this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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Reddit Migration
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What issues have you specifically noticed with this? I've only seen a few - the main one is sometimes it's hard to find magazines from elsewhere unless you already know the name of it and the instance it is on (but folks are creating websites to help others find this, so this is a problem being solved right now). The other one is that sometimes federation is slow, so posts and comments on the hosting instance can take hours to show up on another one. But there are technical fixes to this as well (I'm thinking that maybe the next version of activity pub should include a pull action, so other instances can ask for the latest content on behalf of their users from the hosting instance).
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" ?
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.
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'd argue that this is a technically a different platform - microblogging vs what reddit/lemmy do. But by the magic of federation we get both in kbin.
There are problems here with this instance that go far beyond what you are saying. But that's the nice part of federation - even problematic owners can be dealt with. Can't say the same for a centralized service.
Why use this term? What does it even mean in this context? A singularity is a term from physics and represents when the existing rules break down, like in a black hole (collapsed star).
Again, this suggests you don't really understand federation. Barring one problematic instance, there aren't any serious issues accessing all the instances you mentioned from, say for example, kbin.cafe
Certainly.
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.
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:
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.
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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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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Apologies for any typos or bad formatting, I ran up against the 5000 character limit, and tried to edit down - and the 'more' popup actually pops under the next comment in my browser. I'm sure I could fix it somehow, but I believe everything is still intelligible.
No worries, it's intelligble, and I get it as I got hit by the same thing.
Okay, but I don't think you've adaquately explained why.
But it can also join with older, more established communities on lemmy instances like lemmy.world and the two can share content with each other. From a kbin.social account I can fully participate on lemmy.world bar two exceptions (owning a lemmy.world magazine and being a lemmy.world admin), and the reverse is equally true. Hence why I view lemmy/kbin as essentially a single platform.
In your case, "local" seems to mean central to the server. But why is this an inherently important attribute?
Again, the point of federation - the different parts (instances) merge into a single platform and community. Each instance hosts a smaller part of the whole community, instead of needing a megacorp capable of hosting the entire one on a single set of servers. Ideally, seamlessly, but in practice I admit there are still some rough edges to work out (e.g. multimagazine support).
There might be a point here when dealing with magazine fragmentation - but reddit has the same problem to a degree and we can borrow their solution (multireddits/multimagazines) to resolve that issue here as well.
Yes, but why? This is the part that is yet to be explained. I think the dangers of single-site centralization have already been demonstrated (e.g. loss of 3rd party apps, mods losing their subs when protesting, folks getting permabans for no apparent reason or for obviously incorrect reasons, etc.)
Following this to the extreme, you shouldn't want to use either twitter or reddit, because they can't talk to each other. Right? (Okay, single sign on is possible, but after that you still have to interact with their websites and apps separately.)
The fediverse lacks the first mover advantage of being born in the ninties or early aughts and also lacks big megacorp backing, but it has seen bigger growth than single site replacements like Squabbles or Tildes, and I suspect federation is a big driver of the difference there.
Except that they all speak the same language (ActivityPub) and differ from big monoliths like twitter and reddit that can't talk to anyone else. So from an intelligibility perspective they are a step up.
Seconded.