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Reddit Migration @kbin.social
Gargleblaster @kbin.social

Why we need to move on from kbin.social

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

152 comments

  • 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]

    • I didn't say there was deal-signing. I said they wanted to talk 'off the record'.

      I'm reporting what I heard on Mastodon.

      And that was referring to Instagram, not Meta.

      • This is all ridiculous semantic arguments. Yes, you did say there was a deal. Now you're trying to walk it back.

        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.

        Firstly, the last time I checked, "a monetary offer" is what person might otherwise call a deal. If you propose to give me money for something, that is a deal. And as I stated multiple times with proof, no such deal was made. You really don't like being wrong, do you?

        Instagram and Facebook are owned by Meta. Meta is the controlling entity (Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, among other things). Whatever you choose to call it, Instagram or Meta, it is the same company. Potato, po-tah-to. They are in essence the same thing. But let's be factual: It was Meta, not Instagram who approached those admins and again your information is wrong. this article specifically says Meta, so this does this, and this, and this too

        What you "heard" was rumours and fear-mongering. You have not offered one single solitary shred of proof. I have offered several to the contrary.

      • Instagram is owned by Meta.

  • I agree. I have an account on kbin that is my primary account, but I also have one on lemmy and mastodon.

    • Right, and kbin is more than kbin.social. You could move to kbin.run or kbin.place among many others to spread the numbers out.

      • 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.

  • Honestly this is a pretty small community. The whole platform needs to mature a little before we start “spreading out”

  • 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.

  • 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="['ROLEADMIN']", isverified=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!

    • This is kbin.social, not kbin. You can set up an account on kbin.cafe, kbin.place, and a lot of others and still be able to post and comment here.

  • 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.

  • I fully intend to self host once the software matures a bit, so there's that. Hopefully that comes sooner rather than later.

  • Don't do the work of monopolizing for them! The great thing about the fediverse is that we can all spread out and it doesn't really affect the user experience but it sure makes it a lot harder for wall street to buy a large portion of the network.

  • @Gargleblaster Many thanks, this post is as much enlightening as it frightens me. Those who wished ill for us exist and have the means to do so.

  • I plan on switching instances whenever account transfer becomes feasible! But as it stands right now I'd rather not have to get my account set up all over again for another instance that might potentially go down or make radical changes. That was the very thing that put me off of Mastodon, before they added migration, and I'd rather not repeat that again. (If you have more time and energy than I do, and you're thinking about manually migrating - absolutely do so)

  • I’m a little hesitant to put on my tinfoil hat here.

    But maybe it’s best that the super users kind of spread out a bit.

    Spez might not give a shit that we leave, but Meta is probably all over this. “How can we make our content better than failing Reddit?”

    Then again, I don’t know shit about fuck.

  • One thing I'll say is that both kbin and Lemmy need improvements in order to recommend smaller instances. The UX around being the first in the server to subscribe to a sub is really, really bad. Seriously, try it if you haven't yet. Magazine search won't find the sub. It won't show up on the front page. If you try and visit the sub, you'll get a 404 and no way to subscribe. You have to know specifically how to search for the sub in order to get the option to subscribe, and even then you won't see any existing content in it.

    The problem is less impactful in larger instances because there's a better chance that you're not the first or that the sub was basically "seeded" for major instances. It's a terrible divide in UX.

  • I already have a few accounts on different Lemmy instances but you might have a point there. I'll see about other kbin instances, although this one is already cozy for me. Hopefully won't run into federation issues when going to another one like this very one had in the week of the Rexxit.

  • Meta requesting NDAs to discuss P92 means literally nothing. I once signed a NDA with a prospect (not even a client), and the whole thing unraveled in a very nasty way when said prospect showed very little respect for my work. The fact Meta wants people to sign NDAs to discuss a not-yet-public project is no grand conspiracy to kill the Fediverse. It's literally just how companies work.

    More generally, the discourse over Meta joining the Fediverse is beyond irrational. People are discussing rumors as if they were facts (is there any evidence that Meta has offered payments to Mastodon admins?). They hypothesize and catastrophize everything. What about facts and reasonable hypotheses?

    I'm not trying to defend Meta here. I don't trust them, at all. But not trusting them, and inventing an alternative reality, are two completely different things.

  • I like it here. I will stay awhile. I tried mastodon and beehaw. Both of them are fine, but I must prefer kbin.social. As things evolve, who knows what will happen, but for now, I am content.

  • I fully agree with you. The thing is that with /kbin that it's not ready to be fully used yet and there's quite a many growing pains still. I've tried to self host and been on couple of other instances and it's not been working well on different levels compared to kbin.social that has been working quite great since registration. My end goal is to self host it for my self sometime in the future but not yet.

    • I didn't say to self host. Just move over to something like kbin.cafe, which has far fewer users than kbin.social and you can still see, comments, and post over here.

  • You're probably wrong about what Meta's intents are for the Fediverse. We've heard some things about a prospective product from Meta called "Threads", which would be connected to the fediverse or the threadiverse. I'm looking forward to what they bring, and what it will mean for communication through Meta. If they can make it more locally focused and make it easier to reach out to people local to me, I will be very interested; doubly if it can be used from a web browser. I actually want a central place to communicate. I also understand that these companies need to make money; and I recognize that I am a user, not a customer. I have no interest in paying, so I'll defend myself in a marginal way and just keep moving.

    • If you aren't paying for a service provided by a corporation, you aren't the customer, you're the product.

      Meta, as a corporation, is fundamentally subservient to investors to generate profit; if something can't be monetized it won't happen. I can't speak to the specific intent Meta has in expanding into the fediverse, but I can say with confidence based upon not only their long and well documented MALICOUS behavior, but also the basic nature of Capatalistic endeavor that they should now nor ever be trusted to act in good faith. They are incapable of doing so, period.

      I don't consider myself a hard-line socialist, but the access to information and the discourse surrounding that information should not be determined by an entity whose interests are primarily self serving in nature.

      • I don't consider myself a hard-line socialist, but the access to information and the discourse surrounding that information should not be determined by an entity whose interests are primarily self serving in nature.

        I don't have a problem with that, honestly. My interests are primarily self-serving in nature, which is why I'm not interested in paying. If I'm interested in what Meta is doing, I'll buy more shares. Plus, like I said, I'm interested in the product if it serves my needs; otherwise I don't need it. I work for a company that's focused on profit as well, I don't consider it a shame anymore, since my goal is to make money and keep my money in my pocket as well.

152 comments