r/ModCoord has officially recommended migration off of Reddit.

Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 438 points – 1 years ago

kbin.social was the first thing on the recommended list.

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We should recommend people sign up on some of the various kbin instances, listed here: https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list

My instance only currently has 8 registered users so I know I can take on some more people to help spread the load. People don’t need to sign up for mine specifically though, we just don’t wanna overload kbin.social

thanks for the list of the kbin instances! Hopefully we can migrate our accounts someday. Joining kbin.social at first has been helpful to me to not have to go through that growing pain of not being able to see many communities/magazines

Yeah no problem! I think that’s the link we should be passing around to people instead of flooding kbin.social (if we can). I’ve tried to populate my instance with all the top popular communities from other instances (including Lemmy) because I know that lack of content is a turn off for instances other than the “main” ones.

I think there needs to be an easier way to see communities/magazines across aggregators because I see the lemmy browse sites for communities won't show any kbin magazines, which I think will only hurt the point of decentralizing but being able to access all the content in the fediverse.

I'm not sure if kbin actually suffers the same way, because I'm on kbin.social which I'm guessing just already has all the current lemmy communities added. But if there's a new lemmy community, and no one added it to kbin.social (how would they find out?) then no one will find out if this lemmy community blows up and becomes really popular right?

I see the lemmy browse sites for communities won’t show any kbin magazines

What do you mean? I’m on lemmy.world and I’m able to see kbin magazines like this one in the “Communities” list.

oh, maybe it's cuz I'm on a less populated server for lemmy. I'm on lemmy.studio and it's been good, but it's actually really hard to know about any non-lemmy communities. I believe you can only search up "Redditmigration" on lemmy.world since someone already did the initial work to subscribe to it. On lemmy.studio, most of even the lemmy communities aren't on there yet, but at least the lemmy browser will let you see what's out there, so you can know to do the work to be the first to subscribe to it on that less populated server. However, there would be no way to know about the kbin communities if all I'm looking at is that lemmy browser

I'm guessing kbin would have the same issue( but im on a popular server there, kbin.social, so I can't confirm. Everything here, like you has been searchable for me probably cuz it's big so people have already subscribed)

A lot of people are using tools like https://lemmyverse.net/ to find new communities, which afaik doesn't pull in Kbin magazines.

I'm somewhat of a greybeard, I joined Kbin in the old times when there was only kbin.social. A whole week ago. Looking forward to account migration too, just for load-balancing.

How's resource usage? I hear kbin is heavy on RAM

On average, it looks to be less than 2gb of ram at the moment. CPU and RAM usage obviously will go up as I have more users, but it’s not bad at all at the moment. I’ve been pleasantly surprised tbh. I am also completely prepared to scale the server up if I get more users on my instance.

Edit: just a follow up, looks like I can scale my instance to a maximum two ways,
“cpu optimized” up to 48 vCPU and 96gb of ram
“Memory optimized” up to 32 vCPU and 256gb of ram

I’m a long way off of the max though now, my server is only 2 vCPU and 4gb memory for now

I'm running a lemmy instance and using about 700mb, up from 500mb before I had any users (though I have maybe a dozen active users lmao)

But I'm not using much CPU at all though. 5% average on a 2core VPS VM. 4 gigs as well. I can scale up a bit and still afford it personally. After that Ill have to ask for donations, and if not enough stop registration.

The scaling is from my cloud provider, hopefully I won’t have to scale up to the max (looks like it’d be like $1300/mo)

700mb of ram isn’t bad at all. Yeah I’m using like 30% cpu on a 2 core right now. Kbin definitely uses more resources than lemmy but I think it has a lot more going on in the tech stack

That pricing is crazy for 32vCPU and 256GB RAM. You could buy a used bare-metal server with these specs for that.

Yeah if my instance got busy enough that would be something to definitely consider. I’m using DigitalOcean over something like AWS as well. I wouldn’t want to run it out of my home off of my own network though which is why VPS providers are nice (plus I have all my DNS rules set up through it)

Check out a local colo. It's much cheaper than renting bare-metal hosts as you provide the hardware, and they have proper security, redundant power, and dedicated fiber.

Bro, colo is cool af. Thank you.

Have any recommendations how to locate one near me? I’ve never heard of something like that before

I've never used a colo before; my rack servers live happily in my basement. If you google say "1U network colo <city name>" you'll find many providers.

Looking at the recent Docker Compose commits, kbin should scale horizontally until it hits limits of postgres.

Its a really good candidate for kubernetes, if you deploy on AWS/Azure and use AKS/EKS with Azure Database/RDS you will be able to flexibly scale far beyond those limits.

I have been meaning to learn Helm for ages. This seems a good excuse.

Unfortunately I thought I’d be brilliant and run the bare metal version of kbin.

okay the only thing is, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to keep making instance names that don't start with kbin.___ because then if kbin/lemmy really do take off, it would be so hard to google search for them. You can't do the site:kbin.* search if those instances with different names make magazines/communities and you can't find them with that google filter

I don’t necessarily disagree, I don’t see it happening though unfortunately. The whole idea with federation is for people to make their own instances or to fork the software from the original so they can do their thing. The whole idea being “freedom to do what you want.” Telling people what to name their websites/instances likely won’t fly with the instances owners

that's fair, since the instance owners are hosting for us. The only thing is, I feel like the users might not know about this. I didn't really think about it until a little later that oh yeah, there is no [search for something "fediverse"] google search, and we're encouraged to join new instances and for the most part think of them as just servers to build the fediverse. I know I shouldn't try to box the fediverse ideas like reddit, but I am finding it frustrating that the decentralization is having these cons.

I think we just need more tools to help with that. Like website to show all communities across all kbin and Lemmy instances or a place that we can advertise instances for new users. The way things currently are certainly makes it difficult for discoverability (even for experienced fediverse users it can be difficult to discover new stuff, you don’t know what you don’t know)

I do see them adding a page to see everything, and it definitely could help new users find communities

What is the difference between kbin and lemmy?

They are two different types of software that can access the fediverse. Check out lemmy.ml and kbin.social for instance to see the differences. They can both talk to one another and see posts from each type of software. (Kbin can also see posts from mastodon which is kind of like Twitter) I’d say check both out and see what interface you like better. Since they both can share posts with one another you really aren’t missing much by choosing one over the other.