Thanks for the heads up. I definitely want to opt out. I hope this place has some staying power, but I don’t want an interconnectedness to flood the home feed with too much ragebait and garbage content anywhere near what reddit turned into.
Your home feed can default to “All,” which shows content from all communities across all federated instances (not just Kbin and Lemmy) or it can default to Subscribed, which shows content only from communities you’re subscribed to. Lemmy has a third option called “Local” which shows content from all local communities. Turning off federation for yourself in Kbin is similar to the local option in Lemmy, but allows you to still switch between All and Subscribed (ie, all local or subscribed local). Lemmy doesn’t currently offer a “local subscribed” view.
The hamburger menu next to your name allows you to toggle between Subscribed and All. In the dropdown menu when you hover over your name, under Settings, you can select your default view (Subscribed vs All).
My personal preference is to default to subscribed and see content from across the Fediverse that I choose to see. This way I’m not missing out on any communities or magazines on federated instances that interest me. I sometimes switch to All with the Commented sort to see what the current zeitgeist is (where are the biggest conversations happening). I don’t see much need to de-federate my view entirely since I can block communities/magazines, or entire domains, which means even under All I’m not bothered by content that I find annoying, offensive, etc.
In the dropdown menu when you hover over your name, under Settings, you can select your default view (Subscribed vs All).
Does that work for you? Mine is set to Subscribed but my home screen still defaults to All. From another thread, it sounds like at least one other person is having the same issue.
I had the same issue, I had to once set it back, save, then set it again to subscribed, save and then it worked.
Thanks, just tried that but no luck! Although I noticed it’s working okay on desktop - just not mobile.
For what it’s worth - on the microblogging (twitter-like) part of the fediverse, we’ve had pretty great results federating with lots of instances, but defederating from the ones that have problems with hate speech, spam, etc. It’s led to a much more positive vibe than Twitter etc because people aren’t so afraid of some random person misconstruing something they said and jumping down their throat about it, and there’s no algorithm pushing rage “engagement” to the top.
One of the problems we do have in microblogging land, is the main mastodon developer has tried to direct new users to his own instance, making it by far the biggest mastodon instance, and then did a bad job controlling spam - so the other instances were left having to chose between cutting off a huge number of real users, or being inundated with spam. Having all the kbin and lemmy instances federate with each other, except where there are issues, can make the network overall more resilient against any one instance being mismanaged or invaded by spammers and trolls. The users on that instance will have to move, but there will be plenty of similar-sized instances ready to welcome them, and if the magazines are also spread out, they can keep posting to the same ones.
(I admit I also have a selfish interest here - I’m posting this from fedia,io, a different kbin instance. I joined through a different instance than the main one to help nudge things toward decentralization.)
when you say “disable federation” do you mean preventing our content (threads/comments/posts/etc by us as an individual) from being shared/seen on other instances? or do you mean that it prevents us from seeing federated content? or both?
You only see local only. Unless the instance de-federates your content can be seen on other instances.
Nice. That’s exactly how it should work honestly. Though I’ll just leave it on because I like accessing the fediverse :)
At least from my quick test right now, it limits your home page to posts within kbin.social. Not sure if it works the other way around, too, preventing your posts from going out into the fediverse.
@ernest can you clarify this?
Why am I still seeing posts from other instances on my front page when I have federation disabled? Is this a bug, or is it supposed to work that way?
2 questions for whomever has the answers
- Are all communities shared in the entire federation multiverse thingy…For example … if a community was created on Kbin does that mean it’s prevented from being created on any other site so only one exists?
- Can I subscribe to a community that’s not hosted on Kbin and still see it and participate in it from Kbin
Gracias fellow kbinians ✨
- no, each server (kbin.social, fedia.io, lemmy.world, etc.) can have their own communities, since there is no centralized server that manages community names it would be impossible to track which servers already have a community with the same name
- yes, that’s the beauty of the fediverse! this post explains how you can do that. you can also view and interact with posts from other federated social media sites such as Mastodon if you are interested in that sort of thing
It wouldn’t be impossible to track. Decentralized databases are a thing. Honestly blockchain would be useful here. Never thought I’d say that.
The big issue would be to get everyone to sign up for something like that though. Since things have been running for a while without any sort of checks like that, it would be difficult to switch to that system now (do you merge communities with conflicting names, do you let them change their name, do you let them delete the community, etc.). Plus there’s the whole nature of the fediverse where every instance can be customized to the creator’s needs (so one instance might want to be on that database and others might) and it just becomes too much work to get everyone on board.
Maybe I’m wrong and someone will eventually implement something like this and people will want to use it, but I very much doubt it from what I’ve seen of the fediverse so far
Hi, I’m figuring this out too. Veterans, please feel free to correct me!
- If you create a community on kbin, it does not prevent a community with the same name from being created on another site. We have a ‘music’ community here (kbin.social/m/music), but lemmy.world has a ‘music’ community too (lemmy.world/c/music).
(kbin calls them /m/agazines, lemmy calls 'em /c/ommunities, if you’re wondering about the ‘m’ vs ‘c’ in the URLs lol.)
- Yes! Because Fediverse magic, you can actually interact with the lemmy.world ‘music’ community without leaving kbin.social. Try it out from kbin.social/m/[email protected].
You may notice this @[object]@[place] pattern a fair bit.
For example, our own ‘music’ community is @[email protected]. The lemmy.world ‘music’ community is @[email protected]. Your account is @[email protected]. See if you can spot users or threads that are from other sites! They’re probably already in front of you!
As a second experiment, see if you can visit the music community from beehaw.org, without leaving kbin.social. They have one too, but you don’t need a beehaw.org account to participate there!
Yes, this is correct.
As opposed to the thinking of a lot of people, being able to have duplicate communities on each instance is a feature, not a bug. It is a very good way to give people freedom of choice if, for instance, a mod for a community on one instance is taking the community in a bad direction.
I’ve turned off federation in my settings. Why am I still seeing posts like https://kbin.social/m/StarTrek/p/438502/Looks-like-r-startrek-and-affiliates-just-packed-up-and-setup , which was posted by someone at hachiderm.io? How can I limit to only seeing posts and content posted directly on kbin.social?
Why would you want to exclude external users as well? The reason why you still saw that post is that /m/StarTrek is a local community
Honestly, the reason I want to is because I want to develop a community here on kbin; rather than trying to develop worldwide immediately.
That community is a local community, though. Deciding you don’t want to see posts or comments isn’t focusing on local community, it’s focusing on a gated community.
that’s totally wrong IMHO. You still have the reddit mentality. This is a federated community software, embrace it.
I’ve never watched Star Trek, but wasn’t federation between civilizations quite a big thing there?
It’s something that a lot of lip-service was paid to, but not a lot of action was taken toward. If the world in question wasn’t already capable of going to warp speed, democratic, and generally a lot like the idealized Earth with some minor quirks, the Federation just decided they weren’t important and pulled out the Prime Directive. Planets that were minor Federation members could be allowed to basically call into ruin, like Tasha Yar’s homeworld, and the Klingons and Romulans both basically had to force their culture into the same, “just like us but with a quirk” ideal when they were trying to get diplomacy going with the UFP.
Basically they talked a good game about being a united federation of worlds, but only federated with those who fit their echo-chamber.
Oh so that’s what that does!
so we can defederate individually with any magazine or all of an instance such as lemmy.ml
I believe turning federation “off” would just limit your feed to content from kbin.social.
Not related but I love that @ernest is on 196 and okbuddybaka
he is the mod on lemmy for a few anime and other things too lol
Right now moderator, subscriber, etc. data for stuff from different platforms and instances is broken on kbin, usually just displaying ernest as the owner of anything from a different instance.
Yep, the only way at the moment to see the true info about a community is to go to its actual page, on its actual instance.
Lol I would have never in a million years figured out how to do that, and it’s something I have kinda wanted to do – the fact that the home page is a mix of posts from various Lemmies and Kbins and whatever meant that I have very little idea what actually was on kbin. Thank you!
@ernest Is this something on kbin’s side for why Mastodon isn’t showing any posts from kbin.social? I’m able to view Lemmy communities fine on Mastodon, but unable to view anything from kbin.
I had to play around with it a bit to figure out how this is working. Basically, if you post to a Magazine’s “microblog” it uses the Magazine name as a hashtag. See: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/433361. Paste that link in your Mastodon client and you’ll see the #kbinMeta hashtag. So, if you want to follow the Kbin Tech magazine you’d have to follow the #tech hashtag in Mastodon. If you look at that Magazine you’ll see posts there from Mastodon servers. Those are posts with the #tech hashtag. Posts that don’t have a hashtag end up in the Random magazine.
If you dive into the technology behind it all you start to see that all of these different platforms are designed to show the same content in different ways. They’re all based on the ActivityStreams protocol: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/.
Take the image object. If you post an image to Mastodon you see the text that was posted with that picture then the picture. If you look at the same picture in Pixelfed (similar to Instagram), you’ll see the image first and displayed prominently, since it’s the focus, followed by the text. In Lemmy or Kbin you’ll see a small thumbnail that you can then expand to see the full image. Same image object type, different ways of displaying it.
I guess the point is, depending on what your interests are (microblogging, sharing links, sharing photos, etc) you pick the platform that most suites your need. Or, have multiple accounts for posting different content.
Thank you for a breakdown. Weird that posts from Lemmy work on Mastodon though but kbin posts on Mastodon don’t really work. I have both a kbin account and Mastodon account. Using Mastodon more as microblogging and kbin more as a reddit replacement right now.
Yeah, I was hoping I would be able to use my Mastodon account on here, or at least see some posts from kbin on Masto but I haven’t been able to figure it out.
You can’t really browse kbin magazines from Mastodon from what I’ve found. But, if you’re on a kbin thread and click more->copy URL to fediverse then paste that URL in the search bar of your Mastodon instance, you should be able to find the post.
The only caveat to finding the post is that I’ve noticed this doesn’t work with Ivory for iOS, but it works in the Ice Cubes app
