Introducing https://feddit.online, a new KBIN server

Jerry@feddit.online to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 127 points –

I've brought up a new KBIN instance, https://feddit.online

It's administrated from the Greater Boston, Massachusetts area. Everyone is welcome to sign up, so long as they follow the rules

I now, because I must be crazy, have 4 Fediverse servers running.

KBIN: https://feddit.online
Mastodon: https://hear-me.social
Calckey: https://bostonsocial.online
Peertube: https://my-sunshine.video

#KBIN #Fediverse

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There is a typo in your link, it goes to fedit.online instead of feddit.online

Also what magazines do you have over there? I had a quick look but am on mobile and can't remember how to find that!

Yeah. I noticed the typo right after I uploaded the message. I quickly edited it but I find that changes made to a message take a while to replace the original.

I currently have 303 magazines, 301 pointing to several other KBIN and Lemmy instances. I visited several instances and manually linked to magazines that had a lot of users. Magazines from anywhere else can be added by using the global search (the search icon at the very top), not the search associated with the magazine listings, and using the full name, like @linux

The magazines can be seen at https://feddit.online/magazines

Congratulations!

Side note, did you want the symfony explorer to show up for people? https://feddit.online/\_profiler/a687ea?panel=db

Yeah the Symfony Toolbar shows up at the bottom of the homepage for me. I've never used Symfony before, but it looks like a developer tool, not something you want running in your production environment. ;) @Jerry

Yep, i saw secret keys, passwords, usernames and more just glancing at the Toolbar, he should change it ASAP

it is still like that. After 2 days. I actually believe that such low effort "contributions" to the fediverse are causing more harm than good.

I was looking through that and was thinking it was just reporting on the server configuration, but nope, all .env values are right there and nicely formatted. Yeesh.

Wow. Nice!. Is there an option to make it available, or would I just link to it in the "about" page?

hm, it actually shouldn't be public at all

Yes I remember having a look at that the other day and browsing through all the POST requests that server received from other servers.... And thinking I'm not sure this is supposed to be publicly available...

I think it should only be enabled in the dev environment for debugging. You might need to change the APP_ENV and/or APP_DEBUG environment variables.

Might want to change the settings so this isnt public. I can see the actual info of these settings, and so can anyone else.

$_ENV[POSTGRES_USER] $_ENV[POSTGRES_PASSWORD]

Since you have experience, can I ask how much you expect it to cost to run? I have a couple decades in IT, an AWS cert, a great domain name, and a bit of disposable income. I’m thinking of putting one up myself.

The cost depends on who you use for hosting. I use Digital Ocean which is a bit more expensive than others, like Hetzner, but Digital Ocean has some additional services that make life a bit easier, so I use it.

I also use Cloudflare for caching and protection, but it's free for hobbyists and small businesses.

There are some small costs for keeping snapshots. Less than a couple of dollars/month.

At Digital Ocean, a 4 vCPU, 8GB server is $48/month. Snapshots might be a couple more dollars a month. I'm currently running KBIN on a server half this size but I will be bumping it up to the $48/month option in the next few days.

Another incidental cost would be domain name registration.

I can't think of anything else you would need to pay for.

DB would be a big one, no? Not sure what Kbin is using, but DB costs tend to be meaningful as well, especially since depending on how the app is designed the usage requirements can sort of parity the app hosting requirements itself. Plus storage, but that can be more variable depending on how robust you want it to be. Ie S3 is pretty robust but it's expensive, etc.

It uses PostgrSQL. I'm paying an extra $2/month to keep the database on an external drive. So far, it's only using 151 MB of the 20 GB. I don't think I'll run out of space for a while. But, this weekend, the larger server I move to will come with an 80 GB drive so I don't think I really need an external drive. Currently, the DB doesn't cost anything extra.

But, you reminded me, there is a cost to keeping a database backup. My server is in NYC1. I have an S3 bucket in NYC3 that will be use to hold 5 days of daily database backup, compressed. I pay $5/month for the 250 GB Digital Ocean S3 bucket, I believe.

So you're running a local DB and backing up the external drive? Neat. What about static storage? Images/videos/etc? How are you handling backup?

I'm interested in this space because i'm writing an experimental ActivityPub client and one of my goals is to make it "as cheap as possible" to run a micro-instance. I plan on exploiting a single directory, sqlite and file storage, that users can just rsync or backup however they wish. Cheap is tough hah.

I was hoping to store the images directly in an S3 bucket at Wasabi, which is what I do for Mastodon, Calckey, and Peertube. However, this is not yet supported in KBIN. I think only AWS is supported as a hard-coded option.

I tried setting up a FUSE drive connected to Wasabi and I used a symbolic link to point public/image to it, but, alas, the Symfony framework does not support symlinks. Until external S3 is supported, I have to store the images locally. Ernest did post today that external storage for thumbnails is on the horizon. So maybe all media can be externally stored.

Until then, I'm storing them on the local disk. This weekend I'm going to see if I can set up rclone to automatically synchronize the public/image directory to a Wasabi S3 bucket so at least it will be constantly backed up.

When external S3 becomes an option, I'll move the media folder to the S3 bucket and hook it up.

I also use Cloudflare for caching and protection

looks like you weren't here the previous days. There is serious problem with cloudflare and federation since cloudflare will start blocking all the attempts of other intances trying to communicate with your instance. The browser JS validation, has to be turned off.

Im curious how he worked through the docs to get it online. I tried for a day or so a week ago but could not get the service to come online. Just 500 errors galore.

Noob question - Could I use the same login here to log into yours?

No, federation only mirrors content across instances, not user profiles. Mastodon has an account migration feature, but kbin doesn't have that yet.

you'd have to create another account with the same name over there. there's not much point though, if you see a community over there that you'd want to subscribe, you can do that from your current account.

This is another thing I don’t get. Is there a way to view a list of ALL communities across all Fediverse instances, preferably ordered by size? Doesn’t even have to be searchable, I’d just start with a list.

Needing to jump from instance to instance, searching their available magazines - as a Kbin user - seems so clunky for something with so much promise.

I hope to God I’m doing this wrong.

https://kbin.social/magazines

isnt that just kbin instances?

doesn't look that way. if you go to the last page, you'll see small communities from other services like Lemmy, Friendica, and Guppe Groups.

I share your thoughts on this. The only reason my server has 301 magazines from other servers is because I visited those other servers, searched through their magazines, and one-by-one, entered their full names into mine because they seemed popular. I've confirmed with several others that this is how it works.

I hope this gets changed because what happens now is that there are multiple magazines, covering similar topics, all independent of each other on different servers. If I wanted to join a Linux discussion group, for example, I would want one Linux group shared across all servers. But, unless someone knows of a magazine on the other server and introduces it to the local server to link to it, there will be two independent groups. Multiply this by all the servers and there's quite a mess. People are missing out on discussions.

I want a true content aggregator. I don't think we've reached this goal yet.

you don't need to visit the pages of the other instances directly. If you visit them, then no, the same login is not working.

But you can find the content of other instances inside your "own" instance. For example the main community of that instance can be found here https://kbin.social/m/feddit@feddit.online

I highly doubt it; it's a separate "site", but it would federate with existing instances (presumably). You would have to make a new account there, follow the different mags you do here, and then delete this account.

Not sure if this is what is being discussed. But, you don't need to have an account on a KBIN instance to read the magazines. You just can't post anything. For example, https://readit.buzz/magazines will work. The same is true for Lemmy servers. I didn't create any Lemmy accounts to look through their communities (magazines)

I think he was asking if he could sign into the new instance with his kbin social account, which he couldn't. Absolutely he can read and interact with kbin magazines if federated, tho.

Ok, so what is it with people named Jerry and the need to spin up fediverse instances? (infosec.exchange, fedia.io etc admin is also Jerry)

Seriously though - nice work!

:) Compared to Jerry Bell, I'm more of the Jerry Jr.

I'm getting an error when I try to login with Google.

Access blocked: Authorization Error Missing required parameter: client_id Learn more about this error If you are a developer of this app, see error details. Error 400: invalid_request

I'm getting an error when I try to login with Google.

Access blocked: Authorization Error Missing required parameter: client_id Learn more about this error If you are a developer of this app, see error details. Error 400: invalid_request

I'm surprised it offer the option to sign up with Google since I don't have that enabled. Only email address registration works now. I'll have to play with Federated sign ups. Maybe this weekend