Threads?
I think it's a good argument against Threads federating at all, but a poor one for defederating from Threads.
If Threads produces 95% of content in the fediverse, and your instance defederates from them, then your instance just doesn't have access to those 95% of content. Threads and its friends will be a lot more attractive then because it has 19x the content of what you have access to on your instance.
I think this will still lead to people leaving for the threads fediverse.
Also, I get the argument for Mastodon, but does /kbin actually have anything at all to fear here? Sure, the user numbers and content would be way higher than the rest of the fediverse. But Threads is a Twitter contender, not Reddit like /kbin and Lemmy. We will only see their content in the microblog tab.
Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it? I honestly don't see it happen, I feel like this is an imported issue from microblogging platforms that's just repeated here despite being a non-issue for us.
I assume that 99.99% of that 95% from threads will not be missed and the other .01% will be linked by someone from a non-threads instance just like how tiktok and other social media currently gets linked.
Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it?
I don't think it could put the entire instance in jeopardy, but personally I think the microblog tab has a lot of potential (there have already been strides to incorporate it more), and I'd feel a lot less positive about its possibilities if it were full of content from Threads.
When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account.
This is my main concern.
Personally, I don't care if the fediverse grows. I just care what it grows into. The fediverse has a nice community at the moment because everybody on it made a conscious decision to be here and not somewhere else. Threads users will not have made that decision. Furthermore, they'll outnumber the rest of us enough as to have no incentive to try and fit into the preexisting community here (which isn't helped by the fact that they've already been their own isolated community for awhile).
Well, for the span tags, I haven't seen other tags being an issue. If you see a code block where the same issue occurs with other tags, tell me so I can update it.
If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone.
I don't know if ernest's views changed since the last exodus, but iirc people joining the platform wasn't really his intention, it just happened. Kbin hasn't even had a proper full release yet, it's still beta software, so I don't think people bouncing off is that big an issue yet.
With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site.
That's the case for now, but app development is still happening with other projects:
ernest has mentioned intentions to revive his kbin app project
I understood OP to be talking about mobile specifically. If there is a way to get the userstyles on mobile it's gotta be like 20 steps long. If someone could somehow wrap it all up in an easy package that would be one thing but idk if it's really a viable solution.
I understood OP to be talking about mobile specifically.
And that's why I said Firefox or Kiwi. Both of those are mobile browsers (the latter is chromium) that support extensions, so you can just install your favorite monkey and stylus and add userscripts/userstyles the exact same way as on desktop.
Hey, I will get back to this thread and the comments at the beginning of next week. I am able to quickly address some of the issues you mentioned in your post. Changes will undoubtedly be implemented gradually, but for now, the redesign of the ActivityPub module takes higher priority. Once that is completed, the development of the frontend part of the platfrom will truly pick up pace.
Additionally, the suspension of other work was a conscious decision on my part. I believe that the code at this stage needs to be deeply refactored, and that's exactly what I am doing. Solid foundations are the only option for the project to survive and grow in the long term, and to be properly scalable. Adding more blocks to what I have always considered a prototype (which forks do) makes no sense to me.
But the "spam" is no longer the issue, as ever since then, mod requests system has been implemented, allowing many new moderators to takeover communities with inactive moderators, as a result allowing spam to exist within these communities.
This wasn't the issue. The issue was that moderation actions didn't federate from here. I think that this hasn't been fixed and will be once the new ActivityPub stuff is done, though @ernest can feel free to correct me on that.
EDIT: Actually, maybe it has been implemented? Looking at @RedditMigration from Lemmy instances, it seems like the spam isn't there. If that's the case, lemmy.world should definitely reopen full federation.
I can see recent (few hours ago) comments of mine on lemmy.world (and kbin.social is in the linked instances list), so it doesn't look like it actually stopped federating. But yeah, I can't access kbinmeta from over there.
edit: I think I've read, back when ernest was gone, about some big Lemmy instance blocking kbin.social magazine federation because of the bot spam in so many magazines. I assumed it's just rumors, but is it actually real and still a thing lemmy.world is doing?
And regarding your edit, yes, that seems to be the reason, but that is months ago at this point, and they should certainly revert it back, made a post there (linked in above post now through edits) and here (this thread), hope this can bring their attention and reinstate full connection back between both kbin.social and lemmy.world.
If you want some more CSS modifications to try out, there's a magazine for them btw. Though it also includes userstyles, there's some full custom themes for magazine CSS there too.
kbinMeta
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This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.