I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it’s good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren’t enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.
I run fedia.io. I also run Infosec.pub. Which is lemmy so I know a lot about both. Lemmy is much more robust, but I personally find the interface for Mbin much nicer and the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy. At least for now.
Thanks for answering! Nothing against fedia, after all I’m posting from here, just asked out of curiosity… would’ve been fun if the local magazines were somewhat more active. Though I guess there lies the fediverse’s strength, of being able to post and read in this collection for example.
There’s a reason for that. About a year ago, Reddit started to implode. I set up Infosec.pub and Fedia to give people an alternative. There was a huge influx of people here creating all sorts of magazines, the same that you would see on Reddit. Fedia ran kbin at the time and it had all manner of problems, and over time people sort of wandered away. Either because they were tired of the problems or because they went back to Reddit.
In any event, what we see in the local magazines is the remnants of that initial migration. I really need to go and clean them up.
Now that Fedia is on mbin, things are much better. We still have issues now and then, but generally things work well.
Thanks for this! I escaped Reddit to Kbin.social to Kbin.run, and now landed at Fedia.io. I need to reconstruct some of the communities I started on the previous two. And will soon. It’s just gotten a bit busy IRL.
Unrelated, but does anyone know what happened to kbin.run?
The admin deleted all of his accounts and the kbin.run server without warning a few days ago.
Well that sucks, I was enjoying that instance. Oh well, Fedia will do, mostly the same in the end 🤷♂️
Unfortunately the risk of joining something hosted by usually lone individuals. I’m guessing the admin has mental issues, some life event happened and they decided to vanish. Sucks to do things this sudden and without warning though.
Jerry … admin of many instances!
the development of it seems to be headed in a direction I like better than that of lemmy
Just curious what sorts of things you have in mind here … it’s been a while since I used a k/mbin platform? (I was on kbin.social, RIP, hopefully it returns).
Mbin is very community oriented in it’s development, collective decision-making and all that. Lemmy is more subject to the ideas of it’s creators, for better or for worse.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but what I picked up by the Beehaw drama is that the Lemmy devs do not seem to be too interested in improving moderation support. I don’t know if this is politics related but I wouldn’t be surprised.
I think everyone is always interested in improving, but there are a billion different ideas of what improvement looks like. Especially with content moderation.
What is a brilliant way to handle some issues might cause new problems that may or may not be difficult to predict. A lot of people have a lot of ideas, and people feel strongly about it. And most importantly, it’s a lot of work to implement and typically not the most fun work for developers who tend to be be underpaid at best anyway.
It seems every fediverse service that gets big enough has people chanting about a hard fork because the developers don’t care enough about content moderation. I believe it’s probably more that it’s extremely difficult, and that developers facing the reality of the situation might come across as dismissive when responding to ideas and suggestions.
The Lemmy developers initially included a filter for numerous slurs - I have a hard time believing they don’t want content moderation to be their own vision of as good as possible.
In the end our strength is in fragmentation. I believe, no matter how little moderation tools improve, the small instances I’m on will never get as awful as Reddit. And if they do, I’ll migrate to another one that’s more trigger-happy about defederating. :)
That said, not sure whether you’re wrong and absolutely not correcting you! Just my five cents.
I believe it’s probably more that it’s extremely difficult, and that developers facing the reality of the situation might come across as dismissive when responding to ideas and suggestions.
The problem is that them being on a political extremist side of things makes it incredibly hard to take their word for it and to take them at face value. The most trouble Lemmy communities are facing is coming exactly from the spaces that align not just with the devs views, but in case of Lemmy.ml and Lemmygrad even the ownership. So when more moderate lefty instances like Beehaw complain about the lack of moderation tools to handle the trolls from those places, it might just be that the devs are completely fine with what’s happening.
While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.
For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it’s the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome … when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don’t really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I’ve gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.
Point being that it’s all probably a bit of a mess that doesn’t neatly align with left v right.
I’d bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don’t like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I’ve come to understand over time actually).
From a moderator perspective it seems essential to have a microblogging section, because otherwise people make entire posts for simple questions or personal achievements. That plagues Reddit, drags down the whole site.
I still think it’s missing something though, streaming video service support. Mbin’s idea of combining known socials works great in that respect. Text and image, but needs video support. P2P maybe, no storage needed.
P2P? How is that supposed to work? You cannot expect every user that uploads a video to even have remotely enough uptime for any arbitrary interested person to successfully watch their video
Simply by choosing a lesser used fedi software you’re helping keep the fediverse from being dictated by a single software’s whims. So that’s a big plus there. Federation issues with kbin/mbin/azorius/other lesser used instance software will inevitably happen as people only test against the largest player in the field (in the ““threadiverse”” that’s Lemmy, in the microblogging fedi that’s Mastodon). So simply by not picking the largest you’re, even if in a small way, helping not only mbin but all the lesser used fedi software as a whole.
Your own local communities being “dead” mainly boils down to communities themselves having a network effect around them where the largest one keeps growing larger as everyone focuses on it. And the largest communities are usually on lemmy.world (or occasionally other Lemmy instances). There isn’t that much you can do there.
In my experience, it’s always the smaller software that innovate. The same is true in the microblogging fedi (emoji reactions, quote posts, markdown, nomadic identity, reply permissions) just as it’s true in the ““threadiverse”” (combining communities together, the ability to follow people, polls apparently (?)).
So really, don’t worry about the size of your own instance’s communities. As long as you trust your instance’s staff to keep you safe there’s no real reason not to get on a smaller instance, or on different software. Especially on here, where “discoverability” is not as much of an issue as it is in the microblogging fedi.
This is exactly why I chose Mbin: to help diversify Threadiverse software.
the interface to all the exact same content, as you point out, is better.
why would i use an incredibly shitty interface that almost requires the use of an app, when i can access 100% of lemmy from mbin?
this whole ‘lemmy-centric’ view you have of the fediverse is archaic. you need to think bigger.
the whole point of the fediverse is access to all the content from your interface of choice… and youre asking ‘why choose the better interface?’
this whole ‘lemmy-centric’ view you have of the fediverse is archaic.
More like narrow, but we see that all over. Mastodon users think microblogging is the end-all, be-all of the fediverse, even ignoring the loads of other, similar server software in that sector. Lemmy users talk about the fediverse as if it’s only community-based forums.
In the meantime I guess, say, Peertube users are over in the other end of the room scratching their heads.
The approach could be to use the lemmy server software and a custom UI, not a whole new server-side project like kbin/mbin.
Examples:
Some if them are hosted directly on instances like a.lemmy.world or photon.lemmy.world. Others are hosted separately, but allow you to login from most any server, like tesseract.dubvee.org,
Photon is available for any instance at https://phtn.app.
Alexandrite is available for any instance at https://alexandrite.app.
I don’t like when instances will host photon for anything other than the default interface, as then it’s just a more limited, outdated version of photon and another point of failure.
What ultimately caused kbin to shut down?
Single developer prioritised his life over supporting an increasingly complex project, I think
He had some health issues iirc, and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for. I don’t blame him for stopping development.
and frankly people got really pushy about a thing they don’t even pay for
He doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he can decide to run his open source project just as he pleases, but it could have gone so much better. People are mostly just disappointed, I feel like.
I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.
