I just set up an account at fedia.io, which is an mbin instance. When I ran the script posted over here to copy my subscriptions I had 111 subscriptions succeed and 49 fail. I've been checking the ones that failed and they've all been ones that haven't had anyone post in them for 5 months or more, so I'm guessing those are "dead" anyway. Seems not too bad, I'll see how it goes I guess.
I posted this same response from both of my accounts, I'm going to watch to see how well it federates back and forth.
It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.
No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.
I haven't tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:
I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn't really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.
I assume that this means these communities haven't had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn't know they exist? I've always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.
And yeah, I'm using "community" to refer to "magazine".
I just gave this a try and I think there's a potentially worrisome problem, it silently failed on a lot of community subscriptions. The ones that returned HTTP 500 errors were listed in the "fail" list that the importer script generated, but a whole bunch of others returned 404 errors and weren't listed in either the success or fail lists.
So I advise those running this to pay attention to the error log to avoid losing track of those communities rather than trusting the "fail" list.
It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.
Why can't you do that? Use one of the many non-Threads servers to do it. Like Kbin, the one you're already using. Nothing about it changes if Threads federates.
The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can choose that even if Threads federates. You pick what you engage with, which communities and instances you subscribe to and which you block.
By this argument nothing should ever interoperate with anything else because clearly that's the first step toward destruction.
I'm writing this on Firefox, which interoperates with Chrome and Edge. Oh no! We need to get these browsers operating on incompatible protocols stat, before they all extend and extinguish each other.
In reality, "embrace extend extinguish" is not a law of nature. XMPP is not ActivityPub. They are separate things with separate circumstances. Did you know that XMPP is actually still functional and open and you can download clients and servers that use it to this day? The stories about how Google "destroyed" it have become wildly distorted folklore at this point.
Oh, interesting. My bad then, it's common for people to be unaware that kbin is a different thing from Lemmy and so I made an incorrect assumption.
I suppose this reveals some room for improvement in kbin, then. Other servers' problems shouldn't be impacting kbin as badly as this, likely indicating that kbin needs to add some robustness when it comes to dealing with stuff like this.
Thanks for putting in all this work, especially over a period that's traditionally vacation time. Make sure you're striking a good work/life balance, if you can get the site basically functional (as it appears to be now) don't sweat the small stuff. :)