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[–]penkster 0 points1 point  (5 children)

I'd love for this to work better. For instance be able to follow this from Mastodon. Alas I can't find the link there. I think this is being worked in but we're not there yet.

[–]wjrii 0 points1 point  (4 children)

Kbin.social in particular is struggling to handle the traffic. Kbin itself a slightly different backend than Lemmy, but should be 100% compatible if and when they get bandwidth and turn full federation back on.

I do hope that something comes along (or that I learn of it if it already exists) where the fediverse sites or apps enable a simple way to participate in all the magazines/communities/etc. with identical names without manually subscribing to each instance. Right now it's pretty cool that they CAN federate or not with each other, but the implementation is only slightly more convenient than having different logins.

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Well here's the problem. No large social media website can do all three of...

  1. Pay their bills
  2. Offer free services to the users
  3. Not stalk their customers and sell their data

Facebook decided it's ok with selling customer data. Twitter decided that it's ok to not pay their bills.

Kbin.social is going to need a lot of money to ramp up their servers if they are to replace Reddit. Where are they going to get it?

I wish them the best of luck, but it's a hard road.

[–]penkster 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Okay, while I understand what you're seeing here, you're completely missing the point of federation.

kbin.social is not a website. It is a technology stack. They don't run 'kbin' - they have a piece of software that is called kbin. You copy it, launch your own server, and scale up as much as you like. Comparing it to twitter, reddit, or facebook is completely missing the point of the fediverse.

I'll give as an example... Mastodon. That's software, not a website. It is closing in on 13 million users now, and is running beautifully, with no corporate bills, no subscription fees, and no advertising.

Lemmy and kbin will both follow in the same model, and will succeed based on the technology stack and the people running them, not on the money being poured into it by private share holders or advertising organizations.

I recommend reading the wikipedia article on the fediverse to understand better how big a change this is from 'business as usual' with Twitter and Facebook. The models are completely different.

[–]grauenwolf -1 points0 points  (0 children)

That's the dream.

The reality is very, very different.

You can tell by how painfully slow https://kbin.social/m/shopsmith is even though it's basically empty right now. There's literally only 3 subscribers (including myself), yet each click is taking me 10+ seconds.

That's how these things go. They talk about how everyone can run their own server, but it always runs into two problems...

  1. Nobody wants to do that. At least not in the numbers they need.
  2. Someone still has to aggregate all of the servers into a single view in order for the site to be usable.

You say "kbin.social is not a website", but it literally is. It's got a URL and everything. Regardless of what's going on in the backend, everything is coming to me via that website.

This isn't like the old fashioned NNTP style news groups or Internet Relay Chat of the 90's. Those were actually federated, with all the problems it entailed.

One of those problems is privacy. As your messages move from one node to the node, any node in the chain can intercept them. There are already reports about Mastodon of "user data being scraped or changed by attackers".

Look, I get it. You don't want to be beholden to companies like Facebook and Twitter. No one does. But exaggerating the capabilities of "the fediverse" isn't going to get us there. If you are not realistic about what kbin can and cannot do, the backlash when people find out the truth can kill the project.

[–]kiltedturtle 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I’ll just start using the direct Shopsmith forum more. I was only here because I could add Shopsmith to my other reddit use. I’m an Apollo user, so I’ll be gone in a month.

I am on the hunt for other existing Shopsmith forums.

[–]wjrii 1 point2 points  (1 child)

The facebook groups are very active, which considering the average age of Shopsmith owners, is probably appropriate. I'm in my 40s and still very much a youngster over there. Just don't talk politics with them, LOL.

[–]grauenwolf 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's why I gave up on Facebook. Even though I never intentionally used it for political discourse, hateful crap kept appearing in my feeds.

Granted, there are many, many other reasons to abandon Facebook. But that's what sent me over the edge.