Thanks for the great work on this @ernest, and every contributor who’s dove in and made a PR.

The best way to know who owns the service you use it to own it yourself. That does come with a lot of overhead, though. I started my own kbin instance because I, like you, was worried about “what if one day I go to login and my home instance decided to shut off forever?” That can’t happen now, besides if I forget to pay/something goes wrong with the server. But I enjoy tinkering so it works out in my case.

I think ultimately users are responsible for which instance they choose to sign up for. If there isn’t much transparency on a certain instance, it may not be the one for you. I agree that the sign up pages could have some areas where more information could be shared. Of course, it is up to each instance admin to share accurate and factual information as to who they are/where the money comes from/goes etc.

Very true, if you don’t mind losing your post history. A simple way to migrate subscriptions would be great for those folks that make a new account every once in awhile anyway.

Thanks for reminding me of that! I haven’t been around since the old old forum days, but from my time on Minecraft server Enjin forums, I definitely remember arguments going on, outside of the main discussion, and every once in awhile you’d get a ‘settle down you two’ from someone. The tree format kind of takes the ‘one big room, many conversations going on’ vibe away.

Good idea, I just looked however and they’ve changed the instances page to: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin. So any server that has federated with any other listed is on there, I believe. More Kbin instances out there than I thought!

There are ways to write links in such a way that they should keep you on your instance, but I’m not too familiar with them. I wonder if it would be possible to “precheck” links that load on a page, and if any point to content that can be federated, kick off the process of pulling that content in. Then when the user clicks that link, it would take them to the content on their home instance, where they can interact. That way users wouldn’t need to deal with formatting links a certain way, it would just happen automatically (if your home instance software supports it).

Sorry, I should have included that info. You got me thinking, however, and I made the decision to defederate from lemmynsfw.com. I’m not against the communities it hosts, but I don’t want to deal with any of the content hosting legal questions that come with it (or at least minimize it where I can). There do appear to be some posts that make it in to the ‘random’ microblog section that are NSFW, I will look into what I can do for those.

Wikipedia is a good example. It is annoying when they ask for the $3 every year, but it’s true that a small contribution like that across the many users can keep a free/libre project sustained. Things like Usenet used to be part of your ISP bill anyhow, so a small monthly/annual amount to your instance host makes sense to me. Of course, we pay ridiculous amounts to our ISPs without services like this nowadays, so it does hurt a little

Your knock on the door analogy is exactly right–when I started my instance, I had to search every community that I wanted to see directly by URL. Then my server would send a message to that community’s server saying that I subscribed to that community. Now, every time a post is made at that community, it’s server sends my server an update. If I post a comment to a community on lemmy.ca (like I am now), from my kbin instance (remy.city), and you are reading it from kbin.social, that means my server first saved my comment locally, then sent it to lemmy.ca, and lemmy.ca sent it to your kbin.social because you subscribed to the community. So in that case, lemmy.ca is the ‘authority’, and is responsible for sending updates out to subscribed parties.

There is no such thing for instances–each new instance has to manually make a connection to another (i.e. a user on the new instance must subscribe to something from another instance). I think the tools like fediverse.observer are reading comments or other activity from popular instances, and are then compiling a list of the instances they find by doing that. But there is no central server/authority that makes communication between instances possible. Each instance has to talk to each other instance for it to happen. It’s a bit inefficient but is necessary for decentralized communication.

At least you got yourself into the contributing mindset. Tackle the next issue!