YSK that kbin.social is now federating, adding hundreds of communities and ~26k more users content

CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world to You Should Know@lemmy.world – 972 points –

Because they don't get listed by browse.feddit.de you'll want to browse https://kbin.social/magazines to browse "magazines", which is what they call communities

e.g. !RedditMigration@kbin.social

or directly, https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration

Why YSK: Federation literally just synched up thanks to the tireless efforts by @ernest@kbin.social over the past few days.

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That is so exciting, all of us playing together in here is such a cool concept.

Jerboa seems to crash when clicking links with the ! point but I can do it from the desktop browser. This is great!

Vulcan is reading this from kbin.social

The federation is now active and hello!

Does this mean you are posting this on lemmy.world and I am reading it on kbin?

For those of us new to the fediverse, this is so exciting!

Haha yep, this community is hosted on lemmy.world! And you're commenting from kbin. That's so cool!

Oh, i actually didn't know Kbin (despite these posts lol) was being seen from Lemmy. Iirc when i first saw Kbin a few days ago, Kbin could see Lemmy but Lemmy couldn't see Kbin. Ie it's like it was a partial federation.

I'm curious on if that was accurate and if it was, what caused it in a technical sense. Given i'm a dev working on some ActivityPub stuff, i'm quite interested in it. Though i've not yet used the spec, clearly hah.

It was blocked by kbin having cloudflare DDoS protection enabled to reduce server load. I guess that blocks federation.

Hmm, surely there must be a way to whitelist other instances you want to federate with so they don't get blocked by cloudflare....

I'm sure you can do that in cloudflare but it'd require whitelisting every Lemmy instance that you want to federate with on kbin's end, which is a bit much.

Wow this is neat!

How can I tell that a post is from another instance when browsing on Kbin? Just scanning the card for this thread, it isn't apparent that it's federated content.

If you have the top bar enabled, you can see it at the top on the right hand side.

@livus @CodingAndCoffee And now I'm replying to it from Mastodon!

wow interesting. Mastadon has a decent app in place too doesn't it? That might be the best usage experience for me actually. Mastadon on the phone, Kbin on a desktop. Especially if it all links up.

Is looking at the username how you can tell where a post is coming from? I was so confused a while ago with posts saying "something something fellow Beehaw users!" and it was marked as (kbin.social) lol.

Yeah, that part is a little confusing. Because this is a link aggregation site, it's currently set up to show the domain of whatever link is in the thread. But if it's just a text post, because it's being brought over here it self-reports that we're looking at kbin.social.

If you have the top bar enabled from settings you can see where you're currently looking at the top right.

Yup, exactly. Welcome to the fediverse!

Oh, wow, thanks! I love it that my first inter-fediverse communication was you welcoming me, too.

I come in peace :)

Can we please call it literally anything else? I'm tired of "verses".

Sure. Welcome to the federanus.

It's late where I am. I'm still laughing though, thank you very much :-D

Total newb here, how does one collapse comment threads on the web browser version of kbin here? I've tried clicking around and don't see some UI element or anything to indicate how to do such an action.

We don't have it yet. Kbin is really new, and we kind of swamped the dev with our sudden influx. It's on people's wishlists though, so I'm sure we will have it in future!

This has been the most fascinating last few days. Hello Lemmy from Kbin~

Just started adding subscriptions to kbin magazines and I think it's starting to sink in that there is actually a decent-sized community growing here with a LOT more potential. The FediVerse being decentralized makes things feel a bit empty at first as it is now, but once you start hooking up to other platforms' content it immediately feels twice as big. The trick over time will be cross-platform development efforts that make things look and feel more seamless.

Certainly in this case, because of how how much traffic kbin.social was getting and how long it was running unfederated.

Great news, thanks for the heads-up! Hopefully, though, we get some way to search both Lemmy communities and Kbin magazines through one browser.

Having to use browse.feddit.de and kbin.social/magazines separately doesn't seem optimal.

yeah kbin and lemmy don't seem to interact very well... having two separate hives that don't talk to each other isn't good for the fediverse, it creates unnecessary fragmentation :(

Seeing lemmy posts on kbin this morning has me so excited. I don't even know how the R site can even compete with the fediverse at this rate

@CodingAndCoffee@lemmy.world replying to myself from mastodon!

How…? I think my head just exploded. 🤯

What is a reddit thread if not a root tweet with a bunch of replies (and replies to the replies) formatted in a way that you see the organization of the replies?

I like this idea and the Mastedon app seems much faster to post… that’s really my only wish list item from lemmy right now. I’m figuring that’s a temporary imbalance of increase activity and server bandwidth/speed? I understand we are decentralized but so is Mastodon and at least my instance is very smooth and fast.

I can't speak to Lemmy's implementation (I refuse to go near lemmy on account of the maintainers "politics"), but there's nothing fundamental about threading that should make posting slower.

Loading threads here is... different... work than loading your feed in mastodon, it's possibly slower, but posting is from a theoretical standpoint the same. Probably you're just seeing the effect of your lemmy instance not running on sufficient hardware (very understandable given the explosion in user space size).

Can you elaborate on the 'politics'?

I sense something weird , especially with the hardcoded 'hate speech' filter, which seems to run contrary to federation.

Anything else I should know about ?

The two main devs seem to be Tankies or have at least close views. From what I heard, the hardcoded filter isn't a thing anymore and was removed after heavy protest from other contributors. The good thing is that they don't have any control outside their own instance and in worst case people would simply copy the project (since it's open source) and move on without them. I hope that the different instances + community take a part of the donations to pay independent full time code contributors.

The broad strokes are here: https://mstdn.social/@feditips/106835057054633379

In addition to the more important issues that fedi-tips discusses I find their stance on anti-vax and US-election conspiracy theories... unappealing, which you can see being discussed here: https://lemmy.ml/post/143057

And that they haven't been shy about exerting their power for political purposes. The hardcoded slur-filter was explicitly about discouraging "right wingers" (I put that in quotes because I suspect their definition of right wing and mine differ), and they at least use to be open about their intentions to moderate the instances that they run as explicitly "left wing" (though I don't see a reference to that on the current site).

Oh man , that is disappointing.

I'm certainly not a 'right-winger' , but i hate the idea of arbitrary, centralized control of what 'hate speech' means .

That doesn't sound 'federated' to me!

That explains why I've been seeing some people saying "magazine"

I wish Kbin and Lemmy could agree on a format for linking communities

I tried joining some kbin magazines from here (E.G: https://lemmy.world/c/Aquariums@kbin.social and https://lemmy.world/c/houseplants@kbin.social ). It did work but I'm unable to see any post from those communities. Instead the one you linked ( https://lemmy.world/c/RedditMigration@kbin.social ) works perfectly (even for newest posts/comments). Is there any fix ? EDIT: To add more troubleshooting info, It doesn't say pending, it correctly says "joined" but still no posts.

The federation/sync of content seem to be slow and work on the newest posts first.

First time I checked https://lemmy.world/c/Cats@kbin.social I only saw one post but now there are four.
And a whole lot more at the original: https://kbin.social/m/Cats

Hey, can you folks at Lemmy see this post from kbin.social yet?

this also works for other stuff using activitypub as well btw, not just lemmy but also platforms like mastodon, peertube etc

My home Lemmy doesn't seem to be able to find communities on kbin, when I search for something like !tech@kbin.social it just never resolves. :-/

Try pasting the browser url as it is in kbin, instead of using the Lemmy syntax. I know it's goofy but it works.

Neither seems to work for me, maybe federation is overloaded with the sudden influx? I'll report back if it ends up working.

I tried finding https://kbin.social/m/photoshopbattles Search wouldn’t bring anything up but I copied the url from kbin into the community search bar on lemmy, hit search, nothing…then I refreshed the page and searched it again and it popped up. I had to copy the url from the web browser bar.

Must still be some growing pains, because your instance definitely doesn't have kbin.social blocked.

@CodingAndCoffee So you're saying I can reply to this from Mastodon also?

EDIT: please reply if you see this from kbin/lemmy 😅

Hello mastodon user. I'm seeing this on kbin.social as part of a "lemmy.world" thread. On kbin we have magazines (like reddit's subreddits). This magazine is "youshouldknow@lemmy.world". Your post is showing up as a comment in this thread. I'm doing a comment reply/response to yours.

You’re on mastodon? I’m on kbin! Wow!

And I see both of your replies on lemmy, in the Jerboa app. What a time to be alive!

Seeing this from kbin. The future is now.

Haha tried making an account on kbin.social - can't log in.

The future is tomorrow.

I thought mastodon was a “twitter” like site… how would you be viewing Lemmy stuff?

It IS a Twitter-like site. It displays posts in more of a Twitter style. That being said - it is also part of the Fediverse, so theoretically you should be able to see all federated communities on any fediverse instance of your choosing.

Personally, I have a kbin.social account and a mastodon.social account. I'm doing this because Mastodon doesn't really present threads from kbin or lemmy in an easily digestable way, so I will use kbin as my reddit replacement, and Mastodon to replace Twitter.

So if I had the mastodon app, is there anything I can do with that? Or what would you be signed into to reply back? (Ie) I’m signed into my lemmy.fmhy.ml account, where would I sign into mastodon… tho, I’d like to create another instance to use more like my previous Reddit account

So you would have to sign up for a Mastodon instance to log on to the Mastodon app (I.e. Mastodon.social, mstdn.social, mstdn.es, etc). Similar to the fact that you're signed in to a Lemmy instance right now on lemmy.fmhy.com there are other Lemmy instances such as lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, Beehaw.org, etc.

Your Mastodon account would be completely separate from your Lemmy account.

Does that make sense? Not sure if I explained that we'll.

It makes sense they are separate, but I’m just not following the part where you’d sign in the mastodon app… (when to me it acts like twitter)

I do have a mastodon account btw

I see you from the Beehaw lemmy instance!

So I'm looking for a magazine that I know is on kbin, that I want to subscribe from here. I've tried typing in the magazine name in the address bar (lemmy.world/c/Utah@kbin.social), I've tried searching in the "communities" search, and I'm just not finding it and getting errors. Direct linking works, but I then I can only subscribe if I have an account on kbin. Help?

  1. paste the full target url in search from lemmy, e.g. https://kbin.social/m/Utah
  2. now it's available at !Utah@kbin.social

kbin currently has a bug with the !Utah@kbin.social syntax. Your link becomes https://kbin.social/c/Utah@kbin.social, which isn't valid (should be https://kbin.social/m/Utah). It's a little weird because while the c/ part is what we'd expect if it was a Lemmy sub, it still shouldn't be repeating the domain. I'm sure that'll be fixed shortly, though. Maybe I'll go dig into the code myself.

At any rate, the @Utah@kbin.social syntax should work in kbin. I'm unclear if it works for Lemmy. Here's a link so you can try it: @Utah

EDIT: filed https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/199

hello. can confirm. I'm on kbin.social right now and seeing this thread. I'm not sure federating is entirely up just yet but it's working a lot better/faster than it was these past few days. Definitely seeing an influx of beehaw and lemmy world users and posts :)

Unfortunately, beehaw has decided that they don't like this whole "federation" thing. Hopefully we'll see replacements for their communities in the coming days.

LOL, how silly. A federated community going unfederated is just a small echo chamber. See ya beehaw!

I'm kinda shocked they're openly saying "I just don't like [lemmy.world's] vibe" as one of the justifications, as that looks like the slipperiest of slopes.

Kbin users weren't defederated from them so we can still see and post in their communities.

I don’t think it’ll end well for them, and it’s a disappointing choice. However, choosing to not federate is just as much a part of the system as choosing to federate. If everyone had to run exactly the same setup we everyone else, the whole thing would be pointless.

replying to myself from kbin.social!

Ah interesting. I actually see this post over there so it seems replies from kbin are actually federating now. The question is if I will see my own comment.

Edit: I do! Great news

I have NO idea what’s happening, but I’ll still be active when it becomes easier!

It basically means that we are seeing content that has been posted or created across the "Fedeverse" for example Lemmy, if i understand correctly (Extremely summarized, there's more to the federation).

Earlier, we only saw content/posts made locally on Kbin; however, it appears that we are federated, which is providing us content from other instances in the Fedeverse. This very post is from Lemmy.world, but i'm replying to you from Kbin.social, if that makes sense.

What's the difference between kbin and Lemmy? I thought they were just different instances of the same open source project with different host names.

They are different software with a compatible protocol also used by a handful of other software including Mastodon. There are other kbin instances like fedia.io and there are hundreds of Lemmy instances.

Since the beginning of the Reddit blackout, kbin.social had been running in isolation due to server load. Now it is fully integrated with the rest of us (I'm not on kbin at the moment).

Lemmy and kbin are completely different Software but they can talk to each other with the same protocol.

Different software. Kbin is written in PHP, Lemmy with Rust.

Now I'm curious, can KBin users be mods on Lemmy instances, and can Lemmy users moderate Kbin magazines?

Well I don't know about that, but "appoint as mod" option still exists when I select your post. Maybe we can make a test community for that haha

What's the easiest way to see and subscribe to kbin content while logged into lemmy.world? I have to know the name of the magazine I want and put the link in Search?

Yes exactly. I gave an example elsewhere in this thread but it's getting pretty massive because we're all quite excited. 😃

Yes, and that information is kind of in the sidebar, after replacing the initial @ in e.g. @tech@kbin.social with a ! for !tech@kbin.social. Just type that into search and follow. But would be real nice to have a browser extension to:

  1. Pop up a "subscribe from my instance" button on external communities.
  2. Giving our own "Communities" top link the browse.feddit.de features so we don't need to go there.

@CodingAndCoffee So nice to be able to comment on this straight from Mastodon, too. Though it's weird that the existing comments don't show up on Mastodon when I paste the URL to this post in my search box (t)here.

Wait… how?

That's what the fediverse is. That's how this whole thing works. And why some of us are on kbin, some mastodon, some lemmy, some beehive. The posts you're seeing now aren't all from people on Kbin anymore. Fucking interesting, right?

edit I should add, I thought this post WAS ON Kbinsocial. Cause that's what I'm on. I didn't even realize this was posted to a lemmy instance.

How's that for interesting?

Which is exactly why this is better than Reddit. It'll definitely have growing pains and long term UX warts, but not being siloed and leashed to someone like Spez's decisions is a really great feature of the Fediverse.

It is really interesting. I posted a comment and didn't even realize it wasn't on kbin until I scrolled up to go back to the home page. It was seamless. Super fucking cool.

Yeah, it takes a little bit to wrap your ahead at first (which does seem like a large barrier to tech/change resistant people), but after you get past that it’s amazing!

Crazy that I can reply from KBin and it just works! What a weird system this whole thing is.

Nice to know that the community is growing.

So anyway to make the app Jerboa work with kbin?

I'm replying to this on Jerboa right now, so I would assume there's a way, yeah.

But you're using a Lemmy account to post, I'm confused...?

Wait

Ah, I've misinterpreted, I first saw this post on kbin, but it's a Lemmy post, so of course I can see it on Lemmy.

In that case I dunno. Will kbin posts be viewable on Lemmy, since the reverse is now possible?

Update: I seem to have found a way to view AskKbin on Lemmy/Jerboa, though only a few posts are actually showing up. Is this even intended behavior?

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/5ddf7eb1-f350-4b9a-a59c-1852cde49d64.png

AFAIK posts only sync from the moment the first person on your instance subscribes

I'm not sure I understand, does that go both ways or just for Lemmy looking at Kbin? And is that intended behavior or a bug? Doesn't sound like that'll work very well.

Not entirely sure. It is true for Lemmy. I guess it is true for kbin too, but someone from there should confirm.

I think it's a limitation (for now?).

Thanks for the info. Trying to upvote you and it's not working lol. Assuming that's not intended.

LMAO I do see an upvote, don't know whose though.

There is a bug now that the upvotes/downvotes display incorrectly, even if they work the first time already. Try to refresh the page to check if it shows up.

I don't think so, currently. kbin has a fundamentally different backend AFAIK

There are plans to have a lemmy-like api for kbin so it works too

When I click those links I can’t really interact with those post without logging in, which I can’t because I’m on Lemmy and kbin doesn’t know me. But when I find those posts in the wild I can. My brain overloades a little bit.

It's a bit annoying, but I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong!) you would need to paste the link to the kbin communities you want to join or interact with into your lemmy instance (e.g. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml) in the format of !communityname@kbin.social (with the exclamation mark) to see that community as the federated cached version available to your instance. You can then subscribe to the community while viewing that way to see it in your feed going forward. This works best on desktop, or desktop view in a mobile browser.

But yeah ideally links in lemmy would link to the ! link if available, and not the /c/ link so that you stay in your logged-in environment.

Anyone else having major differences between kbin and lemmy for the same posts?

Gotta say that I like the Kbin GUI better. And let's see what features and options they come up with in the near future. And apps!

Does something special have to be done to get it to show up on Lemmy? I've put in a few of them into the search and they still don't show up. Granted, we are still on 0.17.3

I’m finally seeing them in search. After you search change your filter from communities to All and scroll down to find it (it’s a bug reported on github)

It works! This is the coolest thing I've seen so far! I had to use the actual link to the community though (I couldn't use the exclamation mark syntax)

after I posted that comment I realized this post was in kbin! I saw it from All on my feed and didn't realize

edit: no it's not; I'm blind

I'm just happy to be on social media platforms that are compatible with each other, instead of having to argue with someone on which one they use. This is the future!

Absolutely! I'm honestly scrolling looking at these comments like I'm witnessing a miracle lol. I've seen users from 5 different instances and platforms, in the same comment section!!!!!!!!!!

does it work the other way arround? to use Lemmy from Kbin?

Yup. I'm on kbin and can see and interact with this lemmy thread just fine :)

is better over there?

would you recommend it?

I haven't really used lemmy but it didn't appeal to me. kbin feels more familiar to me (as it's very similar to how reddit works). kbin is super cozy, so I'd recommend it.

I mean, if having trouble seeing Lemmy stuff rn.

since you're on lemmy.world you should see all lemmy.world stuff easily. here on kbin we've been having some federation issues in the past and i'm not sure everything is 100% synced yet but I've definitely run into missing posts here and there.

and other kbin instances?

Ironically, kbin's federation problems seem to surround other kbin instances lol. I think fedia.io broke their federation. There's not really a lot of kbin instances tbh. It's mostly just here on kbin.social.

I see, do you think in the upcoming weeks thing will get better?

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That's awesome! Looks like I joined at the perfect time. =)

I'm really curious what will eventually emerge from all these different approaches to the federatedverse.

That's exciting. :) The more we add to this, the easier it'll be for the lazy to migrate over.

@CodingAndCoffee Very cool! (Posting this from Mastodon.)

How does that work? Just type the !...@... name in the search there? (It didn't work when I tried a few days ago)

@Lemmy @anuckols On Mastodon you can just type in the name and press enter and it finds everyone with that instance. Normally though you would type @name@instance.something in search and you can find who or what your looking for. Works like that on lemmy

@anuckols @CodingAndCoffee Clicking the federation link button from the Lemmy thread brought me to my Mastodon account where I am replying now. Wild stuff lol

When I click on the kbin links, it opens kbin. How do I see it while still on the lemmy site?

Lemmy is similar to Reddit. Mastodon is similar to twitter. Is there an easy analog for kbin?

it seems to be an amalgamation of reddit and twitter

they have 'magazines' which are like subreddits, but magazines can designate hashtags which appear on the 'microblog' tab of a magazine and seem to pull in posts from other fediverse instances such as Mastodon

I'm still learning my way around but that is how I understand it

Wow. That's a little different. Thanks!

From lemmy when i try to subscribe it just says pending?

That also happens between lemmy instances some times. Just check back after a few minutes.

Any help? I've joined a magazine from lemmy and nothing shows up, but I have a kbin account too and know there's posts I'm not seeing.

It's probably just because you were the first user to subscribe to it at sopuli.xyz

According to your server's nodeinfo there's only 462 users active this month.

@serfraser @youshouldknow What's happening? Are you on an instance and want to see everyone's comments/post on other instances? What client are you using? Are you on the website? Are you on desktop ?

Mobile, using Lemmy site to view a kbin Magazine that appears empty and says "no posts" but when I check on kbin I can see that's not true

on iOS / Safari I had to select “Turn off content blockers” to get anything to load

This is great but I am still unable to search for communities in kbin. At least I tried !politics@kbin.social and !opensource@kbin.social a few time the last few minutes but still no result.

I haven't been able to join Kbin magazines by searching in the !magazine@instance format, but when I just paste the URL from Kbin into the search I've been able to add them that way.

Is there a way to collapse comments in kbin?

Not yet. Ernest is still working on improving the UI, but honestly he probably has such a giant pile on his desk that we can't really tell when what will happen, or if something will be added at all unless he's currently working on it.