Can someone take over KBin?
from snownyte@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 01 Jun 2024 06:22
https://lemmy.world/post/16046822
from snownyte@lemmy.world to fediverse@lemmy.world on 01 Jun 2024 06:22
https://lemmy.world/post/16046822
I’m having to register to Lemmy directly now, when I’m used to posting from KBin’s instance. But now the errors is getting so bothersome that I can’t even surf around currently on it. The 50x error comes up after everytime I post somewhere, like make a thread.
The current admin is dealing with issues at the moment and can’t always be there, which is unfortunate because it sets up KBin and it’s magazines to be contaminated with bots, spam and other problems.
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I tried hosting kbin on a pretty beefy server for a while and honestly, it’s dogshit to host. You have to clone and compile the entire code yourself. I use Lemmy.
Call me when there’s a docker pull and docker compose up deployment command.
Be the change. Make a dockerfile for it.
Follow the kbin install instructions, but convert them to dockerfile syntax.
Build it and push to docker.io or ghcr.io or whatever flavour you want.
Its a great learning experience, and containerisation is a huge part of the future (and present)
Mbin has a dockerfile, FYI
I’m sorry, but this sounds… you are aware you’re asking people to run a social network just so you’re not inconvenienced, right and why would the developer just relinquish control of their flagship to appease you?
I just don’t understand how you got there ahead of finding another kbin instance, switching to mbin? Switching to Lemmy?
Is it possible for you to use a mbin server instead? I think it is a fork that has more active development going on around it.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Kbin is more or less dead. You should probably switch over to Mbin, which is a fork of kbin that is in more active development.
This is the flagship instance, not really sure about any others.
kbin.melroy.org
Or just use a Lemmy instance.
Here is a list of mbin instances: https://fedidb.org/software/mbin
We do not really have a "flagship" instance, as we saw that it created a bunch of problems for kbin having one
fedia.io is what i use
I’d say kbin.run is the flagship instance (yes it’s an mbin instance although it has kbin in the name), I think it’s run by one of the mbin developers
If you go by that then we have at least 4 flagship instances:
kbin.run is the most popular one of these and has the most generic sounding name, therefore I declare it the flagship instance lol
I just registered to MBin. Hopefully it’s the last place I’ll have to register to. Because while I love the fediverse by it’s design. Having to register so many accounts is getting me batty. We’re already in an era of technology where nearly everything requires an account of some kind.
Yeah I hear you. Unfortunately we are in the early adopter phase so it requires extra effort sometimes
I have to unsubscribe from some of kbin’s magazines because bots constantly posting spam there in past few months. It’s bad. I didn’t know the dev runs double duty as mod as well.
I unsubscribed from kbin for that exact reason a bit earlier. I‘m sad the platform is suffering and the person taking care of it is overwhelmed.
It does show the fundamental flaw of foss software. People should really donate even small amounts to these platforms so they can afford more dev time.
I feel like this needs to be addressed soon in general, not only in this case.
We do need to create a culture of donations within the FOSS community. But we also need to get real with our expectations. People don’t realise how much time and effort has gone into Lemmy to where it is. People think that creating an alternative is quick and easy and it’s not. Honestly, for more people, their time would be better invested in creating an alternative front-end rather than a whole new piece of software. A one person development team just isn’t sustainable for 99% of projects. New software takes a lot of time to get to a state where it’s ready.
I agree 100%. Still, I dont think most people will donate until they have to and this will lock those out who cant and drive those away who rather sell their privacy. Maybe lemmy (and other foss) should go full wikipedia mode and have banners all over the place until you donate even a dollar. I donate 1$ a week (not the only project I donate to either).
Then, on the other hand countries should have programmes to fund this kind of stuff and it should just happen by user count.
What do you think would be a viable option?
I keep coming back to the idea of cooperatives. If say me, you and three other people all use Lemmy and Mastodon, what’s to stop us putting £10 into a pot monthly to pay for hosting and the domain. I don’t think the problem is the willingness, I think its just the culture. We need to build the culture up of people investing in their freedom and autonomy. We need to build the infrastructure for cooperatives to thrive.
I also like think we should have governments donating towards hosting and teaching people about self hosting. Whether on a VPS or in home.
Thats exactly what I do. A couple of friends use my vps and it has many fediverse services running with 99% uptime.
They throw some dollars my way and I kick a share to the devs and other software that runs this place. I‘m also putting in hours to improve the software and coming up with ideas how to distribute the money better.
What we need is better organization. People need to know about this, talk about it and make plans together imo.
Well there you have it. You are the blueprint!
I offer Lemmy, Mastodon, Matrix and Funkwhale for $29 per year. People don’t need to worry about anything. It is more capital efficient and resource efficient than hundreds of small “cooperatives” running around.
And if you want to have your own domain, I also provide access to the Fediverse via Takahe for $39/year. If I had more customers, I’d be able to use this money to fund its development further and make it compatible with Lemmy’s API as well.
Honestly, I am doing a really poor job at marketing or people are not really willing to put their money where they mouths are.
I’m actually a fan of the service you offer, but yeah, you suck at execution.
First of all, what you offer is a hosting service and that’s very different from a cooperative. A cooperative is however many people with equal ownership and obviously equal managerial oversight. This, what a cooperative is, is emotional involvement.
Your hosting service for example, is, essentially you saying asking people to pay you so they don’t have to worry about anything. Problem is, outside of guilt/a sense of responsibility, what’s the benefit? What does anyone get that they can’t get for free elsewhere?
Even with the servers you offer, you’ve made some tragic decisions. Like main@topic.tld. That’s just a basic mistake. It’s confusing. Main/Meta are always reserved for Meta discussion, so already you’re creating friction and learning curve where none needs to be. selfhosted/selfhosting/selfhost@selfhosted.forum is far more clear than main@selfhosted.forum and actually inspires people to have a look at the topics. We also have to ask, what makes your one better than others? What are your community ambitions? These are the type of questions that need to be asked. Recently, you were tagged by blaze in a topic where he asked your thoughts about hosting the euro24 communities over on soccer.forum and you totally, at least when I checked, didn’t respond. Now if you had spoken up, perhaps you could’ve had more people posting on your instance and once they’re there, they can see sidebars talking about paying for the Fediverse suite. But going back to selfhosted, when I posted about creating a new one, you said we shouldn’t fragment the conversation. Where what you should’ve said is that you have a community that does things differently. I’m very vocal about the fact that I feel having so much of the community centred around Lemmy world is bad for Lemmy and bad for the Fediverse. Not because they’re bad, but because centralization is bad. We need more decentralization and we need to get more people used to traveling off server and curating their subscriptions, that’s not going to happen with people like yourself trying to herd people towards federation. Going back to the football stuff, have you even messaged the mods of the football communities and offered to host them? But yeah, if we’re talking just hosting, you need to figure out what makes you special and content/communities is a good place to start.
I know it sounds harsh, but honestly, I bothered to write all this because I’m rooting for you. I want to see a sustainable Fediverse.
Finally, some useful feedback. Thank you! Some points valid, others not so much:
There is no such thing as a free lunch. There are costs (countable and uncountable) to running an instance. If people don’t want to pay out of their pocket to have someone having the service, they will be subject to the whims of administrators, moderators who will be tired of dealing with thousands of reports, cases of developers burning out (just like the one here in this very post), etc, etc.
I don’t think any of my customers are paying me “out of guilt”. I think that they understand that their time is valuable, they don’t want to deal with this shit and my service provides them more value than the amount of money they give me.
What are my community ambitions with these instances? Honestly, none. I did not start these topic-based instances to grow all these communities or to lead this effort. My hope was to take a supporting role, help with technical coordination, figure out issues with the software that are stopping wider adoption, etc. I first created selfhosted because that subreddit was one of the few that was seriously considering moving out of Reddit, and I am on record actually offering the domain to them. They didn’t take the offer, so I decided to run it and (at the time) use as a test bed for my work on infrastructure stuff and the fediverser mirrors.
There were indeed some bad calls on this. First, it took me a while to realize that these if no one could join these instances, then no one would be able to create their own community. Second, I was pushing for the mirrors even in places where I was not actually participating, and while I still stand by the idea that having content mirrored from reddit is better than having no content at all, I also accept that all those bots were a net negative for the fediverse as a whole.
Now that I got the grant from NLNet, I will work on fixing these mistakes. The first plan is to let anyone create communities on fediverser-enabled instances (even if they don’t have an account there) and it will just require an approval from the admin. Second, I am replacing the bots with “Community Ambassadors” who will be able to reach out and integrate with the existing subreddits in ways that they feel more appropriate
(Lastly, I did respond to Blaze afterwards, I just don’t know why I didn’t get the notification in the first place.)
I agree with you so much that I don’t even understand where this criticism is coming from. I’ve written multiple blog posts arguing for a less server-centered approach to these open social media platforms, to the point that starting to drop “Fediverse” from my vocabulary and calling it “Open Social Web”.
I did. I also wrote to the mods of /r/nba and /r/nfl, because I also created instances for that. I got zero responses. The lesson I learned here: with very few exceptions, the mods of really popular subreddits are too high on their power-trip and do not want to risk anything by moving out.
I know this, you know this. But there’s things called hedged leveraging and acceptable loss.
This is important.
So why should someone trust you? You’re not emotionally involved nor committed.
So an RSS feed? Why does anyone need you then?
Bad idea.
Yes, you need people who are personally invested in order to build local and wider Fediverse communities.
You did a post and someone said, “you know you’re describing nostr” and that made me chuckle
It’s not personal criticism, it’s more observation and clash of ideals. I would prefer to see 20 small but equally active communities about baking, over one on the biggest instance. I wholeheartedly believe people need to get used to traveling around the Fediverse but also building up the communities they’re a member of.
Not the Reddit moderators, the Lemmy World ones.
So…
Something along those lines.
I’m getting the feeling that you are talking about things that more specific to Fediverser (the tools to help migration from Reddit to Lemmy, which is mostly an open source project) than Communick (which is a professional hosting service). But anyway.
My email provider is not “emotionally involved or committed” to my emails. Yet, I still trust them they will do their best to keep me using their services.
An RSS feed does not provide the possibility to interact with the post. There were a good number of conversations between Lemmy users that got started off a mirrored Reddit post.
Why?
Which is a myopic take. Nostr has a fundamental issue around identity management. They went too far to the other direction in the decentralization spectrum and will never be able to reach mainstream appeal. The only companies that are going to support it are (unsurprisingly) the ones that are owned or financed by Jack.
What I am proposing is still based around ActivityPub and doesn’t throw the baby with the bathwater. Much like identity should not be coupled with the server running it, identity should not be coupled with your cryptographic keys.
What you “prefer” has little to do with what people want. I agree that we should strive to spread around different instances, but what is the benefit of having groups with similar interests spread around different communities? If these “similar interests” turn out to not be so similar after all, sure then they can and should branch out. But I don’t understand what is the value of favoring an explosion of content spread around. Content discovery is already the biggest challenge in the Fediverse, by fragmenting more than needed we end up with a bunch of people just yelling in their rooms to themselves.
That’s a given. I also promoted it on New Communities. I also made posts announcing the instances. I also asked people here to join. I’m still posting whatever content I think is relevant to these spaces.
Isn’t that why we have a duopoly when it comes to email providers? The thing with the Fediverse is that we’re trying to change the culture of how people think and use the Internet. We need them to feel like they’re part of it and they own it and big tech doesn’t have the right to rape and pillage our contributions and privacy for it.
But you were unable to grow. Is the world’s most expensive restaurant worth anything if a handful of people only visited once?
Ownership, commitment, dedication. All the basic foundational community building stuff. If they can’t even be arsed enough to create a login in order to make a community, why would you trust them to run that community? If the communities aren’t successful, how will they attract users? Without users, how will the communities be successful? Without a flagship experience, how do you drum up business? Without customers, how long can you continue to offer hosting services?
There’s better uses of your time rather than worrying about the design of ActivityPub.
Is there only one pub in your town?
I dunno, when I asked one of the moderators of one of the football specific communities to mirror his posts on your football instance, he said he’d never heard of it.
There is no such thing. There are a ton of smaller players besides MS and Google. Just as an example: I’ve been a migadu.com customer for years, paying $19/year for a couple of very important domains.
I was. It was so successful that there were people complaining about it, because they felt they were feeling tricked by it. The growth was there, I stopped (most of) the bots because the growth was not serving the intended purpose.
You are missing one thing. The topic-specific instances are not open for registration. I do not want it to be a home of users, I want it to be the home of communities. This is based on the idea that your identity should not be tied to the domain.
It’s not because I like basketball that I’d ever want to have an @nba.space account. It’s not because you like to self host that your identity should be reduced to a selfhosted.forum domain, etc.
This is the gist of the “Federation and Identity” post. The things that I am working on will hopefully make it clearer, but for now suffice to say that the reason that people can not create communities on their own is because they are closed for registration and this is by design.
Physical locations are limited by physics.
People don’t go to a pub to talk around specific topics and interests
Sorry, we are not going to agree on this. Fragmenting groups for the sake of it serves no purpose other than keeping some misguided notion of “ownership”.
Heh, I just joined Migadu this week. But that aside, maybe duopoly is the wrong word. But last I checked there’s two major players and then a bunch of minnows and if you tried to spin up a self hosted email today, your emails would likely get bounced.
They go hand in hand. But let’s see how that changes with the third-party login work the Lemmy developers are working on.
Indeed, but I liked self hosting enough to make an account on libretechni.ca even if I don’t use the account for much.
Never been to a pub? 😂
Different pubs have different customers and atmospheres, despite both selling beer.
Third-party login is not going to change the fact that Lemmy servers (like every other server on Activity pub nowadays) connect the user identity to the server domain. It will maybe save people from creating yet another password, but that is about it.
Have you been to any pub where the conversation goes around one specific topic and there are moderators to make sure the conversation stays within its guidelines? I surely haven’t.
I like the idea of Sublinks for this reason. They wanted to create a Lemmy alternative, but they are maintaining Lemmy API compatibility. That way they build one piece at a time. The Lemmy frontend Tesseract was forked from Photon, and then became the Sublinks front end. But it’s still also a Lemmy frontend because they work with the same API structure.
In addition, Lemmy apps all work with Sublinks as well.
This way, they could focus on just the backend component, and rely on Lemmy components for the other pieces until they are able to get everything in house. Though they have a plan to keep Lemmy API compatibility, so there will always be this big pile of apps and web frontends that can be used with both.
The problem here is that people conflate “Free as in Speech” with “Free as in Beer”. Free Software was never about “not charging” or “pay what you want” or “donation based”. It’s about freedom to access and modify the software code if you want to do so.
The majority of people here don’t want or don’t care about this. They just want a convenient way to shitpost online. They want someone else to thanklessly devote their time and resources to the “community”, but don’t you dare thinking about making money from this.
This need to change. If we want an internet free of big corporations and focused on the interests of “the people”, then “the people” (all of them!) need to be willing to put something on the line and fund it.
I dont think thats gonna fly, honestly. We also need people to vote pro people and pro planet instead of pro billionaires or pro nationalism.
I also dont think its helpful to throw shit at the people using the software because thats how we know the software is good.
Imo, we should implement systems that fund software that attracts users without it using predatory marketing and privacy invasive. Ideally we just push taxes for large companies higher and give the funds to foss devs who attract most users/uses of their software/libraries. That should do the trick.
Speaking as someone who just received a grant from NLNet: I’m glad such a thing exists and I’m grateful for the funds I’m getting which will allow me to pay my bills for a couple of months. But if you told me 5 years ago (when I started working on Communick) that to make a living as a software developer I’d have to depend on the whims of bureaucrats who are playing with money that is not their own, I’d just go apply to Google or go back to my Big Corp.
Centralized economies do not work. Like everything else in the world, the best measure we have to determine if software is “good” is by putting a price on it and seeing how much people want to pay for it.
Also, it’s important to point out that this does not mean that we need VC, big corporate structure or any corrupt institution to work. There are indie devs making a killing (50/70/100k€ per month) on their own because they are building something that is valuable and are not shy from charging what they know what their work is worth.
Thats valuable insight. Thank you.
I‘d like to point out that the bureucrats are a different problem we need go get rid of as well. It does not mean the idea of publicly funding this stuff is bad. I think the reason why bureaucracy takes over is lack of public oversight and influence by the people.
If you take sidestreets of law (ie bancruptcy law in some countries) you will find yourself in the wild west because only a small fraction of people ever has to take this road. The people in charge behave like warlords because normal people dont know and care.
But yes, people should dual license their shit so that corpos have to pay for it.
If you want the government to be the one financing FOSS developement, who will be in charging of managing the purse if not the bureaucrats?
Strongly disagree. If you start putting restrictions around who should have the right to Free Software, it is no longer free. It is because of shitty “source available” mentality that I, as an small indie shop, can not offer hosting for interesting solutions for other companies. If Lemmy or Mastodon were not AGPL, I would never had touched it.
there is a big difference between them holding onto the purse and them being able to put walls of paper in front of anyone trying to access it. The more transparent and voted over publicly that is, the more it should actually function.
Help me here. My understanding is that you can dual license something, for example agpl (not ever to be taken closed source) and a pay for it if you want to build something proprietary with it, no? Let me know what real world example would spell doom here.
Maybe I misunderstood you. I thought you were calling for licenses that force companies to pay. Dual licensing is indeed an option if a company wants to pay to use free software in a closed product.
Re: bureaucracy. If you have any thoughts on how to get a public-funded system that can allocate resources (a) efficiently (b) at a large scale and ( c ) without falling to politicking and power games, I’m all ears. Myself, I still believe that market-based approaches are better, and that we should leave the government only to (local-level) regulations.
You should be able to mark this as solved, honestly. There is already a fork that’s been mentioned multiple times here. (MBin). Here’s a list of instances.
Anti Commercial-AI license
Kbin.run is well maintained. Whenever I submit a bug they are on it right away, it's impressive.
Please don’t take what I’m about to say as individual call-out, but your comment really will go to “reasons software developers should not listen to the users (unless they are paying for the privilege)” file.
You have a developer who started the project by themselves, got reasonably popular, does more than what Lemmy is doing and when they need help to be able to keep going, the reaction from the people is “don’t bother, just move on to this other fork”.
I know this is not your intention, but I can’t stop picturing a bunch of locusts flying to the next crop.
I’m not offended. @snownyte@lemmy.world is, from I understand, basically asking the community to help out the main dev of kbin. From what I’ve seen, that main dev doesn’t want to relinquish control of the main instance or allow others to come on. Nor have they shown willingness for similar actions in the code-base.
That’s a completely valid stance. It’s his project, his baby, his time and nobody should be able to force him to take any other action. However, it does come with the consequences observed: bots, unmerged pull requests, slow-moving code, and just general stagnation as the project moves as fast the main dev. As such, IMO there’s no problem recommending a fork that is community-driven (the C4 model is great!).
Hopefully I’m not misunderstanding your comment.
Anti Commercial-AI license
That’s pretty much the idea. I don’t want someone to take over KBin forcefully to make it their image. I just would’ve thought the admin had someone in mind to entrust to keep things should IRL get in his way. Which is looking to be the case. The admin can’t be there for KBin right now and there’s no one there to help maintain and keep it running.
Worst case scenario is the admin’s health worsens and KBin just becomes a husk of itself in due time.
.
The project page is listing 5 names under contributors. He has received a grant from NLNet and seems to be promoting other sponsorship programs. Seems like he is not above asking for help. Quite the opposite, actually. He is basically begging for the “community” to support him financially, but seems that very few (kbin is getting less than $100/month on Patreon and ~$90/month on liberapay) are listening.
How do you “form a team” if there is no meaningful income? I don’t know about him, but I would feel pretty embarrassed to even ask other people to work on something if I am not offering something tangible in return. And to be quite honest, I wouldn’t trust anyone that accepted a pitch that could be summarized as “hey, would you like to come work on this project that is sucking the life out of me, gives a ton of headaches and forces me to deal with a bunch of entitled users?”
Yes sorry, I know there is more complexity than what I implied. I think it came from a position of frustration that Kbin has been DDoSing lemmy instances for months due to some bug causing junk activities to be sent in huge numbers, in addition to Kbin being the primary source of spam for lemmy. I’ll remove my comment as I can’t stand behind it.
I know there was an issue not long ago where Sopuli had to defederate from kbin for awhile. Kbin had a federation bug that was endlessly spamming federation updates and it was causing Sopuli to fall behind on federation.
Mbin had a fix up pretty quick, but several attempts to reach the Kbin admin all failed.
Kbin still has that bug. Lemmy.world is actively throttling the number of activities it accepts from Kbin as if they don’t, they then federate these out to other servers and it impacts on the ability of those servers to keep up with the genuine Lemmy.world content.
Even with this throttling some are struggling to keep up.
Mbin is a much better fork of Kbin