Thanks everyone for the help.
Original post: I want to create a niche community, but considering Lemmy can’t see kbin magazines, wouldn’t it make more sense to make the community on Lemmy, that way people from both Lemmy and kbin can be a part if it?
Maybe I should have posted this on a nostupidquestions community, I don’t know.
lemmy users can see kbin magazines but kbin magazines are a bit less discoverable since lemmy in particular has tools to help with finding cross-instance communities. I don’t really like lemmy so I didn’t bother making my more niche groups lemmy-specific.
It honestly depends on how centralized you want to be. Do we want all communities on the largest lemmy instance or do we want them on many different instances, some of which are kbin? Suppose there’s a security hole in Lemmy code that needs to be updated. It’d be good for some of the communities to be on Kbin while that’s being fixed, and vice versa.
But really, kbin and lemmy have small but essential differences. I adore the kbin integration with Mastodon and it’s hashtags, so I’m going to prefer a kbin server with that for any communities I make. They can still be found. They can still hit the front page if they get a good thread going. They still show up in the newest feed.
Lemmy.world recent incident was a great demonstration of the benefit there is to spreading what instances communities are created on. There was some grumbling about /r/Android coming and making their own instance and then lemmy.world/c/Android merging with them there, but turns out it’s good to not have all the eggs in one basket.
you’ll get exposed alright
Lemmy can see kbin magazines. I am posting this from Lemmy!
Well I feel stupid, is this new that Lemmy can see magazines? Originally could they not?
When I joined I could, then I think maybe federation was wonky for a bit there, but it seems to be all good now.
(hi from lemmy)
Yeah, kbin is only something like a month old and our dev did NOT expect the influx that he got. He knew about the stuff at reddit, but thought since lemmy was both older and everyone’s first mention, he might get a few.
Nah. Thousands in a matter of days. He had to turn cloudflare on for a few days, which would break the ability to federate but would also keep the server from certain doom while he scrambled to upgrade things. Guy’s got my sheepish respect.
So that’s the majority of why we went dark on you guys, but it feels like we’re going pretty good now. Still working things out, and from what I hear there are also issues on lemmy’s side — bugs in the default config/in 0.18.0, lemmy.ml specifically and possibly deliberately blocking outgoing kbin info — that are adding additional difficulty between us.
Especially with lemmy.ml. It seems to have gotten a fuckton of communities I would have been super interested in, but until the devs decide to unblock kbin.bot, nothing I interact with on .ml will reach back to them, nor would any of our own posts/communities. It’s functioning like a noncommittal softblock, and since the instance ignoring our entire platform seems to be a giant one, it’s damaging.
Hi back from kbin, though :)
But how did we get here? On kbin trying to search for a Lemmy community I can’t find it, and on Lemmy looking for kbin the same happens. And yet here we are because someone figured out how to find it and subscribe.
If nobody has ever subscribed to a foreign instance’s community/magazine before, it won’t show up on your home instance. Currently, the best way to pull it into your local instance is to copy its web address on the other site into your local search.
e.g. If you wanted to pull in kbin.social’s AskKbin from lemmy.world you’d find its URL, https://kbin.social/m/AskKbin, and paste that address into your home instance’s search box. As long as somebody has done this once, AskKbin will now show up in regular community lists, searches, etc.
Lemmy can see kbin magazines. I’m on a lemmy instance right now.
kbin.social itself has had some federation issues in the past month, but I think that’s more growing pains of a new platform than anything inherent in the system itself.
I hope kbin gets federated by lemmy.ml it seems they have been rather trigger happy with blocking. It seems we will have to wait and see which instance is the most free.
A lot of the original Lemmy instances are quite trigger happy. It’s one really nice thing about the new instances with new admins who block but still prefer not to unless it’s really necessary.
i kind of knew what i was signing up for with this lemmy ecosystem, so at worst people will just switch instances and the most free gain the most leverage, it beats this hopping from one centralized service to another by far.
Oh, maybe that’s where I got the idea that Lemmy couldn’t see them, I’ve only been on the fediverse for a couple weeks. People were saying Lemmy couldn’t see kbin, but I didn’t realize that was temporary.
Not really suspicion at this point. They are proveably 403 rejecting requests from the KBin useragent. You have the letters “kbinbot” anywhere in your useragent (case insensitive) you ain’t getting content.
As a bonus they’re still sending out stuff to instances though. But since KBin can’t then resolve it it amounts to a DoS attack as the messages just build up in KBin retry queues.
Yeah this seems to be a temporary thing. I’ve been following the federation issues we’ve been having on kbin and I’m hoping they can resolved as everything stabilizes.
I’m unsure if the ingest from kbin > Lemmy was working because last I checked they were returning error responses on requests that had “kbinbot” in the name.
There definitely seems to be something going on but I haven’t found solid problem replication steps.
For example it may be because the instance the thread was posted on is lemmy.ml but I expected the thread here: https://kbin.social/m/asklemmy@lemmy.ml/t/163712/former-current-Twitter-users-what-do-you-do-on-there would still sync up with where the version of the thread where the OP is located https://lemmy.nz/post/314511 even if it the instance where the thread was posted (maybe?) doesn’t federate with kbin.social: https://lemmy.ml/post/1868037
It’s possible my mental model of fediverse working is just still very basic and thread instance is the ultimate arbiter?
