I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We’ve left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc…
But we need to spread out.
Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.
A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from ‘the bird site’ (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk’s new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.
We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.
I’m a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:
https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105
The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting ‘off the record’. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.
And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.
I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It’s the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn’t really register with me until I spoke with this person.
https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3
Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:
We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.
Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.
TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.
I invite correction and clarifications.
EDIT: Adding further sources below.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207
Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible
Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d
Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media
Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618
And a cartoon to boot
Can magazines migrate instances like users can? (even ignoring federation concerns, at some point it’s going to be much easier to scale this thing if the more popular magazines can spawn off to their own instances)
No but once the magazine/community has been created it doesn’t really matter which instance it lives on because any user from any instance can post, comment and mod in that magazine.
This will be something to regret when a community wants to avoid censorship or move before the closure of an instance.
If they want to “avoid censorship” (aka put things online they know others find offensive) then those instances should just never turn on federating from the beginning. Because then they cry afoul later when they can’t blast their messages to other instances anymore.
There’s all sorts of reasons to be nervous about federation - say you’re starting a community dedicated to Falun Gong or some other subject the Chinese government despises and are worried about moderators of larger instances coming under pressure to shut it down.
But yes, it does seem like the best way to manage that is to start it off on an instance you control from the get-go.
Ah, didn’t realize that.
So what happens if the instance it was originally created on goes offline, or defederates from the instance that you’re on - does it disappear, or does it carry on as if nothing happened? What about if all of the mods’ instances go offline?
If an instance goes offline (based one what recently happened with beehaw defederating some instances), other instances will still keep copies of old posts and comments, and any new comments on the old posts stay just on whatever instance made them and don’t copy to others.
If you want to create a community, can you only create one in your instance?
Yes communities can only be created on the same instance as the user creating it. But, a user can have an account on more than one instance to create communities and then assign their main account on any instance as a mod.
Another option if you want to mod a community on another instance is just having someone from the instance in question create the community for you and assign you as a mod, then remove themselves. Slightly more convenient? But potentially inconvenient too.
It’s an idea I’ve seen floated, and personally would appreciate, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no Magazine or Community migration for kbin or Lemmy.
Incidentally, I’m commenting from a Lemmy instance, to a kbin Magazine on kbin.social, and subscribing to RedditMigration on kbin.social was pretty seamless, at least as seamless as any other non-local Lemmy Community. OP is right in that spreading out is a decent idea. It’s not really necessary for everyone to be on the same instance.
Another way to address the problem of corporate takeover and ensuing enshitification is form non-profits, co-ops, or other organizations to actually “own” the instance. My home Mastodon instance has started down this path already.
If this is implemented it’ll be good for the communities to be able to go where they want, but there’s a good chance it can become a source of drama if the net result is smaller communities choosing to migrate to larger instances.
Also, the logistic behind large magazines spawning their own instances only make sense if there’s an option for users to subscribe to an entire instance. AFAIK that’s impossible right now (or I don’t know how to, if anyone know please tell me), so that is something to keep in mind.