ELI5: What's the differences between Lemmy and kbin?

meteorswarm@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 29 points –

I'm out of the loop.

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Lemmy and kbin are two different forum software that can be installed and run on servers. Because both use the ActivityPub protocol, the content between them can be shared. So, a Lemmy user will be able to see content from a server running kbin, using Lemmy.

But how can I see kbin content from lemmy, I couldnt find an option yet. Also from kbin I cannot find lemmy communities

There isn't an option, you can't even tell but you already have the kbin content.

You can't disable it.

The reason that's happening right now is because kbin is enacting ddos protection using cloudflare so they aren't federating properly, this is a temporary problem.

Is this only some kbin instances thing or all kbin instances thing? I'm fairly sure that fedia.io (/kbin instance) does not use cloudflare. But that would definitely explain why I'm struggling to search some instances that might use it.

As far as i'm aware it's only the main kbin instance.

but (as far as i can tell) kbin is way more centralized than lemmy, so it has a large effect

It's not at all, they're just having tech issues right now.

ah. do you know where i can find a list of all the kbin instances?

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list

Here's a list I used to find kbin.run, it's a little barebones right now but the UI is really familiar as someone who used Reddit a lot. It is mostly centralized to kbin.social right now, as more instances pop up and the main instance fixes federation it should sort itself out as long as it keeps momentum.

kbin being more centralized is just an unfortunate accident of timing. I was only first publicly released two months ago, and from what I understand there's still not much help available for starting up a new instance of your own, and the lone developer over there has been busy trying not to let the kbin.social server catch fire.

This is due to Kbin using Cloudflare anti DDoS, which disallows Lemmy instances reaching it

That seems to go against the goal of federation.

It’s a matter of keeping kbin up at all at the moment. The rapid growth in users following Reddit's ongoing suicide has overloaded the instance. It’s a temporary measure that Ernest will turn off when additional resources can be obtained. He is not a fan of losing federation either.

Indeed, but my guess is that Kbin's admins don't really know. Also that's what I've read, it may very well not be that :p

It's a temporary measure because of their explosive growth and being DDOS'd

They're getting better network resources and will resolve this.

Lemmy instances seem to have trouble seeing content from kbin instances for some reason.

The main kbin instance, kbin.social is getting slammed and cloudflare is breaking their sync in both directions, so currently you can't see their content on any other Lemmy or kbin instance afaik, and you can't see Lemmy content on there. Hopefully that gets fixed soon but it'll probably take a while. The other kbin instance are tiny and don't have much content but I think should be visible here