I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We’ve left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc…
But we need to spread out.
Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.
A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from ‘the bird site’ (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk’s new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.
We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.
I’m a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:
https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105
The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting ‘off the record’. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.
And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.
I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It’s the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn’t really register with me until I spoke with this person.
https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3
Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:
We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.
Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.
TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.
I invite correction and clarifications.
EDIT: Adding further sources below.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207
Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible
Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d
Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media
Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618
And a cartoon to boot
I’ve been thinking about setting up a single-user instance of kbin for myself. Maybe this is the kick in the pants I need to finally get around to it.
I have my own pixelfed server running
Ugh, I’ve found it difficult to get it up and running. Need to throw more time at it but I thought the docker containers would “just run”.
That is also holding me back. I am hosting tons of stuff myself, all dockerized, but I was not able to get kbin up and running yet. I wish someone would manage the images, so we can just pull, edit a .env and run / upgrade it.
For me the whole process always hangs at a step that seems to have something to do with the php setup. I tried on different servers, even created a fresh Ubuntu 22 LTS and still had the same problem. I am sure I am doing something wrong (probably editing something incorrectly in the settings), but the process it not as easy yet as it is for the other services I am hosting at the moment.
I’m running it using docker-compose
Cool! Do you have a writeup or something that you could share? Maybe any mods you did to the docker-compose files to get it to work? Would help a lot of us out.
How was that process? I’ve been going back and forth on it for a few weeks now.
Man my only issue with pixelfed is followed tags aren’t showing up on my feed. There a issue already submitted, so hopefully it’s resolved soon!
On your own server or someone else’s? There is an artisan command to fix this count
On my home feed on Pixelfed.social. I would expect posts with followed tags to show up under my home feed unless that is not intended.
That is strange and I’m not sure what’s going on there. You could try asking on the pixelfed discord
Theres already a github issues submitted.
Hopefully its resolved soon, I really want to like pixelfed.
What would be the benefit of a single user instance?
I guess you’d really control your data.
You could do a magazine as your own personal blog.
And you could still post to any instance you want.
You won’t be defederated from other instances. On the flip side if instances start using whitelists instead of automatically federating it could become an issue.
Good point. Defederation is one of my biggest concerns about the fediverse.
I’m not necessarily recommending a single-user instance, just a smaller one. The people who do have single-user instances generally put out a lot of their own content.
This guy has his own instance, 26k posts and 31k followers.
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral
Same, though I’m lazy enough that I was waiting for linuxserver.io to have a kbin image. I haven’t looked at the documentation yet, but if it’s straightforward enough…
Judging from the issues I’ve been watching on the hit repo, the setup process is still getting some kinks worked out, but it’s not impossible.
That’s cool, I didn’t know about that. Hopefully someone acts on https://discourse.linuxserver.io/t/kbin-and-lemmy-fediverse-reddit-alternatives/7667 soon.