Also, the Kbin dev expressly stated he isn't ready for a massive migration, and the current influx has caused him no end of stress. We want to keep him around and not drive him insane.
I appreciate the concern, and it seems to me that kbin is no longer just one person ;) Currently, kbin is a team of wonderful people who handle development work, devops, project management, and more. Additionally, Piotr helps me with administering kbin.social. There will be significant changes here soon, things are happening quickly. But to be honest, I wasn't fully prepared for such substantial growth, and it will probably take some time before everything stabilizes. But... this is just the beginning ;) What's important is that the snowball starts rolling, regardless of whether kbin, Lemmy, or Mastodon gains the most users. We all win in this situation.
Kbin is PHP/Symfony, but people are writing tools in various languages, not to mention clients. I haven't looked at the client repositories, but I assume that some, if not all, of the codebases for them are Java.
The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.
A feature we'll definitely want to have with kbin in the future is the ability to migrate accounts to other instances. That would mean that even though we're centralizing on kbin.social right now, people could move to other instances and spread the load across the fediverse without losing their history
I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.
Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.
Kbin doesn't have the ability to sort comments by top. To me, that is the #1 most important feature, and not having it when it's easy to do shows some real ignorance. The reason I come to these sites is to see the best comments on news of the day.
12 years ago reddit would crash all the time. To make it worse they always told me I was the one who broke reddit personally by putting a message on my screen. My bad yall.
Yeah, I always thought it was a little unfair when it popped up telling me that "Briguy24 broke reddit!". But I never held it against you, don't worry :)
To each their own but sometimes it's nice to just scroll through comments and see the varied replies instead of just fed the top/earliest on some posts. Imo it increases user engagement.
Brother, acting like a douche to people who are working and paying for you to be here shows some real arrogance. You're not a customer here. There's no ad revenue, no data collection, no money. If you want it so bad then do it yourself. Beauty of the fediverse is you can go make your own instance that does what you want it to do.
Even with the donations I doubt there's that much of a profit to being made. Servers are expensive, and there's no way that servers are the only overhead that ernest is dealing with.
His own knowledge, skills, abilities, and time are almost certainly worth more than he is receiving in donations. Dudes a skilled programmer/developer and is putting serious work into this. If he was putting his time and effort into freelance work instead he'd be building a heck of a nest egg.
R/pics is also refusing to go down without a fight, and I’m kind of loving watching all this from the sidelines.
Reddit already got caught using ChatGPT to astroturf in posts supporting the admins, so I wonder if some of the people the mods mentioned popping in for drama are actually ChatGPT.
"I love everything that STEVE HUFFMAN is doing with REDDIT and will stand behind him in any endeavor. In addendum, he does not look like a crack-addicted lemur. End statement. Please insert coin to continue."
Dragon's Lair, when you look back on it, was a corporate grab in the arcade world. Disney-level graphics when all the other games were 8-bit, and the worst gameplay ever in an arcade game...because it was made by someone who'd never set foot in an arcade.
The only competition it has for worst came later when that hologram game came later where you're a cowboy shooting...Native Americans. Another turd that was all graphics and nothing else.
Sega's Time Traveller. It was quickly replaced with Holosseum, which wasn't much better, but at least it was playable. Sort of. (It's the most claustrophobic fighting game I've ever played.)
As an artificial intelligence, I do not have a physical presence in the world, and as such, I can't interact with a turtle or any other physical object.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where you encounter a turtle in distress, it would be good to help if it's safe to do so. Here's how you might assist an upside-down turtle:
Ensure your safety first: Before you decide to help the turtle, make sure it's safe for you to do so. Avoid risking your life or causing accidents. Also, some turtles can bite or scratch, so handle with care.
Gently flip it over: Approach the turtle slowly so you don't scare it, then gently flip it back onto its feet. Try to handle it as little as possible to minimize stress.
Move it in the direction it was heading: If the turtle was crossing the road, carry it across to the other side in the direction it was already going. Turtles are often very determined and will try to continue in the same direction if put back in the same spot.
Wash your hands: Turtles can carry diseases like salmonella, so make sure to wash your hands thoroughly after handling them.
Please note that it's generally better not to interfere with wildlife unless it's necessary. Turtles and other animals have their own behaviors and mechanisms to survive. In some places, it's even illegal to handle certain species without a permit. When in doubt, contact a local wildlife rescue or animal control agency for advice.
I can't help but think of 4chan's unofficial tagline of "trolls trolling trolls trolling trolls".
The joke used to be that "everyone on Reddit is a bot except you", but as that has become more a reality than a joke, it's morphed into "text-AIs trolling text-AIs trolling text-AIs".
A shame it doesn't [t]roll off the tongue quite as nicely.
Am I also a large language model? Let me answer that with another question:
Do you remember that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where Agent Smith occupies Bane out in "reality"?
I’d say the morning is the best time to take acid. You can’t sleep on it anyway. So spend your 12 hours of happy bliss doing something fun and productive, maybe outside in the fresh air. It’s probably good for your mental health to have a fun day out on acid.
This is from the various services trying to talk to each other in ways they weren't originally designed to do, really. Our "upvote" is a mastodon "favorite" (like) while our "boost" is functionally a retweet/reblog. Kbin tries to bridge the gap between threaded content and microblogging, and it gets about 90% of the way there; all it really needs to do is change it so that upvotes are the ones that contribute to reputation instead of boosts, which are functionally useless outside a fully microblog-style environment.
From what I can see the upvote / downvote both work as you'd expect now (as in upvoting curates content). There was apparently a period of time where 'boost' was the upvote mechanic but that's been changed
There's definitely room for improvement, but I like what I see so far and don't have a problem learning a new paradigm. I'm sure that as the platform matures things will become more consistent.
Boost is like retweeting something, you can have followers in the fediverse. Boosting makes something more visible to everyone, so you upvote/downvote things you personally like/dislike and boost things you think your followers/everyone would like
Think of this place as a cross between email, Twitter and reddit. All communities can interact with each other and are independent
14 years, 17 accounts, ~2000000 karma. Nuked everything: deleted comments and submissions, de-modded myself, unsubbed from everything, gilded various protest content using the coins I'd been given over the years, bought a cool Apollo app t-shirt, walked out and walked away. Nope, don't miss it; I'm exploring kbin and tildes, and getting my meme content from imgur. Which is ironic in a way, because the sole reason imgur was created was because reddit refused to allow native images.
Are you having regrets? It's okay to have regrets.
Kbin is a part of the Fediverse and is similar to Lemmy. I have a kbin.social account and am replying to you from kbin. (I subscribe to a lot of Lemmy communities via kbin).
Tildes is not a part of the Fediverse. It is a text-driven private forum basically created and run by one person. You need an invite from a Tildes account holder to join. It's its own little island. am on Tildes a lot and really like it.
Kbin is a different software than Lemmy, although similar.
It has only been around a few months (unlike lemmy that has years in development).
It offers what seems to me a more centralized view of the fediverse, with federation to lemmy servers and mastodon servers as well.
It has access to the microblogging feature, that is like sending a toot from mastodon.
I've found it to be a more familiar experience to Reddit, and honestly, I prefer it over lemmy.
Due to it being so new, it has many missing features lemmy might have, like mobile apps (the API is still not public, and it's being worked on).
HOWEVER, Kbin has a great community backing it up.
I'm currently posting this from the amazing Artemis beta app for Kbin, the first of its kind.
This is due to the incredible job @Hariette has done!!
I did, actually. My instance has a saved copy of the post, I replied to it there, it forwarded the information to Kbin.
OPs point is dumb. Lemmy and Kbin are separate platforms that happen to be interoperable because of the backend protocol they’ve decided to use (which Kbin added relatively recently in the grand scheme). The Fediverse is made up of many of these platforms that are doing the same thing. There is nothing wrong with referring to the platform one is using.
Well said. If you want to mean all the things connected to ActivityPub, you say Fediverse. If it’s restricted to lemmy, use lemmy. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. OP saying it borders on ignorance may have to think about it.
I use lemmy. I don’t really care for nor use other Fediverse services like Mastodon.
Wouldn't every viewed copy anywhere then be a saved copy of the original post? Does that distinction even mean anything when it's still posting specifically to the original instance?
If I reply in a Lemmy.world thread, I'm still posting on Lemmy.world even if I'm viewing from Kbin.social.
As a comparative example to old and dying social media, it would be like finding a link to a celebrity's Twitter comment on Reddit and you saying you saw the person saying that on Reddit, which would be extremely misleading to anyone listening, thinking that the celebrity had posted it on Reddit.
It’s not posting comments specifically to the original instance. If the instances defederate I can continue to post comments, and people on my instance can see and interact with them.
Once somebody subscribes to a community (or magazine if you’re on the rifle site), ActivityPub acts like dynamic, synchronizing RSS. Everybody interacts with local data, an instance isn’t simply acting as a proxy when interacting with a different instance.
No, you're posting on kbin.social. You're never ever doing anything directly on a remote site. You view on k-so, you vote on k-so, you post on k-soc, and you comment on k-soc. Your actions are then, at some later point (which may be microseconds, or it may be hours, depending on traffic levels on both k-soc and the remote website), relayed to the remote website so the two copies of the community can be synchronised.
Reddit was antagonistic when they removed moderators from subreddits, banned their accounts, and did everything else they possibly could to quell the protests. The behavior they're exhibiting to this day isn't new.
This is the second time I've seen something on kbin trying to dress the reddit migration to the Fediverse up as some hugely patriotic thing.
We don't need that, we don't benefit from it. This is how you create demagogues. Don't infuse nationalism into the Fediverse. That is super problematic and I think you're going to be in for a rude awakening when you see how much more European the Fediverse is than reddit was.
When the API shut off early, Apollo dev u/iamthatis (@fhristianselig) revoked his token so I cannot see any of this; but I’m wondering if reddit isn’t pulling a silent reversal of this to stem the bleeding of users and content. There is a lot of useful stuff that has been deleted. The AMA staff resigning and all the stuff migrating to fedi. No matter how much f-u/spez tries to shout “This is fine”; the building is still burning all around him.
I thought access would essentially be the same from the app's perspective, just the app builders would start getting MASSIVE bills in the mail? And they were shutting it down preemptively to avoid this.
That was my understanding, also. I read that the first billing for devs would be sent on Aug 1, so developers who did not want to pay shut their apps down on June 30 so they wouldn't have even one bill for API use. However, it also sounds like Reddit shut off the API early from what Christian Selig said so they continued their petty games.
Reddit is supposed to block api access to anyone not in a contract with them. This is why all the apps stopped working early yesterday. Reddit had to turn access on to any app that is staying. That is why this is weird. Unless all these apps are in deals with Reddit.
The problem with platforms advertising that they’re free speech platforms is that you’ll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.
And that backtracks all the way into
The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don’t). It’s quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to “ackshyually”. In this case “free speech” makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn’t, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)
Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
Often, but not always. It’s a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it’s just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.
What will decide if Squabbles’ admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let’s see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there’s some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on “With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence”).
I disagree because any and all words and expressions can be used to bring the dogs to the garden. Coupled with your reasoning, this would mean that all words and expressions are always dogwhistles.
Instead I think that it’s better to see a word/expression as a dogwhistle if it’s within a certain context, and that context is mostly available to a hate group but not to outsiders. This has a bunch of consequences*, but in this specific case it means that we’d need to look for further actions and words from Squabbles’ admins to know if it’s a dogwhistle or not.
Or even a lack of actions/words. If transphobic and related content becomes commonplace in their site, and they do nothing against it, I think that their very silence would be already enough to label it as a dogwhistle.
*e.g. it explains why dogwhistles are often found alongside each other, or why they keep changing, or even how they actually work on a discursive level.
so I totally get your point. For example, a therapy group that says, "this is a free speech area" and has 8 members who are all queer, would probably not mean it as a dogwhistle, and in that case, it also probably would not be one. But also, they wouldn't be saying it to anyone other than those 8 members.
The thing is, in this case it legit does not matter the intent, they are saying it on a public chat forum. That makes it a dogwhistle regardless of intentionality, and it will be recognized as such, because if you say that on a public platform on the internet, guess who will hear it.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn't want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they've attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.
They also have an email address so that you can make a GDPR request via email since the EU legislation gives you the right to do that, you shouldn’t be forced to use their platform to do that as otherwise it would be too easy for a company to lock you out of the process.
If you have questions or are not able to submit a request to exercise your rights using the mechanisms above, you may also email us at to [email protected] from the email address that you have verified with your Reddit account, or submit them here.
That's a pretty good analogy, only he would have to specify that he still considers all women to be whores in his bio to be completely accurate.
Honestly though, it's desperate. I don't even want to know what's become of Accidental Renaissance 'Under New Management', I'm glad the original team are here though
Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it's not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain't happening.
Expanding on this, I'm worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it's clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn't matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don't use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren't even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old "Internet for Dummies" sorts of books back in the 90s, but I've never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.
Yeah, I got into it from the TalkOrigin.org website, and 1) I'd never have gotten into it otherwise, no question, and 2) I think it took years and many, many attempts to go from "huh they refer to a talk.origins 'newsgroup' where all this fun discussion comes from, oh the link does something weird nvm" to "OH HEY I MANAGED TO SIGN UP THIS THING IS REAL WHODATHUNK".
I said that in another comment but I think discoverability is huge. The way people find things out on the internet is by going to their usual internet places or asking questions of a search engine. I don't know how people got onto Usenet in the before times but definitely at the time I got onto it everyone was on the WWW and there were very few ways to even hear about Usenet there, let alone hear something enticing enough to want to check it out. And when you combine that with the technical barrier to entry that's pretty fatal.
That's a cute grumpy old man take but I don't think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It's true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won't hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it's not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.
Offhand I'd guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other "portals" to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don't mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they'll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?
Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people's recommendations because I don't have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I'm working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don't know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.
Usenet suffers from two problems: 1. Network effects and 2. Paywall.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor. You want to go where people are.
Secondly, Usenet used to be bundled into your internet package along with some basic email hosting and maybe some website hosting. But then the binaries groups exploded and a lot of the ISPs dropped support. So you have to go out and buy a separate package for access now.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor.
It is purely a matter of free public servers. Right now, the free public servers are almost all Fedverse. But they could just as easily be Usenet servers. If the free Fedverse servers close like free Usenet servers did, then Fedverse will also decline. But Usenet actually has some superior features that Fedverse lacks (e.g. automatic merging of groups), so if free Usenet servers pop back up, it would take off again.
There is https://www.eternal-september.org. For me the biggest hurdle tbh was finding an email provider that was 1) anonymous (including not requiring my credit card obvi) so that I could have a specific identity for Usenet 2) had IMAP/POP3 support so I could use it with Thunderbird and 3) wasn't gmail, yahoo or outlook/hotmail because I already have accounts with those and don't want to keep switching. I actually failed, I ended up having to pay the email provider I'd picked for IMAP support.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it's the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it's wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I'm working on whenever she's over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I've only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands "minecraft" to be an adjective meaning "that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic", it's adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it's time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age
I was just going to say this. Holding on to the illusion of power as a major moderator is about to turn into a shitshow. Even Reddit themselves have been caught using chat bots to sway public opinion.
Reddit has decided to make every bad decision (favoring profits) possible, all at once.
Peck was a part of the EPA and had legitimate reasons to investigate them.
Venkman was a dick and didn’t cooperate with Peck’s investigation, so Peck got pissed and went nuclear on their ass cause he thought they were charlatans.
The guy who actually flipped the switch even told Peck he’s never seen anything like that and didn’t want to do it.
I really wonder about bot synergy. How many haiku’s will one not write that another will correct the spelling on and a third find that all words are in alphabetical order?
The really really sad thing is, Reddit could have done a half decent job and made a fair bit of money, but they decided on stupidity instead.
Sure, it would have upset some people a bit, but... Not by anywhere close to the same degree.
Alright, we're sorry, but use of the API is going to have to start costing money for some kinds of uses.
First off, people that just want to scrape everything get the following access, and a much higher rate limit, but it's going to cost $x.
Moderator tools will always be free, but the API will require that the tool be associated with a moderator, and it will only permit access to subs that the user is a moderator for.
Community bots will generally be free, subject to the following restrictions.
And 3rd party clients will be charged a minimal amount, calculated to be roughly equal to what we are making from similar users on the official clients, to make up for lost ad revenue. Alternate options involving profit sharing may be viable, contact X for details.
By accepting the API agreement, you agree that use of the wrong class of API usage (for example, using the community bot or 3rd party client classes for data scraping) will be billed, retroactively, at $X * 10.
There. That's really not that hard. And people would have been much less upset at that, at least as long as the fees were actually as described, and not based on, say, how much they would like to make per user.
You'd probably want a free tier for 3rd party clients for users of specific account types. If the user is paying for Reddit Premium, maybe 3rd party clients don't get charged for API usage for that user account. Or if the user is a moderator for a given subreddit, API usage for that user on that subreddit is also free. With an API that the client can use to check the status of such things. If they were smart, they would also have a process for users with disabilities to have their accounts exempted from fees. That last one is hard, because you need a verification process, but it would get them a lot of good will.
Again... This shouldn't be hard. And it would have turned into a viable revenue stream!
Hell, flatly disclose that the 3rd party cost is 30% more than the average cost of using the standard client, to support the effort required to maintain the API. (Largely bullshit, but it makes those users more valuable than those that use the official client, while not being expensive enough to make it impossible for anyone to offer a 3rd party client at an even remotely sane cost.)
Yes, this would have very sadly been the end of free 3rd party clients... But I for one would have been... Okay with paying a small amount per month/year through the app store for a client that didn't suck.
Instead, Reddit decided that committing suicide was the better path forward.
RedditMigration
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