Reddit bans subreddit detailing how to move to competitor Kbin
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
They are heavily overloaded, the dev already upgraded the server as high as possible (16€ to 67€ per month), but that only helped at the beginning, now that some are saying to join kbin instead of lemmy (because of lemmy devs apparently being tankies), the server is essentially close to dying. This is also an issue with some lemmy instances, earlier today I was unable to reach feddit.de.
No judgement on you or the dev using "as high as possible" here, I realise it could be a simplification in this instance.
However, I have seen a fairly strong pattern of fediverse servers being run by people with relatively few skills in system administration/web apps/operations/etc. It seems like there are a lot more people who are engaging with it on the same level as people renting multiplayer game servers, or installing Wordpress on a consumer-focused VPS provider.
And I think this is kinda great. I want the fediverse to be accessible at that level or even below! It does lead to issues like this though.
67 euros per month is a small server, and a single server is not the best way to run a service that other people are using. It's different when it's your personal site, but a social network?
I think the fediverse needs to figure out whether it wants to focus on making smaller servers easier or bigger servers easier. It's fine if most people are on million-user servers with teams running them, and it's fine if most people are on family servers that can go down without much negative impact, but this middle ground where people are on ~10k sized servers that individuals without the necessary skills are struggling to keep running on a volunteer basis seems to be a bad middle-ground.
What's the limit here? HN is a great example of what's possible, but can a single beefy server scale to handle the traffic of a Reddit?
But if you like the idea of ignoring best practices, there are EC2 instances with 192 vCPUs that go for several thousands an hour. And taking as example Golang benchmarks https://github.com/smallnest/go-web-framework-benchmark where it's not uncommon to be able to serve 6 digits of 30ms requests per second with just 4 cores. Then the conclusion is, the limit is the sky, if you are stubborn enough.
For those interested: right now the largest instance I see is a u-12tb1.112xlarge (448 vCPUs, 12 TB RAM, 100 gb networking) which is ~$109/hr on demand or $40-80/hr with a 1-3 year commitment. This works out to ~$29k, ~$58k, or ~$79k per month.
If you don't need 12 TB of memory, there's a 6 TB instance for roughly half the cost.
Not to forget the data transfer costs though https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ And also the potential minefield of API GW and NAT costs.
edit: physical server that is
Combine that with the ability to actually throttle a physical server (ie you only pay what you actually use, not per hour) ... I guess I would propose the following scaling strategy:
1. get cheap physical server 2. get your software up and running 3. get a second physical server that is roughly twice as capable 4. use that second server as a "beta" and development server ... do a lot of profiling there 5. once your real world usage spike on the first server routinely reach 80-90%, switch production over to the bigger server 6. get a new development server that is twice as beefy as the former development server
... do you know me? ;-)
My eventual plan is to host my own 1-user instance and rely purely on federation.
I do wonder what the funding model is supposed to be for the large servers. Tiny servers can be funded out of pocket, but large platforms can't, and the resource requirements of fediverse apps seem to be much higher per-user than those of a centralized platform.
(I'm not sure if the resource requirements are inevitable or just a sign of an immature app.)
Currently this leaves a lot to be desired. It sorta works for status-based updates with Mastodon and a few others, but it's not a great situation as Mastodon isn't the most standards compliant player, and the standards themselves are pretty loosely defined.
I am glad I have no data limit though - I apparently went through >3 terabytes (split 30/60 between up and down) last month alone, mostly due to Plex and Wireguard.
I wonder if this has the same issue.
> Lemmy uses roughly 150 MB of RAM in the default Docker installation. CPU usage is negligible.
[0]: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/administration/administration...
It was fun but that was insane.
Once you get to 3 postgres nodes, 2 LB's for the DB traffic, then Front ends with Load balancing, you are looking at 9 servers-ish minimum....
That monthly cost even in Linode is a bit more than I would be willing to front with no compensation.
That said, i may just setup an instance of kbin I can control and rely heavily on the federated portion to interface with the various communities. If my understanding is correct, I can access other lemmy instances even with kbin, such as beehaw etc.
The negatives all just became positives, or at least drivers towards the positives.
For anyone else wondering wth a “tankie” is.
It does tend to be true that all 20th century Marxists were and remain tankies, I was raised by such and have family friends who think Putin is awesome and it's fuckin embarrassing.
But I am a Marxist in the economic sense and also believe the USA is still a pretty good bet.
There's plenty of USA-hating anarchists who aren't being called tankies. The authoritarianism is a pretty important part of the term.
Though this isn't entirely incompatible with what you said, the major non-US geopolitical powers have historically been nominally socialist, and also happen to be authoritarian; so people who support non-US-aligned powers will have been supporters of the USSR or China, and I'm comfortable calling those people tankies.
So I'd define it more as primarily someone willfully ignorant of genocide and other appalling human rights abuses with a mild preference for an economic system.
If you step into the tankie mindset for a moment, you will zoom in on the book banning and anti-trans cudgel that's currently getting swung around, and they will contextualize that with our 400 year history on this continent, and pretty rightly conclude that there is no moral champion at the nation state level, and if there is, it cannot possibly be America, but if they're here, America is the one they are able to fight.
Likewise, if you step into a naive geopolitical viewpoint and say to yourself that Russia is a country that lost the cold war and which the West did not really help to become more democratic in the aftermath - you sent your capitalists and that equated to sending freedom, in the minds of Reaganized America.
But Capital does not concern itself with anyone's freedom but it's own, and Capital does business with anyone willing to do business with it, including its morally-liberated, and now ideologically-liberated, former rivals, who were never fucking communists in the first place; they were the new autocrats, same as the old autocrats, and likewise, Yeltsin was just a drunky thrown up there to give speeches while they reestablished control under the new capitalist branding.
And for thirty years, mostly anyone who question it has been shouted down. "These are our trading partners and they're totally super into freedom, guys! China wants to be like us!"
And here we are. But anyways, rant aside, to the tankie and to the book-banning Christian Fascist alike, the enemy has lost all moral status, they are outlaw, and therefore any measure used against them is just, no matter how inherently unjust it might be in and of itself. As long as it's used against them.
This is how "good" people like you and me end up joining the organizations that end up living in infamy, whether it's my sainted grandmother who went to her grave believing Stalin was fine or whoever ends up as the evil poster boy for the current attempt at Christian Fascism that Barry Goldwater was already warning yall about.
If he had leaned into it like Trump did, he would've brought this all on much sooner, and we would be dealing with some other calamity here in 2023, but Goldwater called it, these people believe in apocalypse as a good thing, so all of us who are right-thinking, whatever economics we may favor, are gonna have to get on the same page about this one.
It's extremely telling to me that the mainstream right-wing view of the Russia/Ukraine conflict is one which supports Russia -- in perfect alignment with the tankies.
Of course, we are all still carrying around child slavery in our pockets, most of us. It's got a shiny touchscreen and it helps us find our way around, through the power of child slavery.
The above paragraph is me being a Marxist.
So you're right but I think people know what's meant.
So did communist states have capitalist governments then? Is this boiling down to "real communism has never been tried" again?
Authoritarianism does not know a political stripe. Before 1917, the government of Russia was a self-identified autocracy with a god-given right to make Russians live how Russians have mostly always lived.
The worker's movement that took that down instituted a thing they called communism, but which was really just the old system with different uniforms and modernist art. Not that efforts were not made, and not that the old guard in the rest of Europe didn't take steps, but it was mostly that the revolutionaries didn't really know how to operate a ship of state, so they fell back on old habits and kept the branding.
It ended up as a collectivist nightmare, and it still had a privileged class at the top, but there was no ideological conviction that capital was a positive force which could do no wrong, so no, they did not have a capitalist government, and pejoritavely calling it communist is fair IMO, I think communism is a thing that could be done but which won't, in a just way, in the lifetime of anyone alive now. It can be done badly and people keep trying.
I'm a 30s-style socialist, myself. I think the New Deal was doing well and Americans could have had a nice country all this time, but I dunno, everyone wants to roll those dice and be one of the upper class instead of demanding justice now.
A curious irony is that the 45th POTUS once characterized Putin's decision to invade as "genius".
Actually I take the above as further evidence that the usual projection of political thought onto a single left-right axis remains hopelessly reductive.
So now for basically the rest of my life I won't be a pure Redditor and I'll always have an OSS/federated alternative to it vaguely on my radar, it's a sea change.
I mean Reddit for me psychologically has gone from an OK platform to the bad guy very quickly here and in mere days I've gone from not even knowing alternatives existed to sniffing around the edges of one. Seems like Reddit is waving around a huge footgun right now.
Edit! : I can't help but compare Twitter and Reddit to insanely successful older companies like Apple and Microsoft. Both of those companies became very successful by building the biggest moat they could, muscling out their alternatives, acquiring or commoditizing their compliments etc. Google too. Yet with Twitter and Reddit here we have two social media companies who have just said "Hey let's do very public stuff that promotes direct alternatives to our core offering." Idk what to say other than... Dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb
Big Apple fan here, but I’m under no delusion that Apple will always make great products or treat their customers well. The moment they struggle to maintain growth, they will resort to the same user-hostile tactics that have enshittified the rest of the internet. That will probably happen under a different CEO, but I think it’s unavoidable in the long term.
Any service that supercedes whatever next, will eventually be a protocol, and future generations will consider all the iterations in-between to be, dumb.
Still, that's irrelevant because mobility is one of the main purposes of the fediverse. That is, move to Lemmy or something else like kbin, yet, you're connected and may move again later on. Transferring of one's own content is still an open issue, though.
Besides, while tildes incorporates a lot of the lessons mods learned already after the first half a dozen years of Reddit, it is not meant to scale. It's a platform for small/medium instances, not very large ones.
It's a pity, though, there is so little support for decentralization/federation just because its design is a bigger challenge. Another reason is, however, the absence of a constitutional protection of one's privacy outside one's own property. Because of that the consumers of the dominating nation in that market don't really grasp nor care about that aspect.
everything on Reddit gets archived near instantly. I don’t think expecting deletion to work on public forums online is reasonable.
For federated APIs though i tend not to think Privacy exists. "Delete me" is nice, but when it's already broadcasted to dozens of other instances it feels a bit moot. Still, worth doing right if you're going to do it at all - not sure why an instance owner would want to host everything indefinitely anyway. Storage concerns and all.
This whole conversation is making me want to take the plunge and check out ActivityPub. "It can't be that hard" lol, right?
Queue the narrator: "It was that hard".
Worse yet if this publication is in a slightly tweaked format that your software doesn't recognize.
this is talking about the developer of an AGPL 3.0 licensed software. WHAT HAS THE DEVELOPERS politics or for that matter, anything got to do with selfhosting lemmy ? isn't this problem with google or facebook yet no one seems to care about that but oh my god, its lemmy.
also, what operator is this talking about in particular because lemmy is a FEDERATED SOFTWARE. there are hundreds of active servers
I would really appreciate it.
I realized the beauty here is that i don't need to replace Lemmy, Kbin, etc. I can lean into them, and even if i don't gain traction (i probably don't want it anyway. Managing large projects are unfun), i still get to be part of the larger ecosystem.
Ie, why write a Client to Lemmy as you might with Reddit, when you can instead write a participating Server which also serves as a Client. Federation is neat like that.
Though i'm still unclear on a lot of steps with federation, so we'll see how this goes.
This whole situation looks all too familiar now. First, it was Freenode, then Twitter, then now Reddit.
Oh, never mind. I was looking for a Reddit competitor where I see interesting discussion, decide to interact, create a username and interact.
This isn’t that.
Ugh. I’ll take a look for the moment but the “secure” on that page (Cloudflare-provided I think?) has filled my weekly allotment of bullshit. Never going to be a regular as long as that’s on, sorry.
(There’s a special angry place in my heart for people who continue to devalue the word “secure” in the eyes of end users.)
I also didn't see any ads, so... I feel I'm missing something important here.
Edit: and there was no Patreon or any popular platform to quickly save the site.
While it's supposed to reduce captchas and things like that, I found it to be causing some checks to fail. I disabled it and stopped having issues with CF.
Fair.
> Good sign the devs don't bother to test on anything but Chrome.
So what do you call this then?
No fact was claimed other than what something looks like or is cosistent with, and I agree with that much. I'd say it's not even controvercial, no question about it.
But as a first response, I think it'll chalk it up to "ops, we missed that" rather than "we like links that don't work like links", especially if the issue hasn't been reported yet.
> just like on HN and old reddit etc.
Those use plain links
It works on Firefox, Safari and Brave/Chromium the exact same way for me, middle click always work. Not sure what you mean.
it really demonstrates the absolute hubris of some executives.
Honestly the more I read about Nostr the more it makes sense to me. It would be nice if there were a more forum-like Nostr.
I really want the Fediverse to succeed as an alternative to content silos like Reddit, but at this rate I think that we're headed towards a world–like every other time Reddit fucked up–where a small number of people splinter onto different websites while "normies" stay on Reddit and continue to look at the funny memes be they posted by bots on badly moderated subs or not.
Reddit really has become trash. I’ve deleted my accounts and apps. Good riddance.
If not, here's what I got (Firefox on Android):
- Mobile = "Unreviewed content" banner, must open in app, no option to view
- Mobile, pretending to be desktop browser = loads fine
- https://old.reddit.com/r/kbin/ = loads fine
Even more, you can visit any NSFW subreddit in old site (eg nswf411), click 'view 18+' and now see any age gated subreddits. Though if you access it through from any GDPR country then you need to accept GDPR consent first on new site and only then move to old.
My only options are "View in App" or "Take me Home".
Pity everyone went chasing popularity, shouting loudly at each other and influencer moneys.
If you wanted to find a forum on a specific topic on the broader web, you had to sift through various sites and look for individual hints as to their vitality, and then register and introduce yourself on each one. With Reddit it was a single search away, and the more or less consistent UI made it easy to tell "this is the active one."
But importantly, it retained a lot of the value a forum does: a comment pool that persists, that shows up in Google later.
Discord is a TERRIBLE substitute. It's not meaningfully threaded. It's not externally searchable. It doesn't even have the "it's federated, so we're not beholden to one specific owner who will inevitably tank it." catch.
I also hate Discord, topic threads are the best way to categorise conversations. Discourse started the way down that path, never liked it either.
It can be if you're part of the ever-growing number of normal humans whose views fall outside of the tightening Overton Window that American elites want to impose on all social media platforms.
Reddit has its own particular, identifiable cultural aspects (some positive, some negative) though it's also large enough that it's managed to escape being pinned down to only its more negative aspects. Twitter maybe not as much among some crowds though it's still a very broad userbase.
Admin, mods and finally users set the tone of a site and lead by example. On HN for example the more one has read over time what the tone of the place is and the type of content and moderation, the likelier it will continue, almost Ship of Theseus style with regard to users.
While if this place for example were more accepting of crass comments and submissions then the culture would adapt and invite more of the same. Some might like or prefer that but it also has its downsides, particularly for users who like aspects of a site/sub-community but find other aspects more difficult to be an apologist toward.
Idk where I'm going with this apart from I wouldn't want to be in someone's shoes trying to broadly handle maintaining a decent culture that isn't weighed down/characterized only by its more negative aspects :p
I'm hopeful that Reddit alternatives which get popular now are getting an influx of more moderate users, who are fed up with Reddit's management's terrible treatment of developers (and overall bad direction lately with the redesign and pushing website users to use the app and generally chasing profit over all else). Sort of like how Mastodon got an influx of mostly decent users who are fed up with how Twitter is being run by an incompetent chud.
EDIT: But to be clear, what these Reddit alternatives are trying to do is still extremely difficult. They have a better starting-point than Voat, so I give them better chances to not end up as cesspools, but nothing is certain.
Voat was almost destined to become a nasty place because of the audience that reddit was disenfranchising at the time. If losing /r/fatpeoplehate was enough to make you seek an alternative platform, then the community you wanted to create smelled a lot like /r/fatpeoplehate. And regardless of whether you think that's a community that should or shouldn't exist, I don't believe it's a solid foundation to attract a wide userbase to.
The communities currently being disenfranchised are power-users, community moderators, developers .. if (Voat equivalent) were to happen today, it might find itself with a much more productive community to build from.
A good example was that I actually remember discussinf about the increasing rate of transexuality amongst children on there (what could be the causes, the consequences, etc.), all the way back in circa 2015. 8 years before it became such a hot-button topic...
Voat never went away though - Poal was created and the entire, quite angry and detestable, userbase migrated.
There will always be a spectrum of humans, and every spectrum has two ends, and there will probably always be the "80% middle" forums, and the "10% ends" forums...
It's at https://www.goobix.com/news/ , I would be happy to get feedback or build capabilities people feel as missing.
Backend is P2P, but the UI fits your "knock off" question.
It seems even a slight amount of required effort is too much for most people to go to another platform. Which should probably tell you something about the quality of online content these days.
The migration process is a lot of work and most communities just don't bother.
Social wise, I imagine there are controls to steer how the site allows new content. Maybe start with just the subs that naturally tend toward the most use and least controversy. The pet subs, car maintenance, science, benign hobbies, news (tough but worth the clicks), etc.
Let me know how it works for you if you try it! Still fixing bugs.
I'm not aware of reddit's admins having a large hand in curating site content, though I also haven't been heavily into reddit for a while.
The experience I get as a user of the app? Is it that hard to believe that people at the very top can be out of touch with the average user of their product? I'd be surprised if any of those people have even seen the Reddit homepage once. We've seen plenty of companies go down because they made an incredibly out of touch change which caused mass migration to a better product(the example floating around is Digg). All this happening right as they prepare to go public is really all the indication one needs to deduce what's going on.
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core
It's ActivityPub though, so it can communicate with Lemmy and others.
Are Kbin and Lemmy currently interoperable?
They obviously have very different architectures and must have been a very impossible task.
This on the hand, makes me think that if someone wants it, it can look like anything, twitter or Facebook or Reddit (which it looks like currently)?
What’s the reason for it being more inter-operable with mastadon than lemmy?
Just to clarify, it’s fully inter-operable with lemmy. But while lemmy only has basic Mastodon support, kbin has full support. I’m guessing it’s just priorities.
- Your site says nothing. It doesn't say what kbin is, why I should bother, why it's useful.
- You have a link to docs. No thanks. Show me CONTENT. If I see content I like, I'll sign up.
- Why is fediverse better? (I know what it is, the average viewer won't)
- Mobile app "coming soon"? No, that should be directly the "Download Alpha Mobile App" Button. People know what alpha and beta are.
- Cute graphics = this is VC funded and going to tell me what I'm allowed to think. The fact I can't even see this walled garden the second I open the main page is a nonstarter for me as a user.
https://kbin.social (better https://archive.is/3Gpcu because they are quite HN-hugged ATM) is Kbin the main instance with content.
If you've ever run a service with open registration + user generated content, you know there is a lot of stuff to clean up. This seems to be a relatively small community, so there is also little to clean up.
Not sure what the ratio is though, which is more important than just counts of how many removals.
I'm ok with cleaning up blatant commercial spam and illegal content, but they seem to be removing comments from people who are just expressing their opinion. Not a good sign
True for every content platform. If the website just spews meta without showcasing the innards immediately (even just screenshots) it seems suspicious.
For kbin, they link 5 instances on top, but that doesn't connect the context.
kbin.social
Checking if the site connection is secure
This check is taking longer than expected. Check your Internet connection and refresh the page if the issue persists.
Upvoted.
Using Firefox iOS on iPhone.
It's likely to be ruled by people with a 'toxic positivity' mindset who insist on everyone having the same set of political and cultural opinions as their own, with very little dissent permitted, under the threat of being individually kicked out, or having one's server defederated, or both.
It’s just one political side does that more, so conflates the two
As determined by your local Ministry of Truth, of course. You could see why many people might be skeptical of their benevolence.
Let's face it. A lot of these platforms will absolutely ban you for saying true things in a problematic fashion, eg. FBI crime statistics. It's widely accepted and celebrated and it doesn't pass the laugh test to say that it's just about stopping misinformation or whatever. Because you're hurting The Cause and that can't be allowed.
But even though the data is truthful and I wish we could discuss it, it's hard to deny that the goal of the poster is usually to legitimize hate and after a few heated discussions the mods learn to recognize it as a red flag and they act early.
I know, it sounds like a slippery slope fallacy. But we've seen how platforms turn out when it's allowed. Eg voat or gab.
Because that is what you’re complaining about: the harassed voicing their concerns and having people make moderation choices based on that.