this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Reddit Migration

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### About Community Tracking and helping #redditmigration to Kbin and the Fediverse. Say hello to the decentralized and open future. To see latest reeddit blackout info, see here: https://reddark.untone.uk/

founded 1 year ago
 

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:

https://kbin.social

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

https://cutie.city/@nuz/110602855304673785

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[–] [email protected] 266 points 1 year ago (4 children)

It hasn't even been two weeks. Let people get used to the platforms.

Difference instances are showing up slowly, so maybe instead of saying everyone needs to split up before communities and magazines have had a chance to mature even in the slightest, we slow down a little bit and support the hosts and developers we have now.

Or perhaps, look for new instances and report back on places folks can migrate to.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Magazines having a chance to mature is going to lead to people being further entrenched on one instance.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (4 children)

If you use reddit as an example, they have hundreds, thousands of subreddits.

We aren't anywhere close to even a hundred nature magazines.

Allowing people to be comfortable for a month won't cause any long term damage.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

100 nature magazines would get pretty niche.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Brb, just going to create m/aardvarks, m/african wild dogs, m/anteaters, m/antelopes, m/ants, m/armadillos...

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I do wonder if it would be healthier for the fedditverse for instances to really narrow their magazine/community footprint. I.e. "This is an Anime instance" a "Science instance" etc. Making off-topic magazines could either be discouraged or outright banned.

Not looking forward to having dozens of "news" and "technology" magazines sharing the same stories,

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

That's fair but what if, say, the "news" instance dies/goes offine or something along these lines, isn't all the content it hosts going to be lost or become inaccessible? Not sure how the whole thing works but it's something that's been concerning me. With redundant communities across multiple instances at least the whole topic won't go down with any single instance.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

This happened a good amount on mastodon and was very helpful. It's part of why I'm on Midwest.social right now

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I sort of think instances forming around distinct communities is what the Fediverse's early architects had in mind, but it just doesn't seem to be turning out that way. Users are not frequently self-segregating by ideology (e.g. lemmygrad) or interest (e.g. startrek.website). Even beehaw is not really specific enough to be ideologically distinct. Lemmy.ml is even less so, despite the devs/admins politics, and lemmy.world or lemmy.ca aren't even trying. Neither is kbin.social, to be fair, but imho that's okay. It's just a fact to deal with.

Without the expected behavior, you end up with one of two options. On one hand, you hope that the admins of tiny instances are superstars and populate their /c/'s or /m/'s to attract a following against all odds and force the projects back on the roadmap by having all the fans of a niche community or all the people interested in a specific viewpoint post mostly or entirely on the relevant instances /c/ or /m/. On the other, you have the discourse dominated by a few busier instances when their new "subs" populate more quickly. The latter, while not ideal, is not as bad as true centralization and, importantly, it seems to match actual behavior and it might be useful for front-end devs of apps and sites to make choices that work with the user behavior as best they can, like optional auto-aggregation of identically named communities.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's what I think too. There's going to be a dozen gaming communities in their own instance and none will really take off. To get it going there needs to be one.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Frankly I think we need more people before we can start getting concerned about things like that. If we're trying to make the Fediverse a viable alternative it has to be appealing and easy enough to use that people want to use it. If we don't get that right this whole thing is doomed from the start

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Can magazines migrate instances like users can? (even ignoring federation concerns, at some point it's going to be much easier to scale this thing if the more popular magazines can spawn off to their own instances)

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago (8 children)

No but once the magazine/community has been created it doesn't really matter which instance it lives on because any user from any instance can post, comment and mod in that magazine.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

It's an idea I've seen floated, and personally would appreciate, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no Magazine or Community migration for kbin or Lemmy.

Incidentally, I'm commenting from a Lemmy instance, to a kbin Magazine on kbin.social, and subscribing to RedditMigration on kbin.social was pretty seamless, at least as seamless as any other non-local Lemmy Community. OP is right in that spreading out is a decent idea. It's not really necessary for everyone to be on the same instance.

Another way to address the problem of corporate takeover and ensuing enshitification is form non-profits, co-ops, or other organizations to actually "own" the instance. My home Mastodon instance has started down this path already.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's right to say that instances are showing up slowly, but there is definitely a centralization occurring. According to fediverse.observer, kbin.social has 43k users, and the next most populated instance in the US only has 104 users.

Ernest, developer of kbin and who runs kbin.social, has spoken about the difficulties in running kbin.social with the spike in users. If people are willing to sign up on smaller instances or migrate over, that could help distribute the load.

Or, like me, learn about VPSs and domain names and Linux commands from zero knowledge to get their own instance stood up - but it took a bit and I'm still running into issues here, so I can't necessarily recommend it for someone who has a life to attend to. :)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

tbh before reading your comment I had no idea that there are other kbin instances

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

This is the most rationale response. A lot of people suffering from mental illness will bog themselves down in theory and never focus on the practically of what they're saying. This is one of those examples. Just be glad people are using the platform and let it grow organically. If you're convincing users "they're doing it wrong", they're just going to give the finger and probably leave. What's great about decentralization is we, as individuals, can choose how we use it. If you want a big server? Join one. If you want a small one? Join one. It really is that simple. Try to ignore people who tell you otherwise.

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[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, I think there's a lot of truth in that. I don't want to force anyone to stay here ;) I believe that kbin can be a stepping stone to a wider fediverse, which is great. However, I'm trying to keep the entry barrier as low as possible so that everyone can find their place here. The rest will come with time. Currently, we're working with contributors to make setting up and maintaining your own instance less of a nightmare, and it should change for the better soon.

https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/p/485886/This-happened-quickly-Lemmy-is-now-the-second-biggest-platform-next#post-comment-855115

ps. The queue of deleted accounts will be processed with the next update.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Thanks for all the hard work!

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've found it really beneficial joining an instance that's hosted locally to my country and/or city. Not only can you take advantage of the "Local" filter to literally see local posts in your area, but you also get an amazing ping so everything feels super responsive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

How did you find one that local to you? I'd love to do this as well! I've been kicking around just hosting one myself but I leave for vacation in 5 days so that's probably not a project for right now, lol.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Hey! Hey hey hey! No! I JUST moved away from Reddit! Now you're telling me I need to move into an even smaller place than this? Can we space out our social media crises a bit? I'm still winded from the Dutch douchebag buying Twitter.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

OP is a panicky buffoon who essentially wants the Internet to become a series of unhinged mountain hermits, because having more than one person per instance is OVERCENTRALIZATION THE CORPOS ARE COMING AAAAAAAAAAA

I wouldn't worry about it. I'd worry that there's no good way of exporting a federated "kbin account" to another instance if one becomes compromised in some way, or goes down permanently, which both hypothetically solves OP's insane paranoid rambling and more practical concerns.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You can safely ignore him and people like him. Do what works for you. Don't get bogged down in theory. It's no substitute for experience.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

But you're not "actually" moving to a smaller place. You can still see everything. You're still in the fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (10 children)

I have my own pixelfed server running

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

No, that's completely wrong. You're scaremongering. There was no such offer.

There is no confirmation of any financial contracts, or moderation arrangements and Eugen Rochko/Gargron has stated he doesn't know anything about any secret deals.[1]

From @[email protected]:

The nda wasn’t because of some absurd agreement but just the fact they’re launching a new project and we’re getting access to engineers and product team to discuss what the relationship could be. And they went well.[2]

There was a call to talk about engineering, moderation, safety, support for user privacy controls and how federation would look like. (and more)

There was no deal signing or any bullshit like that - that’s all fake news.

The nda is because none of this stuff is released and it’s up to meta to share details or admins to join the ongoing calls to learn in advance of launch what is going on.[3]

We don’t know, what we don’t know. So i initiated contact and meta obliged. Because the product isn’t released yet, there is an NDA.[4]

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. I have an account on kbin that is my primary account, but I also have one on lemmy and mastodon.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Right, and kbin is more than kbin.social. You could move to kbin.run or kbin.place among many others to spread the numbers out.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some other instances can be found here. It doesn’t list these three instances: kbin.cafe, feddit.online, and fedia.io.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

When I joined kbin.social it was the only kbin instance. Or at least the only one that was actually online at the time.

When there's a way to migrate accounts I'll definitely look into moving somewhere else, though, for the sake of load balancing if nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

People need to just chill out and touch some grass.

Like how long have you been on the internet? If the whole federation thing can be bought out by a company and ruined, then it's a failed experiment and we move on to the next thing. It's a tale as old as the internet itself, cool grassroots thing gets popular, sells out, destroys itself, repeat every few years.

For now, kbin and lemmy are working, but don't think this will last forever or won't get tested. Either the concept is good and it will stand the test of corporate takeover, or it won't and we try something else.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

The funny part about this story is that, while everyone has their "price", most of the people building these instances did so because they want nothing to do with these corporations.

Now admittedly things can change, but these corporations also don't seem to understand how these insurances work. Buying one instances, while shitty and something that hopefully won't happen, isn't the same as buying a company. You can't "own" the Fediverse because of the nature of what it is.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

For those who are interested in a different Kbin instance I joined Kbin.cafe the other day. It’s very small right now and has some good hardware running it I believe. Not many magazines/communities but of course we can browse others from any instance.

It runs smoothly too since low traffic. I love the fediverse!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Honestly this is a pretty small community. The whole platform needs to mature a little before we start “spreading out”

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I may move on to a private or semi privately run instance in the future but I'm definitely a fan of kbin over Lemmy and the current state of self hosting kbin is a mess. When things have gotten better on that front I will look at moving on and expanding the fediverse.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I won't downvote bc I think this is a genuine question OP is presenting, but I disagree with people splitting quite yet.

People will naturally find their pockets as the Fediverse grows. The benefit is that it's already decentralized, so you have that option.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The cynic in me screams that this post is to stir up FUD because someone at BigSocial is shitting their pants right now... :D (/s?)

But yes, you have some valid points but stretching too thin is not going to get us anywhere and will just result in people leaving due to lack of content. Remember that divide and conquer is a valid tactic too, so having many small instances isn't going to magically shield us from Bad Things (TM).

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Centralization is a result of social behavior. People naturally gravitate towards the place where others are.

Like, the internet wasn't centralized by corporations. It was centralized by the users. And it will always happen. It's a very predictable pattern of human behavior.

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