There was a post about how beehaw was defederating from shitjustworks and lemmy.world about 6 hours ago. Are we involved in that, as are we a subset of lemmyworld?
https://beehaw.org/post/567170
How does this affect us? I still see beehaw posts on my ‘all’ page, but any content I engage with is effectively visible, I want to be sure
So when beehaw says they’re degenerating from
sh.itjust.worksandlemmy.world, the way that works is that any content from those specific servers will not be ingested into beehaw’s view of the fediverse. That includes content and comments. It’s identical to how if a Mastodon instance setup for LGBTQ communities and a Mastodon instance set up for far right extremists decided to defederate from each other, they would just never see any content that originated from each other’s servers. Sincekbin.socialis notsh.itjust.worksorlemmy.world, we should be fine in sharing back and forth with those communities, and becausekbin.socialhasn’t defederated from those servers, content will flow back and forth between them fine. beehaw users should be able to see content fromkbin.socialminus any contributions from the defederated servers.It’s a very powerful tool in toolbox for the Fediverse, and one that absolutely brings an eye to the moderation of servers when it’s used. I think it’s a bit of a bigger deal in this part of the Fediverse right now because there aren’t a ton of options yet for federated link aggregators; it’s pretty trivial now to move to a different Mastodon server if you disagree with the instances being defederated from the one you’re on. That said, it’s very much a “with great power comes great responsibility” thing; I think that it’s fantastic that servers are able to engage or disengage with whomever they want. Most will get along just fine and it’s not really an issue.
I also think that as part of a “community taking back the internet from billionaires” movement, defederation is one of our most powerful tools. If Meta comes into the scene and starts scraping the Fediverse and building marketing profiles and training their AI chatbots on our data, it’ll take about 3 minutes until people are maintaining a blocklist on git* for all server administrators to simply block Meta from accessing the majority of the Fediverse. There is a challenge in deciding what the scope of “generally acceptable behaviour” is, but we did it before centralized social media and we can do it again. If anything, I think some of the challenges of the last 10-20 years was this idea that diametrically opposed communities should occupy the same “space” on the internet. Get a big general pool, and give flexibility for communities to push in a direction they want if they want to go outside that space.
Some of these things will iron themselves out as more instances of lemmy or kbin or whatever decides to interoperate with these two spin up. In the end, I think these are tools that allow us to develop healthier communities. In the long game, it won’t matter for any one server if they can’t access beehaw because good content will be distributed amongst a ton of servers. And if the people from
lemmy.worldorsh.itjust.worksreally want that beehaw content, then they can work to address some of the issues that beehaw feels are worth defederating them for!Hi,
New here and still learning the ropes. With lemmyworld being defedrated and the way activitypub works, can I still post to, interact with(up vote, down vote) and subscribe to instances originating from beehaw? Or would being federated put all people who log in from lemmy.world on a block list from interacting with the communities and only being able to view?
Cheers.
The defederation shouldn’t affect users of kbin.social in any way, beehaw isn’t defedarating from this instance.
Thank you very much for this insightful, lengthy reply. I think it’s a great feature. My initial concern was ensuring continued engagement in the early stages of this experiment. I got very excited yesterday when everything seemed to open up and there was content out there, and got concerned when I woke up this am when Beehaw pulled the lever to shut out some instances. They are well within their rights. Just want to make sure this whole community isn’t going to croak before it gets a chance to find out what’s it’s defacto rules are
Oh, definitely understandable. It takes a little while to wrap your head around how all this actually works. I learned most of it with the Twitter exodus when I moved to Mastodon. Once you do get it, though…it’s kind of like taking the red pill and realizing how railroaded the internet has actually been for the last 15 years. I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
Technology – and the efforts of open source developers – got to the point where we can make Facebooks and Reddits and Twitters and GoodReads and Instagrams and more that can run on a server anyone’s willing to spin up, and content no longer needs to be gated to one community thanks to the ActivityPub standard.
And think of it this way: a piece of content on kpub is really no different than a piece of content on Pixelfed or Mastodon. They’re all embedded within an ActivityPub “container” that has a standard form. All these websites exist now not because you have to be super-specific in how to read the content, but rather to craft experiences that are optimized for different types of content. kbin has microblogs, which is really just Twitter/Mastodon. Some will like it here, others will find the experience that a dedicated microblogging client like Mastodon far more favourable for viewing that kind of content. When sharing a photo on Pixelfed, you can assign licenses, attributions, and locations, which makes sense given its intent to be a photography website. You don’t really need that for a lot of images shared here or on Mastodon , but all that info is stored inside the exact same ActivityPub “container” as a link you put on here; nothing is stopping kbin or Mastodon from reading that data, or being able to write it if they wanted to. At the end of the day, it’s all the same stuff, and you just need the application you’re building to interact with the right parts.
That’s why you can do things like follow people from entirely different “platforms” on other Fediverse platforms. For example, here’s someone I saw trending on Pixelfed who had some nice pictures: Charlie as viewed from kbin. It may not be ideal following them here – it might not be the optimal experience for photo sharing – but you can do it. Likewise, you can boost content from one “platform” into another.
The more I learn about it all, the more I find it impressive how forward-looking and comprehensive the ActivityPub standard was. And I’m sure it will flex and expand as needed heading forward.
Last thing I’ll say because I’m way too wordy…one of the things I did when I was learning all this was set up a similar username on multiple accounts. I’m on here, Mastodon, Bookrastinating, and Pixelfed. I put a 💬 after my display name on Mastodon, a 📖 after my display name on Bookrastinating, and a 📷 after my display name on Pixelfed. From my Mastodon account, I followed my Bookrastinating and Pixelfed accounts. Now I post content into the relevant platform that’s optimized for it: Mastodon for microblogs, Bookrastinating for reading stuff, and Pixelfed for photos. Those communities naturally develop interest for those specific types of content. But now, if I post a picture on Pixelfed that I really think my followers on Mastodon would like, I can just boost the content into my Mastodon feed. Not a link to the content, but the actual content itself. And it can move on into that community as well. I’m content right now having these different places optimized for different types of content, but on a technology stack that allows that content to seamlessly transition between applications. It’s great!
I genuinely think the Fediverse and ActivityPub will be a massive turning point in how we use the internet, and over time (think a decade time of time-scale) will redefine how social engagement occurs on the internet.
I completely agree! The potential is absolutely there and so far I can’t see how corporations will ruin it this time. However, I’m trying to be cautious, because I recall how excited people were for blockchain to revolutionize everything, only for that to turn out worse than useless. Granted, the problems there were fairly evidence from the beginning and there were plenty of naysayers. The Fediverse is too new and obscure to get the same kind of scrutiny yet, I think.
If everything goes as I think it could, we may look back at the 2010-2025 years as the first true ‘dark era’ of the information age.
@buffaloseven do you mind if I pick your brain? Why does kbin have microblogs AND threads, and why do some magazine have only microblogs? Is that an admin choice?
I’m not super-familiar with the inner workings of kbin yet; my gut reaction is that if a magazine only has microblogs, it’s because nobody’s made threads in it yet? I don’t think there’s an option to prevent threads in a magazine.
@buffaloseven thanks :)
It’s definitely possible to actively use this place without wrapping your head around the how of it, but it’s unfortunate that it’s part of the experience, which is intimidating to new users. Hopefully Lemmy and Kbin become more mature and easier to use from the start without using your brain.
I actually don’t think it’s unfortunate, but mostly because the technology needs a shakedown period. Having some barriers that will keep out less technically savvy, or even just the less motivated to learn, allows the people that are more invested to work out the kinks and build something valuable.
Think of the coming months and years as the incubation period that Reddit had before the great exodus from Digg made it a much more mainstream place on the web. The only reason all of the people fleeing Digg went to Reddit is because it already existed with its own community that was (mostly) able to help absorb and train the incoming waves.
We’ve seen the same thing on Lemmy and Kbin, where people that had already been around are helping others adjust. Eventually the user experience, the differences and similarities between instances, probably some consolidation and splits of communities between and across instances… all of that will be happening as more and more people join.
(If I’m being honest, I would be perfectly fine with some of these barriers remaining in place forever. I don’t necessarily need to interact with a billion people to meet my news, hobby and curiosity needs.)
Is anyone else seeing weirdness on this thread? When I view it in tree view, multiple comments have the same string of 15-20 responses that show underneath them. I took some screenshots showing this. Each of these begins with a comment that then has the same string of responses underneath it. The screenshots show the first 3 comments of that long string of comments.
Coming back here, this thread is now displaying correctly for me a few days later. Very strange behavior. Also, I realized I don’t know how to post multiple images on a comment, lol. I’m going to have to figure that out.
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“Are we involved in that, as are we a subset of lemmyworld?”
No, since kbin.social and lemmy.world are not only two separate instances, but two different Fediverse applications (kbin / lemmy)… so yeah we’re fine for now. -
“but any content I engage with is effectively visible”
I self-host a small Calckey instance and previously self-hosted a Mastodon instance, and something I noticed is that different instances don’t always federate well… So remote messages won’t always show up.
E.g. say I follow Eugen from mastodon.social so I see his posts. For example there are four replies: one from a guy I follow on infosec.exchange, one from a fresh new account on mstdn.social, one from a tiny one-person instance, and one from a suspicious instance that was quickly suspended. I can (most likely) only see the first reply from my instance because the latter three won’t federate with my instance… so yeah that’s completely normal. -
“How does this affect us?”
As background knowledge: (some) people are awful. In practice this means that any large, open-registration social media WILL attract difficult people. To solve this, select at least one: 1) close open registration, 2) limit the size of the instance, or 3) be ready to put a lot, a LOT more effort into moderation.
Many for-profit social media, as well as some large Mastodon instances, have to stay open-registration for various reasons, so they have to find large numbers of moderators to do the thankless jobs of filtering out terrible stuff. This doesn’t always work smoothly. Pretty sure lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works were defederated because of this reason: open registration, and mods couldn’t handle the bad people.
Pretty sure kbin.social is still open-registration at the moment? I mean kbin isn’t as popular as the previous two so I assume we are safe now, but unfortunately ernest will have to make the tough decision one day. Jerry from fedia.io probably already knows what to do since he already manages infosec.exchange, one of the larger Mastodon instances lol.
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