Where would be the best place for new kbin instances to share info about their existence?
Hey guys,
I’m sure some of you have seen me around the last couple of days. I was wondering if we have a dedicated place to “advertise” our smaller instances at. I’ve seen more and more discussions recently about pushing users away from the main instance and towards smaller instances (but then nobody knows where/who/what to send them to). I’d like to put message out somewhere that my instance is ready for those folks with open arms.
Is kbinmeta the best place for that? I don’t think kbin has support for “stickied” posts yet. I want to tell new users that I have a chill instance with <10 people on it and I have the ability to scale it up as we get more people. I don’t know where to tell people that or what the correct behavior is for this situation.
We definitely don’t want server advertising to turn into WoW buying/selling gold bot spam chat 😅
Lohrun
lemmy.world has a community to announce new communities. According to the description, this is intended to promote communities on any lemmy (and presumably kbin).
https://kbin.social/m/newcommunities@lemmy.world
Whether-or-not one wants to have a instance-specific announcement sub, I think that if I were creating a new instance, I'd probably also announce there, at least unless the traffic gets high enough.
I can give it a shot over there! I figure I’m not the only new instance admin that has been curious if there is a dedicated place for us to name drop our servers.
Honestly, I think that a big part of the problem is that the best way to currently find a new lemmy or kbin instance to register at is to browse the fediverse observer site, and while that does a decent job of finding a geographically-near place, it does not make the instance's policies particularly easy to find. In some cases (take, say, beehaw) those policies may be rather different from what some users are expecting.
Also, specifically for lemmy and kbin, while one can get a list of lemmy or kbin instances, unlike with most of the Fediverse packages, they don't currently actually have a link to kbin.fediverse.observer or lemmy.fediverse.observer from fediverse.observer.
For a kbin instance, the rules for a given instance are at /terms. So for kbin.social, one can see them at:
https://kbin.social/terms
For a lemmy instance, the convention is apparently for the rules to show up in the right-hand sidebar when one browses to the web UI for the instance.
Neither is immediately-accessible when browsing through the list of instances on the fediverse observer site. Basically, the only material about the server is the language, the uptime, the user count, and whether signups are allowed (and I think the mobile version of the site only shows the uptime). That's not really enough information to help one choose an instance. Even just an IRC-chat-room-style single line of description would do a lot to help people find an instance that fits what they're looking for.
Yeah I see what you mean, https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list
Sure that tells you what instances you can register for but it’s impossible to know if you will like the rules or how an instance is run. I think there will have to be some standardization across instances like you said, a designated place with a concise description to check for info. Imo, it shouldn’t take you longer than a 20-30 second read to tell if you will like that instance or not.