Hi Ernest, any thoughts on whether kbin will be federating with threads or not?
Hey, a month ago I would have simply pressde the button and not thought too much about it. Now the situation looks completely different. I have bookmarked all the discussions I came across, and next week I will read every single post to have a complete picture. I owe you that.
However, we need to think about additional privacy features, as priorities have drastically changed in recent weeks, and I will have to carefully consider that. Now that I have dealt with infrastructure issues, I will focus on the most important matters.
While I absolutely appreciate the commitment, you do not owe us that. You don’t owe us anything really.
If you want to have a discussion, I suggest maybe you could make a thread where it’s discussed officially, rather than you having to go through everything that has been written all over the place. We owe that to you. :)
Thoughtful consideration is the most I could have hoped for. Thanks Ernest, keep being awesome :)
My worry that many articles are going to have a biased take on the situation, or be coming from Mastodon etc. where things don’t map up 1:1.
My perspective:
I moderate a medium-sized magazine here on Kbin (@Disneyland, about 264 subscribers here and a couple dozen elsewhere on the fediverse). You can’t moderate a magazine from another instance, nor can you redirect a magazine somewhere else. This means I effectively must use Kbin.social, especially since I also mod the /r/Disneyland subreddit and have been redirecting people to our magazine for a month now.
I personally would like to see Threads here, if only because @disneyparks would be a nice fit to have automatically included in our microblog tab. I can’t go to another instance that supports Threads because again - moderators on Kbin can’t be from different instances. And besides - me being on another instance doesn’t stop the fact that I couldn’t have content from Threads automatically added here. So my options are basically “deal with it” or “abandon the community here”.
It really sucks that there is a way that could make my magazine better by including actual official Disney sources in our Disney-themed magazine, but some people are afraid of EEE they are trying to keep that from everyone. I’d rather federate with Threads and allow users to individually block the domain if they desire.
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If EEE is the worry, fight them at the “extend” step, not the “embrace” one.
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If mountains of spam is the worry - people have to manually follow people from other instances for those posts to federate to Kbin, so not every single account will magically pop up here on Kbin. It’ll be accounts that people on Kbin have followed; a small chunk.
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Vice-versa, Threads is full of casual users who don’t know much about the fediverse. Any Threads users interacting on Kbin are those who understand the fediverse and go out of their way to subscribe to Kbin magazines from Threads. We know from past history that these are going to be a minority; even within the fediverse, Mastodon is huge (and tech-savvy) but we see very few Mastodon folks posting to Kbin threads.
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If “Facebook is sucking up all my data” is the worry, they could do that anyway. The fediverse is open and public; they can easily set up a “shadow instance” that federates everywhere and slurps everything. They don’t need Threads for that.
If people just don’t want to see Threads users at all, making the block button defederate on the account level would be wonderful. If people choose to block Threads, then Threads users couldn’t see them and vice versa. People who see Threads as a potential useful resource (myself, for the magazine I mod) would still be able to have that content in the community here on Kbin. Everyone’s happy.
my magazine
and thus the entire issue with reddit. The glory of the fediverse is that there can be competition. You do not work for Disney, you do not own Disney. The community is not yours because you got to it first. If you want to own a Disney forum, start your own website.
We should not be allowing FB/IG to gain their foothold on the work of other people, yet again, so they can eventually take control once it’s too late to stop them. Especially not because it would help your own ego and foothold on a community you do not own.
I am using “my magazine” as a colloquial term for “the magazine I moderate”, obviously not as the term for “the magazine I own”. I trust you know that and are arguing in bad faith.
You can go start your own magazine on another instance if you wish. The presence of one does not preclude competition. Heck, you can even start another one here; we had similar subreddits on Reddit. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld folks were an example of a bad mod team on a power trip, which caused splinter subreddits to pop up like /r/DisneyWorld. The /r/WaltDisneyWorld mod team came here to Kbin and sure enough Kbin has already splintered too - there’s @WaltDisneyWorld (original WaltDisneyWorld mods), @DisneyWorld, and @wdw.
If you think you can do a good job running a Disneyland magazine, I’m not going to stop you from making DisneylandResort or DisneyParks or going to Lemmy and making something there. Competition is good and healthy.
But… I don’t think you truly appreciate how much work moderating a community can be. I literally was a mod for 1 sizeable subreddit (I was a mod on 2-3 other subs, technically, but they had subscriber counts in the dozens and rarely saw activity).
I’d love to show you what moderating a subreddit with 500k subscribers really looks like. It gets bad. Gore, scat, porn, hate, bigotry, and trolling - you deal with it all. Death threats in modmail to boot. And we were just 500k subs! The former default subs have millions and they are far worse, I’ve been told.
We ran a community for folks to discuss a single topic: the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim, CA. Not Hong Kong Disneyland, not Disneyland Paris, not Walt Disney World. Those have their own subreddits, with their own communities and their own mod team (plus /r/disneyparks). I wasn’t associated with any of them outside of small formalities; I only got to know them during the blackout when we did look into coordinating our own site. (More on that later.)
If each mod team didn’t do their job, each sub would be overrun with posts that don’t fit the sub. We’re constantly removing posts about WDW or Disneyland Paris or Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. We’re constantly removing posts from people talking about general Disney stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with the park. It’s a lot of work to curate a feed, and when the effort is made in good faith we redirect people to more appropriate places to talk about the things they’re passionate about.
People joined that subreddit to talk about the Disneyland in Anaheim; many didn’t care about Shanghai Disneyland or whatever. If we missed something and a person posts about the “wrong” park (which happens sometimes, even with AutoMod), the community generally comes in and downvotes the post (and sometimes insults the user). From their perspective, they’re seeing some content they don’t care about/want in their feed. And technically, per Reddiquette, that’s what the downvote button is “supposed” to be for - sorting out things that don’t belong.
It’s like posting a TikTok link to /r/YoutubeHaiku or a picture to /r/videos - each community has a set of rules and a social contract to enforce them. That’s what makes a good community with relevant content that makes you come back. Without a good mod team, a subreddit gets overrun with posts that don’t fit the sub - you can see some of that here on Lemmy/Kbin already. This is both because mod tools are lacking (no AutoMod) and because people are changing instances as they see fit. For example, @Starwars is abandoned, I think - the only(!!!) mod hasn’t been active in weeks. I’ve seen things here like videos in the politics communities and other things that wouldn’t fly with larger mod teams.
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You say we should move off-site. There’s already a large general-purpose forum for Disney: MiceChat. It’s a classic non-federated forum, from a bygone age of the internet. People who aren’t attached to a Reddit-like interface typically are on MiceChat, or one of the thousands of Disney Facebook groups. They’re the largest Disney community on the internet.
We discussed running our own Disney-themed Kbin instance (like /r/StarTrek and /r/Android both did), that would be a federated competitor to MiceChat. The idea still appeals to me. But the fact of the matter is that we didn’t have the time nor money to be admins. I have a full-time job where I can’t be spending time working as an admin all day (and - fun fact - I actually did work for Disney, formerly), and I don’t have the legal know-how to host a website.
Making a community on someone else’s instance doesn’t have those same issues. kbin.social has a sane admin team and is permissive with federation, giving the magazine a large reach (but keeping out hate speech and trolls). There are people on here who want to participate in their hobbies - like going to Disneyland, which for many is a hobby - or who want to use the community as a resource (and the Disneyland subreddit was a resource, too).
Because at the end of the day - it is a lot of work, but seeing a thriving community is rewarding. You grow attached to it. It’s why people play simulation games; you help shepard people along, make people happy, and watch the line go up. It’s not “ego” any more than playing a city builder game is “ego”. I certainly never threw my weight around on Reddit; our subreddit was positively tiny compared to others. The only time I used my green badge on Reddit was to give people warnings or make community-wide announcements. The only time I mentioned I was a mod elsewhere was when I needed a “fun fact” to introduce myself with at work/school or when it’s directly relevant (like letting people on the fediverse know that the magazine here is run by the same team that ran it on Reddit).
The Disneyland subreddit was a good community, IMO. The whole mod team did a lot of work to keep it good, and I was proud to help out. Connecting people with the resources they need and letting them show off the things that made them excited, while keeping the spambots and trolls at bay and redirecting lost folks to the right spot. It’s something you need to experience to understand.
One thing that was missing was Disney’s direct involvement. Disney never contacted us. Even when I worked for them - corporate knew I was a mod there but left us alone since it was considered my personal business (my only restriction was that I couldn’t say I was speaking officially on behalf of the company). As long as the sidebar said that we were fan-run, Disney never said a peep. Because Disney didn’t have any official presence on Reddit, folks would frequently repost news shared by Disney to the subreddit directly.
Threads gives us a unique opportunity to be able to connect folks to official Disney social media right here on Kbin. They’d be able to interact 2-way without needing to make a Threads account themselves (and without Disney needing to come here officially). It’s really the best thing that could happen for that type of community, and it would be a shame to lose out on it.
Question, is MiceChat connected to Disney corporate in any way, or are they a fully independent website, of/by/for disney fans?
I hope you see where I’m going with this question and the fact they are the largest community, still around from the “bygone era of the internet”. If you allow FB/IG/Threads to gain their foothold, you will not be around 20 years later. If MiceChat had integrated into FB/Reddit/etc, they would not be around anymore, especially not in the independent way they are.
btw, I wasn’t arguing in bad faith. the idea of the power hungry power mod of reddit is a widely known concept. Immediately trying to disregard my argument on that continues to show your fragility in your control of your community.
Idk if you’re familiar with GenCon, a board game convention in Indy, but I’ve run the unofficial Discord server since 2017. While not even close to as big as the official server, made in 2020, the users have stayed on our little server and we still gain new users each summer. The thing is, I don’t run the server like some big corpo project, but literally as a diy space where people can feel comfortable asking questions and getting to know each other, myself included. I don’t ban folks without community input, because while I have the sole power to do so, it’s not my community, it’s ours. GenCon LLC has never reached out to me, because I’m not trying to do what they do, and I don’t care about them because of the same reason. I’d wouldn’t mind having a larger number of users, but at the same time, I’d rather keep the community feel homegrown, and not artificially inseminated (with money).
To bring it all around again, kbin and the fediverse works because it is homegrown and community based. Waaaaaaaay back when, Reddit was the same, but being centralized, that will cause problems, thus the problems of the past months. kbin and the fediverse at large (not so much just the AP protocol) will continue to succeed without corpo takeover and influence. It can breed discussion and community without trying to make money off of it. Give them an inch, and they will redefine what an inch is so that it includes all inches in perpetuity.
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I’m not bothered by it being federated with kbin, and if I don’t like it, I should be able to ban the whole domain on my account on kbin. So I hope he doesn’t give in to peer pressure to preemptively defederate with them before I can see what they are about.
Having the freedom to make my own choices like a fucking adult is why I’m here instead of Lemmy.
I understand your point but you also have the freedom to just go join threads yourself without the rest of us having to deal with the nonsense that it will bring here to kbin. I honestly don’t see how this could end up a net positive for the verse.
Additionally, @BaroqueInMind has the option of creating their own kbin instance and federating with Threads that way.
I so often see this presented as “choosing what others see” when it’s not just about that. It’s about choosing how many/which kind of people are coming onto this platform and interacting with us.
The article Ernest posted mentions a “firehose”. Politics of EEE aside, It’s totally okay if instance admins don’t want to deal with the strain that puts on servers, moderation etc.
This is way too simple of a view. It’s about what happens to kbin. Threads will be huge and generate a lot more content. Eventually there will be people joining Kbin just to view Threads content. Kbin’s own content will never match the output of threads. That gives meta a lot of leverage against kbin.
Threads can pull an API pricing trick just like reddit, unless Kbin bends to their will. And since kbin users are just here to view threads content, they basically have to. Who knows, maybe threads will develop a new advertising platform plugin and charge API access for any platform that doesn’t agree to it. To make the money back from “lost ad revenue”.
Of course if you only care about what you see and not the fediverse platform itself, then it doesn’t matter to you.
How can you block all Thread users replying within discussions? The discussions will become unreadable, I think.
@BaroqueInMind
What’s the deal with Lemmy, why do you say: “why I’m here instead of Lemmy”?
@ernest @DoucheAsaurusIt is an open secret that the Lemmy developers are tankies and support fascism. By using their software, you essentially endorse those views by proxy.
kbin is developed by one Polish guy doing his best.
Quite frankly I’m a little anxious about Threads. We all know Meta’s playbook, and 30 million subscribers is a huge influx. At this time I suppose it’s a wait and see. However I do agree that decentralization is strength, and that kbin does have the potential to interface with Threads more because of the microblogging feature.
I’m personally at an “arms length” stance on the whole thing right now. I don’t trust Zuckerberg & Meta.
@Madison_rogue @ernest I don’t think those 30 million subscribers are a huge influx. I think those were already Instagram users with a default profile on Threads. Like when you had a Gmail account in 2010, and at some point afterwards (2014, more or less) you instantly had a Youtube account.
Not even Twitter had 30 million users during its first 2 days, that’s insane.
Sure, the majority of the 30 million subscribers is through Instagram. What I’m referring to is an influx of 30 million users should Threads choose to federate, and whether or not it overwhelms the smaller instances throughout Fedi.
I suppose it might not, however I’m just extremely reluctant about Meta’s involvement.
Copy, Acquire, Kill
Hopefully I find more time to contribute to the kbin source code. I think it has promise, I like how it works so far, but like any big project there’s plenty of room to improve.
There’s a supportive community of server owners in the Mastodon Discord (access to the Discord is a perk for Patreon donors)
I don’t have a comment on this, I just thought the irony was funny.
Nice!
A short but very nice article, and some good discussion about meta that isn’t just “press the ban button”. It’s important to note that threads and Lemmy probably won’t have much to do with each other since it’s a Twitter clone.
One big thing is what I always say: decentralization is strength. Spread out over different instances and start your own instances or what happened on Twitter will just happen again.
I think kbin and Threads will probably have more interaction than Threads and Lemmy because of the native microblogging support in kbin. That puts them more or less on the same field.
I still don’t think it will be very prevalent though. I’ve been using Kbin for quite a while now, and I have not once really used the Microblogging feature, just because it’s tucked away in a separate tab, and it’s not really what I use Kbin for
I quite enjoy how microblogging is integrated in kbin.social at the moment. It brings life to smaller communities, and connects us with the Fediverse at large.
For example, /m/gardening only has 12 threads at the moment, but since the microblog follows
#gardeningthere are hundreds of posts in the microblog; several of which are from the last hour.It’s not perfect yet (if you open gardening@kbin.social from another kbin instance you won’t see microblogs using the hashtag) and it’s not for everyone, but to me at least it’s a great bridge between kbin and the microblogging universe. :)
I have no words.
Hats off!
@ernest It says “Provide only if you want content from the fediverse to be included in this magazine based on tags”. But if a user post a thread in the magazine, will it then also use the tags to basically “cross-post”? Or is it just getting/retrieving (instead of also pushing).
Personally, I’m not really big on threads.
kbin felt more like an anonymous social media tool, like reddit. I can act the way I do because I know it’s anonymous and not attached to my real name or face.
If we’re starting to federate with a platform that mainly acts like Instagram (where many people try to represent themselves to their friends & family), then kbin will lose that aspect in my opinion. I prefer online personas rather than “real” people on the platform.Also, I don’t trust facebook/meta.
Be kind. This is a scary and exciting time for the Fediverse. It’s been almost a year with very little rest for the developers, system administrators, and community managers who keep it running. The people building this place are tired, so be nice. They’re carrying a lot.
I can’t agree more! Let’s have some respect for each other and be kind. Otherwise, you are better off with Twitter or Reddit ;)
