As one Admin to another, I'm sad to hear that we're losing a good instance. And, I'm sorry that people ruined your fun.

Thanks for all you've done. All the best to you.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you'll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it's quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.

kbin.social must still be having severe problems. Ernest posted this a day ago:

    ernest@kbin.social

    We're experiencing massive delays on the queues today. We're actively working on a solution,
    and I think we're getting really close. Just wanted to let you know ;)

One thing you might try doing is switching to a different KBIN server. The smaller ones are probably Federating just fine with Lemmy and the other KBIN instances, although everyone will have trouble Federating with kbin.social.

I wonder why Ernest doesn't turn off new sign ups on kbin.social and ask people who want to join KBIN to do so on a different instance so the problems there aren't exasperated?

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.

1. Before joining an instance you can go to their /terms page and see if they will tolerate you because you're just making stuff up and your ignorance will hurt and endanger people. Most KBIN and Lemmy servers will, fortunately, not willingly host you because of this.
2. I won't tolerate you, so don't join my instance. So, 1 down.

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

• I ignored the thing about kbin.localhost and everything on https://feddit.online is working well, also in my test environment. So, you can probably skip it too.

• The "var" folder will not be found in the kbin folder so the chown will not work. What I did, and from other comments that I've read, I think this is what it should have been, "sudo chown 82:82 /var"

Here's my .env file without the secrets.
Where I mention a long secret, you can use this Linux command to generate a strong 32-character secret
openssl rand -hex 32

kbin variables

SERVER_NAME="feddit.online"
KBIN_DOMAIN=feddit.online
KBIN_TITLE=/kbin
KBIN_DEFAULT_LANG=en
KBIN_FEDERATION_ENABLED=true
KBIN_CONTACT_EMAIL=admin@feddit.online
KBIN_SENDER_EMAIL=notifications@feddit.online
KBIN_JS_ENABLED=true
KBIN_REGISTRATIONS_ENABLED=true
KBIN_API_ITEMS_PER_PAGE=25
#Frankly unsure if the next line does anything
KBIN_STORAGE_URL=https://media.feddit.online
KBIN_META_TITLE="Kbin Lab"
KBIN_META_DESCRIPTION="content aggregator and micro-blogging platform for the fediverse"
KBIN_META_KEYWORDS="kbin, content agregator, open source, fediverse"
KBIN_HEADER_LOGO=false
KBIN_CAPTCHA_ENABLED=true

Redis

REDIS_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
REDIS_DNS=redis://${REDIS_PASSWORD}@redis

S3 storage (optional) THIS DOES NOTHING. TURNS OUT IT ONLY WORKS WITH AWS S3 AND I WANT TO USE WASAB

SO THESE SETTINGS ARE NOT USED

S3_KEY=<key>
S3_SECRET=<secret>
S3_BUCKET=media.feddit.online
S3_REGION=us-east-1
S3_VERSION=latest

oAuth (optional)

OAUTH_FACEBOOK_ID=
OAUTH_FACEBOOK_SECRET=
OAUTH_GOOGLE_ID=
OAUTH_GOOGLE_SECRET=
OAUTH_GITHUB_ID=
OAUTH_GITHUB_SECRET=

###> symfony/framework-bundle ###
APP_ENV=prod
APP_SECRET=427f5e2940e5b2472c1b44b2d06e0525
###< symfony/framework-bundle ###

###> doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###

Format described at https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/latest/reference/configuration.html#connecting-using-a-url

IMPORTANT: You MUST configure your server version, either here or in config/packages/doctrine.yaml

==========

POSTGRES_DB=kbin
POSTGRES_USER=kbin
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
POSTGRES_VERSION=13
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@127.0.0.1:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?serverVersion=${POSTGRES_VERSION}&charset=utf8"
###< doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###

###> symfony/messenger ###

Choose one of the transports below

RABBITMQ_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=amqp://kbin:${RABBITMQ_PASSWORD}@rabbitmq:5672/%2f/messages
#MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=doctrine://default
#MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=redis://${REDIS_PASSWORD}@redis:6379/messages
###< symfony/messenger ###

###> symfony/mailer ###
#MAILER_DSN=smtp://localhost
###< symfony/mailer ###

###> symfony/mailgun-mailer ###

MAILER_DSN=mailgun://KEY:DOMAIN@default?region=us

#MAILER_DSN=mailgun+smtp://postmaster@sandboxxx.mailgun.org:key@default?region=us
MAILER_DSN=smtp://notifications@feddit.online:<password here>@smtp.dreamhost.com:587
###< symfony/mailgun-mailer ###

###> symfony/mercure-bundle ###

See https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html#configuration

The URL of the Mercure hub, used by the app to publish updates (can be a local URL)

MERCURE_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure

The public URL of the Mercure hub, used by the browser to connect

MERCURE_PUBLIC_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure

The secret used to sign the JWTs

MERCURE_JWT_SECRET=long_password_here_that_you_make_up

Docker

CADDY_MERCURE_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure
CADDY_MERCURE_JWT_SECRET=long_password_here_that_you_make_up
###< symfony/mercure-bundle ###

###> nelmio/cors-bundle ###
CORS_ALLOW_ORIGIN='^https?://(kbin.localhost|127.0.0.1)(:[0-9]+)?$'
###< nelmio/cors-bundle ###

###> symfony/lock ###

Choose one of the stores below

postgresql+advisory://db_user:db_password@localhost/db_name

LOCK_DSN=flock
###< symfony/lock ###

###> lexik/jwt-authentication-bundle ###
JWT_SECRET_KEY=%kernel.project_dir%/config/jwt/private.pem
JWT_PUBLIC_KEY=%kernel.project_dir%/config/jwt/public.pem
JWT_PASSPHRASE=
###< lexik/jwt-authentication-bundle ###

###> meteo-concept/hcaptcha-bundle ###
HCAPTCHA_SITE_KEY=<key>
HCAPTCHA_SECRET=<secret>
###< meteo-concept/hcaptcha-bundle ###

I just tried it myself on kbin.social and you are right. If you use the search at the top of the page then it will not find your magazine. If you use the search that is part of the magazine page, then it will find your magazine.

I think your question is specifically about the search at the top of the page, the global search, correct? If so, yeah, it doesn't appear to find magazines. I don't know if it's by design or a defect.

I also tried finding your new magazine from two other KBIN instances, https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io and in both instances, using either the search at the top of the page or the search on the magazine page, I was not able to see your new magazine if I didn't add @kbin.social to the name (if I already knew where it was). And I don't think they will ever be able to because I have been unable to find any magazines that exist external to any KBIN instance that is not already added to the local server unless I first visited the instance where it exists so I can give the domain name as well with the exact name in the search.

It sucks. If I want to see, for example, all magazines about Linux across KBIN and Lemmy, either because it's part of the magazine name, or it's in a magazine's description, I don't see how to do this.

This is a bummer. When someone gets onto a new instance and they want to subscribe to an interesting magazine, I don't see any way that they can find them outside of their local instance.

I'd love to be wrong about this. Has anyone had a different experience?

I know this is kind of off topic but it relates so I've extended the conversation.

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

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.

@1chemistdown ActivityPub is a public protocol just like every other Internet protocol. Individual server Admins, whether they run KBIN, Lemmy, Mastodon, Calckey, PixelFed, PeerTube servers, are free to block any other server that connects to ActivityPub. You have to ask the Admin of the server you're on or interested in joining.

Congratulations! Good job!

The key word here is "connected" instances. You don't find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.

This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.

When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.

Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don't have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.

For others reading this, there are 2 others that I know well: https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io

You can find bunches here: https://kbin.pub/en

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

I agree with all that you've said

Lemmy as well. For example, https://beehaw.org/communities

Not good for an application promising to be a "content aggregator"

This will lead to a number of magazines with the same names and topics existing all over the place because people can't see that a relevant one already exists. This will make a big mess and people will miss out on discussions.

And who would want to join any instance other than the biggest if they have to visit the biggest anyway to find interesting magazines?

And even on kbin.social, everyone is missing out on Lemmy ones. :(

Do you know if Lemmy can find magazines on KBIN or other Lemmy servers simply by searching by name?

I used a VPS running Ubuntu and followed the Docker installation. The only issue I ran into was that the docker-ce installation instructions don't work on Ubuntu. They were written for Debian. This is easy enough to work around. Just find the Docker install instructions and the docker compose plug in instructions for your Linux and use them instead of what he has, if you run into an issue.

As long as you follow the instructions exactly it should be fine. Your experience should be enough.

I initially set it up on a really small VPS with with 1 GB / 1 CPU and 25 GB disk. I scaled it up after I got everything working and checked out. It performed fine on that small VPS.

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

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.

I think there ought to be a newmagazines@kbin.social. I'd then link to it from my instance. Does anyone want to create it?

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.

Just add "/terms" after the domain name, like https://feddit.online/terms

Terms, and other information screens, are not listed anywhere in the KBIN UI that I've been able to find. I expect it will be in the future.

There were two screen shots. I saw them. At least one of them was doctored. That is all anybody knows. How are some people so certain which Admin doctored the screen shot?

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)

It's a closed instance and all their postings are done by their bots. I'm guessing they've chosen not to Federate and that they don't want anyone posting to their communities. Just a guess.

My last edit removes the markdown interpreter from messing up the text. I'm not sure if you saw it before I added the escape to make it more readable.

Anyway, I hope it goes well for you!

My instance, https://feddit.online, is only about 2 hours old and it was a struggle to get it this far. I'm not sure if it's fully working. I too am left with some questions. I hope that this topic becomes more active and we can help each other.

Did you use the bare metal build or the Docker build?

1. I used the Docker build. To answer your questions in reverse, I too do not yet have anything in my "random" magazine. However, last weekend I brought up a test server and today it has 509 posts in that server's random magazine. It took a while to see any. Seems it may take some time to start getting some, I'm hoping.

2. The only configuration that I saw for mailing things was in the .env file. I configured my email provider information there and it's working. Here is the one entry that I have:

MAILER_DSN=smtp://notifications@feddit.online:<password here>@smtp.dreamhost.com:587

I did not configure anything else except the hcaptcha.

One issue, related but important for all to know, is that the confirmation email is only good for one hour. If the person doesn't confirm their email, then they cannot get another confirmation email. If they contact you, and they can send you an email from the email address they want to use, you can manually activate their account by doing this (these instructions were provided to me by Jerry Bell who runs fedia.io)

• go to the kbin directory and run:

         docker compose exec database psql -U kbin kbin
  
  

• that'll dump you to a postgres psql prompt

        run the sql command:
  
        update public.user set is_verified=true where username='$username';
         \q
  
  

• You'll have to substitute $username for the name the person is trying to register. I believe user names are case sensitive because I saw someone post that you can have the same names on a server if the letter cases are mixed up. I hope this is just a defect that will be fixed if true.

**My question for anyone: ** When I use the search icon at the very top of the screen, why am I not finding anything that matches anything from anywhere in the Fediverse, save for maybe a couple of posts? A FAQ I saw says that if you search for "history" then all magazines with the word "history" from across all the KBIN and Lemmy, etc. servers will be returned. For me, no magazines are returned. Maybe it will just take some time to finish federating? Does anyone have experience?

P.S. This is the first post from my instance and so it's also a test. God, I hope you all see this!