Hey, once again, I welcome the newcomers. It’s great to see new faces here :) It seems that we’ve managed to resolve the server issue. Unfortunately, I had to temporarily disable certain features, such as content auto-refresh. It will be restored at the beginning of next week after the infrastructure change, so you’ll get to experience kbin in its full glory then :) Currently, I’m working on a few critical things that I want to finish by Monday:
- Infrastructure improvement, optimization related to high traffic
- Admin guide - creating a new instance
- Fixes in notifications for post replies
- Attend to the new mod reports
- As soon as possible, I also want to get back to Codeberg Issues, private messages etc - there are many new topics there. Thanks to everyone for the that!
Some time ago I had an issue with bots, so registration process it might not be done perfectly. If the emial didn’t reach or wasn’t received in time, after a while and additional verification, the account will be manually activated.
If something important happens, please email me through the contact form - it’s the fastest way to reach me. Now I’ll get back to my tasks, and I wish you a great time exploring the fediverse :)
At some point, the registration will also be temporarily disabled. Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.
Have a great weekend!
rel: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/417417/Alright-it-was-a-long-night-for-me-But-I-m
I appreciate you making this and the work you’re doing. Is there a way to donate?
I have seen a few questions in the suggestions about this. I wanted to wait until everything settles down, but additional support would be extremely helpful for me right now, and maybe this is the right moment for it. In my free time, I will write a separate post about it, with detailed server costs, etc. I also quickly created this for now https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin :)
Bought you a coffee as a small thank you. Could I ask you a question, while I’m here - possibly contentious.
If we agree that servers take cash to run, some kind of income stream is good. Donations is one way - but what do you think about the concept of letting individual instances display advertisements similar to Reddit’s sponsored posts.
The advert would only show in the local stream. Users could then decide whether they want to host their own instance, use one that asks dor donations, or use one that takes adverts.
You could see how an instance that is specialised around a subject or geography could maybe subsidise their running costs.
Is this philosophical abhorrent? Or acceptable, and if acceptable might it be something that might be supported in the future?
Thank you :) I wrote a longer post on this topic on my Polish instance once, but I can’t quickly find it now, and I have to get back to work. As soon as things calm down a bit, I’ll go back to your post.
So, there are people across the Fediverse that are opposed to ads and will block an instance that have them, I understand but believe this is ridiculous. As running a server costs money and donations are not enough. I believe as long as they are not intrusive ads then it should be fine.
I agree. Although, non-intrusive non-“native” ads are hard to find. I wouldn’t mind the return of text-only ads like back in 90s when Google started out. However, ads must not be of tracking kind either.
But video + image visual ads are automatic no from me. They’re distracting and slows down the page.
I jumped over from reddit this morning and am glad I could support you. Still trying to figure everything out but I like what I see so far. Cheers!
First up, thanks for your hard work!
Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.
As things are currently developing, it is almost a certainty that all reddit alternatives on the fediverse will get absolutely hammered on the 12th.
I know you are working on an infrastructure update. I just sent you a few bucks via buymeacoffee to support that. However, it could well be possible that the new infrastructure will also become overwhelmed during the days following the 12th, requiring another update in short notice.
At some point, things might become really expensive.
What I’m trying to say is: Don’t be hesitant to ask for donations. I think many of the users here right now are acutely aware of how important the next few days are going to be for the post-reddit fediverse ecosystem. Growth needs servers, servers need money and I’m sure many users would be willing to to chip in.
@zombiepiratefromspace Thank you, I really appreciate it! I will try to keep kbin.social alive for as long as I can. However, not at any cost. What is more important to me is the future decentralization, which is beautiful in the fediverse. That’s why there is an emphasis on providing instructions for creating your own instance, even though kbin is still far from a stable release. I believe people will manage with a little support from me on Matrix… :)
Well said, the dream really is for people to start hosting their own instances instead of everyone just coming here.
Also, as the number of federated instances increases isn’t it going to cause exponentially more overall traffic since every instance will have to start pinging others in order to populate the landing page, it’s gonna be quite a web with many requests instead of just one as it’d be on reddit or other centralized sites?
Can you link me to a brief explanation on how the fediverse/instances work?
It is something I am still not fully grasping. For example can there but duplicate magazine names on different instances or is kbin.videos link to all the same threads regardless of instance?
Each instance is it’s own independent website, but with the ability to also export content to other websites using the same communication protocol (ActivityPub). So, if you create a community on kbin.social, let’s say, to use your example, videos@kbin.social, then that is a singular community that lives here on this website, kbin.social.
Someone on another website, let’s say lemmy.ml, can create their own videos community, which would be videos@lemmy.ml. They’re as independent from each other as r/videos on Reddit and a Facebook group also called “Videos” would be. Only, here on kbin.social, you can choose to subscribe to the videos group on lemmy.ml, and see what people are talking about there. In doing so, you’re requesting that lemmy.ml forward all future content posted to videos@lemmy.ml to kbin.social, and you’re requesting that kbin.social populate your personal timeline with that content that it receives.
Similarly, if someone on lemmy.ml wants to see what people are talking about in your videos@kbin.social group, they can ask lemmy.ml to do the same.
Importantly, these websites will also pass along local posts and replies intended for remote communities back to the hosting server, so that things stay in sync.
But they remain totally separate websites. They’re just separate websites that pass content back and forth between each other, at the behest of their users.
A lot of people have voiced some consternation about this in the last couple of days, as I guess they feel some angst around missing out on discussions on topics they care about, because they might be taking place in communities they’re not following. But I don’t see this as an issue. Not only, as many people keep pointing out, are there multiple groups covering the same topics on Reddit, just with different names, that people don’t object to, but in large subreddits a majority of posts never even get seen by subscribers, because they just don’t gain traction in the short amount of time necessary to reach ‘Hot’ before something else does. In this distributed model, there is the potential for average people to actually get their posts engaged with, and for a single space to be dominated by a handful of power users. Now, each instance can have its own set of power users on a topic.
It’s also trivially easy to share posts between groups, as lemmy – though, as far as I’ve found, not kbin – has a cross-post button, just like Reddit. So, anything from small groups that will interest big ones can be pushed up and anything from big groups that people may want to discuss in a quieter space can be passed down with relative ease.
After all, what’s the real value in being commenter # 72,641 on a post that’s reached the top of r/videos? No one’s going to even see your comment, let alone respond to it. And the OP definitely won’t notice it. But if you’re commenter # 72 in a group of 200, then there’s meaningful engagement to be had.
Here you go https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/
I appreciate the link but that really doesn’t explain much to me.
I understand different instances allow for decentralization. But how are they connected or are they connected? Do I see other instances on kbin.social?
I thought this explanation by /u/buried_treasure does a great job explaining this in an easy to understand way.
You will naturally be aware that there are many different systems on the internet, run by different companies. And these systems are generally incompatible with one another.
For example, you can’t use GMail to compose and send a post to Twitter. You can’t log on to Facebook and read content from Reddit (unless somebody has copied it there). You can’t watch Youtube videos via Flickr. And so on.
All of this seems obvious - they’re completely different systems. Why on earth SHOULD you be able to interact with them from elsewhere?
A few years ago some people decided that even though this was obvious, it wasn’t the way the internet HAD to be. They developed a protocol (which is just a set of instructions for computer programs to talk to each other over the internet) which they called ActivityPub, and then basically said to software developers “here it is. We think this could be a cool way of getting different systems to interact with each other. See what you can do”.
In the 5 or 6 years since then, lots of software developers HAVE tried to see what they can do with ActivityPub. One well-known example of a system that uses it is Mastodon. It’s a system that is similar to Twitter.
Another couple of ActivityPub systems that are becoming popular right now are Lemmy and KBin. They are Messageboard systems, roughly similar in concept to Reddit.
There are many other ActivityPub systems, for example Pixelfed (which is a bit like Flickr, so for hosting photos), Peertube (yep you guessed it, videos), Friendica (like Facebook) and far too many others to list. Collectively, these systems and any others that use ActivityPub call themselves “the Fediverse”.
OK - so what? These are just wannabe competitors to the big boys: Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, right?
Not right! The magic of ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that they can all interact with each other.
So you can log on to Mastodon and subscribe to Lemmy groups. That would be like logging on to Twitter and subbing to your favourite subreddit. And then being able to read the posts from that subreddit right there in Twitter.
You can log on to KBin and follow users on Peertube. Imagine being able to follow and view content from your favourite Youtube streams from right here in Reddit.
That’s the real beauty of the Fediverse - every system knows how to talk to every other one. The other clever bit about it is that because ActivityPub is a publicly-defined protocol, no one company can own it and take it over. It’s almost impossible for a billionaire like Elon Musk to take over Mastodon, or for Lemmy admins to decide to shut out third-party APIs. Because the system has been built from the very beginning to be open, and shared, and communal.
Is there any mobile app for kbin?
Kbin has been my first foray into the fediverse, and I gotta say I really like all the work you’ve done. Keep it up, you’re building something amazing here!
I’m exploring things. I even created my own magazine (or board) for random things /m/Copy.
Can we have an option to put the textbox (to post) at the top, just below the OP? It’s jarring to have to scroll past a whole page of content before being able to type something.
Anyway, so far I’m pleasantly surprised and quite enjoy kbin.
agree: move comment box to top (or add link to jump)
@ernest Thanks! I appreciate all of your hard work! #kbin #Updates #Maintenance
Registration was no issue for me and the confirmation mail went through immediately. Meanwhile the beehaw registration has not seen an approval or disapproval for a couple days now. I definitely like the UI leaning more towards that of Reddit, although some features are missing, like the ability to collapse comment chains, individually or all of them (as in the Relay mobile client), or even starting them out collapsed by default (useful for very active submissions, which I think the Infinity mobile client had an option for).
For visibility sake I also want to push for calling “Magazines” “Bins” instead.
Collapsing a comment & chain is a huge missing feature for me. Also, one cannot get a permalink to a particular comment/reply nor a context link (ie the comment/reply a new comment/reply is responding to). Unless I’m missing that. I also wish the true/false difference in up/down votes were more distinct.
These are early days for a lot of these platforms, and really what’s been built on kbin so far is impressive as it is. We’re all used to feature sets that have existed for years so it’s easy to think they are simple to implement, but that’s not the case. I’m looking forward to seeing everything mature.
Edit: permalink is the timestamp/age next to your name at the top of the post.
Thank you to all of the developers, testers, and everyone else involved for this. I am loving kbin and I hope it’ll gain more prominence on the fediverse.
Are you comfortable with saying how much this instance costs to run? Or even just a ballpark of how much you think it would cost per-user?
A few subreddits are having a discussion later today about hosting our own “official” instance collectively and we’re trying to figure out how much each option would cost.
So any kind of data would be fantastic to help me convince them to choose Kbin. ;)
@EnglishMobster Sure, it’s no secret. Everything I do is transparent, and I want others to benefit as much as possible from it. Kbin was designed with small instances in mind. Of course, there are optional components like Redis and Rabbitmq that increase the requirements a bit. It’s hard for me to assess the impact on users at the moment. I’ve been maintaining my Polish instance (karab.in) for over a year with these two hetzner vps - 6eur-9eur/month + ~2$ s3 storage.
Kbin.social has been maintained on a VPS for €16.11/month up until now. Currently, I have upgraded it to the highest package to handle as much traffic as possible when the worst comes. It now costs €66.91/month.
These are the statistics with approximately 7000 unique visitors per hour and a fairly intensive usage of the site, including the entire federation. That’s all I know for now.
@ernest wow. Po pierwsze - gratulacje. Po drugie - współczuję 😅. Trzymam kciuki!
@ernest @EnglishMobster Do you have an open Collective I can direct people to? I also love the #Accessibility work you put into this already! I hope it continues, as a screen reader user.
That’s so exciting 😊 You guys should consider opening donations when you do. I’m sure people will want to help you guys out
Are there any plans to add POST endpoints to the API to enable bots? Looks like there needs to be a proper auth mechanism to grant auth tokens and then you can expose the API. If you need help, I can be of assistance.
@brandacus It will definitely be done, but first, I need to catch my breath. You’re welcome to join me on kbin Matrix and Codeberg.
Do you have the Matrix link?
Thank you for your work! Is there any way to give feedback to the UI/website?
I’m trying to gather everything here: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues.
Cool to see that this thing is already federating. Let’s see if my comment from Smithereen appears 😏
Excited to see where this goes! Thanks for your hard work @ernest
Thank you so much for your work! I’m really enjoying here 😊
@ernest Federation appears to be broken. My server started getting
403 Forbiddenresponses when it tries to fetch actors from kbin.socialYour server presents HTML page containing this text: “Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue”
@silverpill @ernest
yun-wuxin:[wisknort]:~$ curl -Is kbin.social | grep -i server
Server: cloudflarelol, lmao
@Zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com @silverpill@mitra.social @ernest@kbin.social Amazing that he doesn’t realize that Cloudflare is doing the same thing as Twitter/Facebook/Youtube. They admit that they want to capture users into the free tier and gouge them into upgrading in their S-1 filing (this is also called “predatory pricing” and would attract the ire of any regulator with a spine).
@ernest@kbin.social I’m going to be relatively nice because other Fediverse users won’t. A lot of Fediverse users use software that Cloudflare does not like (i.e. anything that protects privacy, any IP address that cannot be traced to a single residence) and will not be able to view anything on your site. I recommend at the very least making plans to move off of Cloudflare, because there are negative externalities that arise from using it.
I’m simply trying to keep the instance alive at all costs for the time being. Believe me, several years on the fediverse have been enough to educate me about Cloudflare.
@momo @ernest @silverpill It’s wild how we live in a world where mitm-as-a-service is not only legal and profitable, but is so even while also being scummy as hell.
@Zerglingman@freespeechextremist.com @ernest@kbin.social @silverpill@mitra.social It’s definitely not legal, but the precedence that would be set from prosecuting anti-trust would blow up everybody’s portfolio. So, money.
Thanks for the update, it’s very welcome as a new user!
Have you published anywhere a something like a vision statement or a roadmap that would help me understand how kbin differs from Lemmy and how those differences might will change in the future?
