My instance, https://feddit.online, is only about 2 hours old and it was a struggle to get it this far. I’m not sure if it’s fully working. I too am left with some questions. I hope that this topic becomes more active and we can help each other.

Did you use the bare metal build or the Docker build?

1. I used the Docker build. To answer your questions in reverse, I too do not yet have anything in my “random” magazine. However, last weekend I brought up a test server and today it has 509 posts in that server’s random magazine. It took a while to see any. Seems it may take some time to start getting some, I’m hoping.

2. The only configuration that I saw for mailing things was in the .env file. I configured my email provider information there and it’s working. Here is the one entry that I have:

MAILER_DSN=smtp://notifications@feddit.online:<password here>@smtp.dreamhost.com:587

I did not configure anything else except the hcaptcha.

One issue, related but important for all to know, is that the confirmation email is only good for one hour. If the person doesn’t confirm their email, then they cannot get another confirmation email. If they contact you, and they can send you an email from the email address they want to use, you can manually activate their account by doing this (these instructions were provided to me by Jerry Bell who runs fedia.io)

• go to the kbin directory and run:

         docker compose exec database psql -U kbin kbin
  
  

• that’ll dump you to a postgres psql prompt

        run the sql command:
  
        update public.user set is_verified=true where username='$username';
         \q
  
  

• You’ll have to substitute $username for the name the person is trying to register. I believe user names are case sensitive because I saw someone post that you can have the same names on a server if the letter cases are mixed up. I hope this is just a defect that will be fixed if true.

**My question for anyone: ** When I use the search icon at the very top of the screen, why am I not finding anything that matches anything from anywhere in the Fediverse, save for maybe a couple of posts? A FAQ I saw says that if you search for “history” then all magazines with the word “history” from across all the KBIN and Lemmy, etc. servers will be returned. For me, no magazines are returned. Maybe it will just take some time to finish federating? Does anyone have experience?

P.S. This is the first post from my instance and so it’s also a test. God, I hope you all see this!

I just tried it myself on kbin.social and you are right. If you use the search at the top of the page then it will not find your magazine. If you use the search that is part of the magazine page, then it will find your magazine.

I think your question is specifically about the search at the top of the page, the global search, correct? If so, yeah, it doesn’t appear to find magazines. I don’t know if it’s by design or a defect.

I also tried finding your new magazine from two other KBIN instances, https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io and in both instances, using either the search at the top of the page or the search on the magazine page, I was not able to see your new magazine if I didn’t add @kbin.social to the name (if I already knew where it was). And I don’t think they will ever be able to because I have been unable to find any magazines that exist external to any KBIN instance that is not already added to the local server unless I first visited the instance where it exists so I can give the domain name as well with the exact name in the search.

It sucks. If I want to see, for example, all magazines about Linux across KBIN and Lemmy, either because it’s part of the magazine name, or it’s in a magazine’s description, I don’t see how to do this.

This is a bummer. When someone gets onto a new instance and they want to subscribe to an interesting magazine, I don’t see any way that they can find them outside of their local instance.

I’d love to be wrong about this. Has anyone had a different experience?

I know this is kind of off topic but it relates so I’ve extended the conversation.

Not good for an application promising to be a “content aggregator”

This will lead to a number of magazines with the same names and topics existing all over the place because people can’t see that a relevant one already exists. This will make a big mess and people will miss out on discussions.

And who would want to join any instance other than the biggest if they have to visit the biggest anyway to find interesting magazines?

And even on kbin.social, everyone is missing out on Lemmy ones. :(

Do you know if Lemmy can find magazines on KBIN or other Lemmy servers simply by searching by name?

I used a VPS running Ubuntu and followed the Docker installation. The only issue I ran into was that the docker-ce installation instructions don’t work on Ubuntu. They were written for Debian. This is easy enough to work around. Just find the Docker install instructions and the docker compose plug in instructions for your Linux and use them instead of what he has, if you run into an issue.

As long as you follow the instructions exactly it should be fine. Your experience should be enough.

I initially set it up on a really small VPS with with 1 GB / 1 CPU and 25 GB disk. I scaled it up after I got everything working and checked out. It performed fine on that small VPS.

Yeah. I noticed the typo right after I uploaded the message. I quickly edited it but I find that changes made to a message take a while to replace the original.

I currently have 303 magazines, 301 pointing to several other KBIN and Lemmy instances. I visited several instances and manually linked to magazines that had a lot of users. Magazines from anywhere else can be added by using the global search (the search icon at the very top), not the search associated with the magazine listings, and using the full name, like @linux

The magazines can be seen at https://feddit.online/magazines

The cost depends on who you use for hosting. I use Digital Ocean which is a bit more expensive than others, like Hetzner, but Digital Ocean has some additional services that make life a bit easier, so I use it.

I also use Cloudflare for caching and protection, but it’s free for hobbyists and small businesses.

There are some small costs for keeping snapshots. Less than a couple of dollars/month.

At Digital Ocean, a 4 vCPU, 8GB server is $48/month. Snapshots might be a couple more dollars a month. I’m currently running KBIN on a server half this size but I will be bumping it up to the $48/month option in the next few days.

Another incidental cost would be domain name registration.

I can’t think of anything else you would need to pay for.

Wow. Nice!. Is there an option to make it available, or would I just link to it in the “about” page?

I’m surprised it offer the option to sign up with Google since I don’t have that enabled. Only email address registration works now. I’ll have to play with Federated sign ups. Maybe this weekend

:) Compared to Jerry Bell, I’m more of the Jerry Jr.

I share your thoughts on this. The only reason my server has 301 magazines from other servers is because I visited those other servers, searched through their magazines, and one-by-one, entered their full names into mine because they seemed popular. I’ve confirmed with several others that this is how it works.

I hope this gets changed because what happens now is that there are multiple magazines, covering similar topics, all independent of each other on different servers. If I wanted to join a Linux discussion group, for example, I would want one Linux group shared across all servers. But, unless someone knows of a magazine on the other server and introduces it to the local server to link to it, there will be two independent groups. Multiply this by all the servers and there’s quite a mess. People are missing out on discussions.

I want a true content aggregator. I don’t think we’ve reached this goal yet.