We want to move away from Reddit, is kbin suitable?

TheVillageGuy@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 227 points –

Update: we're live @rimworldporn

Hello, I am the founder of /r/RimWorldporn. We would like to move away from Reddit and are looking for a good alternative. We are kind of like /r/earthporn, so we require hosting of large images. We've been around for about 4 1/2 years and have accumulated roughly 30GB of images. The main advantage of Reddit is that it hosts relatively high quality images, for free. Would kbin be a suitable platform for this? We could host our own instance, maybe even centralize image storing on it.

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  • If you are asking if the kbin.social instance/server can handle your existing content and future content, you will have to talk to the admin.

  • If you are asking if the Kbin software can handle your content, sure, the software is only a software. Your data will rely on the capabilities of your hosting provider.

  • If you are asking if there are Kbin instances that can handle your content, you will have to contact them individually and find a way to struck some deal.

You can check this list of the different servers/instances using the Kbin software --> https://fedidb.org/software/Kbin

Or, you can host it on your own: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core

^_^

So, trying to understand, what would happen if a user from another instance, that doesn't support, wants to look at mine, will they be redirected?

They would be able to see, so long as your instance remains federated with theirs. Donations are volunteer only.

Sort of. When content is posted on instance A and someone is browsing on federated instance B, they'll see the content from both A and B "mixed together" in their feed. They'll be able to view it on instance A as if it was local content and post responses to comments and so forth normally. Someone over on instance B would then see their responses normally as well.

This very thread is an example of this. The person you're responding to, @youronlyone, is viewing this thread on the readit.buzz instance and posted his response over there. You saw his response on kbin.social and responded to it, and presumably he can now see your response to him over on readit.buzz. In theory this should all be seamless.

In practice, the programs we're using here are pretty new and are being hit with load they've never experienced before so there's occasionally glitches. But that's the goal, anyway, and I see no reason why it won't be workable.

The main issue seems to be your photo storage requirements. In terms of federation, your posts should appear normally for whatever platform you're using to users who are on other instances so long as the instances don't become defederated for some reason (a rarity in most cases unless an instance has a large number of spammers or bad users).

To answer what I think you're asking, yes, users on other instances would see the post and would be linked to the images stored on your "home" instance in most cases.

By support, do you mean an instance not having the storage space to host your images? The content itself is only hosted on the instance you upload it to, so even if someone from a different instance that doesn't have the space to store your content visits your magazine, they'll still see everything just fine.

They'll be able to look at it from their own instance, without the need to switch over to yours. They can also comment from their own instance. I for example am replying to you from https://forum.fail, whereas you seem to come from the https://kbin.social server/instance

(federation can be a bit wonky, but generally this is true.)

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Self-hosting your own instance might be the best way for you. You can surely use kbin for this. But I would recommend you to check out Pixelfed, which is focused on image sharing and is a part of the fediverse. A dedicated pixelfed would meet your needs really well.

This is a good point, but pixelfed is more like Instagram so it depends a lot on the comment & conversation style that users prefer.

Yes I was going to say this, it doesn't quite suit the needs of RimWorldPorn but does look like a great imgur alternative @LollerCorleone

I would like to note that it did not like me signing up from firefox, then verifying my username using chrome. It would not let me in until I tried signing in from chrome and then verifying again. I recommend passing this on to the devs as this will likely be too complicated for a lot of users.

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I'm a big fan of RimWorld and I'm very impressed with kbin so far. It's already improved a lot since 4-5 days ago. I say at least give it a shot.

30G is practically nothing. Any self-respecting VPS will give you that at the absolute minimum. My 7 Eur per month VPS gave me a 200G NVME

Share the link please! VPS providers are kinda stingy with storage.

Of storage or bandwidth? 30gb of bandwidth is nothing, but storage? I'm sure not seeing that kind of storage for €7 month.

Hetzner's lowest tier ARM server (2 cores, 4GB RAM) comes with 40GB storage for 3.79 EUR, although those are only available at their Falkenstein (Germany) data center

Backblaze for an example is $5/month/tb. 30gb is $0.15/month...

S3 has a million tiers, ranging from $1/month/tb to $23/month/tb. $23/tb is $0.69 for 30gb. (the cheapest tiers add additional costs for get requests)

It should be doable. I've got a VPS with HostHatch in Los Angeles, 120GB NVMe, 16GB RAM, for around $77/year. This is a proper VPS with good hardware (AMD EPYC and Samsung gen 4 enterprise NVMe and a good network - it's not just something like Contabo. Here's their most recent sales thread (sale is no longer active though: https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/185742/celebrating-12-years-in-business/p1)

My Lemmy and Mastodon instances are on a VPS that only costs $33/year and has 99GB space. It was a 9th birthday sale for a provider I use (GreenCloudVPS https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/181793/greencloud-9th-birthday-sale-9999-plans-99-giveaways/p1) where they had a limited amount of stock for a plan with 9 cores, 9GB RAM, 99GB NVMe for $99 / 3 years.

Keep an eye on LowEndTalk... There's a lot of good deals to be had, especially during Black Friday and Cyber Monday where there's huge sales.

The problem with Rimworld shots of the entire base is that they're simply huge, especially if you share them in lossless PNG. I remember trying to archive one of my old Rimworld posts here on Kbin and the site straight up refused to accept my image. Even Imgur did not work until I reencoded it as a JPG. Reddit interestingly enough allowed me to host the original large PNG.

Honestly if you want to move your sub over to Kbin just initially have your users use a third party service like Imgur/Imgchest/ImgBB/etc. to get things started. I wouldn't recommend self-hosting initially unless you already have experience deploying and managing similar services.

Reddit has an upload limit of 20MB, so that's our standard. Reddit does decompress, sometimes, it's hard to put a finger on how and when, but usually the endresult is somewhere ~8MB. So if we can get 20MB non-recompressed images, we'd be well pleased.

They really are simply enormous. It's like 5.5mb per image if I recall.

maybe use a third party image hosting service instead (like vgy.me), and link to those in your posts? that used to be the norm on reddit for years before they've introduced image upload.

Yes, reddit used imgur. Unfortunately they re-compress too aggressively and have a maximum res (iirc) so we prefer not to use them. We also want to keep it as simple as possible for RimWorld colonists, so if we can bypass a hosting platform that would be great

It would be hard to find instances that will allow such huge image files unless you host it yourself. Do consider hosting images on vgy.me, which allows 20 MB per image, and then linking it to here to kbin, if you don't want to host an instance.

30GB isn't that much that data, so you could probably host it on a kbin or Lemmy instance. It will however cost money, where as Reddit does it for no fee. So, your community would have to chip in to host the VPS/Dedictated server to host your community with. The other way is to join another instance that has enough of an interest and capacity to host it for you, like kbin.social but it will also mean you give up the control of hosting and the rules that apply. You could also look for image hosters that allow for nsfw and have a stable reputation, might be better than trusting an instance to work out with your images.

Not sure if you made the nsfw reference because you thought of the other “rim world” or not but I found it funny.

It's a happy space colony simulator. It just happens that yayo, organs, and child labor is profitable.

I think that one thing that is worth considering is whether the plans you have are future proof. The Fediverse and open source model means that at least the discussions can be easily preserved.

Open sourcing also means that the community can more easily design scripts to archive information.

The image hosting is a separate issue, but again you should have a view towards the future and the possible preservation.

It’s the same issue with individuals who use Google or Apple for cloud storage of their images. At some point the convenience needs to be considered in light of the lack of power for preservation.

Good point. That's one of the reasons why I came here, we don't want to be dependent on a commercial platform. I have safeguarded all the current renders, but all the comments / upvotes will be gone.

Self-hosting will give you the most control, and 30GB really isn't all that much data in the grand scheme of things. I haven't done much research into it yet, but I've also seen PixelFed listed as an option for image sharing on the fediverse.

Pushing that much data out to hundreds of other instances might be a pain point though.

@tchambers this question is for everyone, I am tagging the owner as it may concern you as well. I have a few questions.

First of all, this is looking great and I can imagine this platform is under a lot of stress due to the mass migration form Reddit. Keep up the good work!

-Will it be possible to set the add type to photo only for /m/RimWorldPorn
-What is the maximum allowed filesize/resolution?
-I have almost 1000 renders on /r/reddit. Can those all be posted on /m/RimWorldPorn? (I have them stored locally)
-Less important: would it be possible to use square thumbnails?

thank you!

Either Kbin or Lemmy would work fine.

If somebody could help me set it up that would be great, I am having trouble uploading to /m/RimWorldPorn

What are you trying to upload to it? Are you not able to create posts on it?

If somebody could help me set it up that would be great, I am having trouble uploading to /m/RimWorldPorn

I am trying to upload images to /m/RimWorldPorn but it seems to fail on large images, giving either 503 errors or reloading the post image page.

If it's all images, PixelFed might be a better fit?

If they're a subreddit it's more about the conversations the images prompt.

Does Pixelfed not have comments? Admittedly I haven't used it.

Even if it does, the difference is in whether the emphasis is on the comments (like here) or the images (like insta). And in this case, these are HQ renders of (ideally) HQ gameplay; the main point is a space to engage with the player/creator about the design, methods, mods used, story of how the game went, etc.

Oh, I understand now. Thanks!

hey, I'm @ivy and I'm the admin on fedi196.gay
I would totally be open to you using my instance if you would like. Kbin gives you the option to either upload an image or link to a preexisting image on the internet. depending on how they're stored on your end, if you already have it on a server you could link to it. if not my instance has 80gb of storage and I'm going to be setting up object storage with storj as soon as it's possible so I could easily handle a good deal of content. I've done my best to make this server as cost effective and reliable as possible so it should be pretty safe on here. if you want to follow up, please get in touch and we can get things sorted out

Hi there. Did you set up your instance simply following the guide on kbin.pub? I just bought a domain/VPS but I haven’t had much luck following the guide yet. Did you run into anything you had to do that wasn’t in the documentation? I’ve been looking for a walkthrough video even, but only found one for setting up a Lemmy instance.

I'm not @ivy, but I have setup a kbin instance using the "Install with docker" guide.
I ran into the following issues:

  1. Including a symbol in the passwords in .env file. You either have to encode/escape the symbols or not use them. I ended up using passwords without symbols.
  2. Before running yarn install and yarn build, I had to isssue composer commands as described here
  3. File permissions issues. The docker compose up command failed, if everything in the kbin directory didn't belong to the kbin user.

Also if you want to use docker, then there should be a new setup soon(See here)

Thanks for the info and the links. I'm not in a particular rush so I'm just viewing this as a learning experience. When it finally works it'll be a great feeling :D

I wound up following most of the admin guide for bare metal but it didn't wind up working so I had to get a ton of help in the matrix room for the project. documentation is really scarce at the moment but I'm trying to make sense of it all and put some better documentation together

kbin is still basically undocumented since it's so young so there is still a lot of work to be done on that front

Thanks for the reply. I guess I picked a great project for my first go at this haha. Do you have a quick link to the matrix room so I can check it out? A video guide would be great for those like me, if you're up to it. I'm sure it would be very helpful once people realize they can own their own home here.

Edit: I found the matrix room and ended up getting it going for the most part! Still tweaking the .env settings and trying to get mail/registrations to work though

@ernest can you spare 30Gb for these guys? @TheVillageGuy S3 is working I think?

When replying to this message my reply disappears after refreshing

Either Kbin or Lemmy would work fine.

If somebody could help me set it up that would be great, I am having trouble uploading to /m/RimWorldPorn

I think it's a visual bug. I'm having trouble seeing new comments on my own posts

The queue is slowly unload. This should occur much less frequently.

Hello.

I host kbin.chat(Kbin instance) and endlesstalk.org(lemmy instance), where you would be welcome, if you wanted to.

The lemmy instance have a lot more storage, when I move the picture storage to correct server, but I will probably also move the kbin instance to a new setup, where there would also be more storage space.

Maybe not the place to ask. But you seem knowledgeable. Is kbin a Lemmy instance or a different platform that can federated? I could Google of course, but I like talking to humans.

Yes finally some rimworld content on fediverse!

After alternative S3 hosters are implemented I would be very open to something like this on my instance. But I don't know when that will happen. Right now I am paying for far too fast SSD storage that is just too expensive for this.