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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • @Cryst

    Hm. Generally, yes. I’m on kbin.social. tl;dr: Fantastic and excellent social media alternative, but as someone that’s worked years in ITSec, I have some huge concerns.

    Things I found surprising:

    • Registration was intuitive and easy.
    • There’s already a huge volume of good content readily available without having to “find it” (I had imagined it being more like ““the dark web””, i.e. you have to know what site you’re looking for
    • Voting transparency omg holy shit. I remember when Reddit introduced vote fuzzing and it was the dumbest thing. At least on kbin, who upvotes/downvotes something is publicly viewable. So rather than “let’s fuzz the votes to throw off the bots”, simply showing who voted allows you to easily find the troll downvoting everything or a flood of bots or so on. I imagine there’s probably not much tooling around this yet, but there inevitably will be.

    Things I’ve found confusing, concerning, or have questions about (feel free to point me in the direction of a good magazine or FAQ as well):

    • WTF is boost vs upvote?
    • Are usernames unique across the fediverse, or only across instances? (Is there anything preventing me from registering e.g. Cryst@kbin.social , then jumping on this thread and pretending to be you, or vice versa?)
    • What happens if an instance closes up shop? Is there any way to migrate everyone’s data over to another instance?
    • What happens if I decide I hate kbin.social admins, or you decide you hate lemmy.ca admins - are either of us able to fairly seamlessly move our identities from one server to another? Or would it be “nope, create a new account and start over”?
    • On reddit, a lot of good things happen around flairing (users, posts). Does fediverse have an equivalent?
    • Sometimes as I’m browsing I find myself on a different server (I think) and the language of the GUI is entirely switched to Arabic or similar. I still haven’t figured out how to fix that or even what’s doing it.

    I still need to set up my own instance and play with that too.



  • They may make their own instances, but depending on the content that comes from them, they may even be defederated from ours.

    It is WEIRD how much I feel like I’ve been here before.

    My first days on the internet were around the time that both email lists, and IRC chat, were popular. IRC chat was a bit more centralized than this perhaps in management, but in many ways the concepts were similar: multiple servers, interlinked, and if the admin of one server had a problem with the admin of another, they could delink from each other. IRC, a protocol that was popular 30 years ago and has been largely dead for at least 10, was basically the OG fediverse of instant messaging.

    Anyways, there’s a massive amount of promise with this. It’s more or less what Reddit was originally meant to be: Each team fully in charge of their own subreddit, and Reddit admins only there to make sure that each subreddit played nice with each other subreddit. In a fediverse context, it’s almost exactly the same, except the responsibility for cutting off subreddits that don’t play nice lies with the managers of each “subreddit” (instance).

    I realize that instances are not magazines and so on, and this analogy has technologically weak comparisons, but I think the principle works.


  • That’s a really solid take, but I’d say there’s 3 practical types of conflict: discussion (disagreement with a lot of thought put into it - a category that I’d like to think my comments frequently fall into), shitposting (disagreement with little/no thought, or sarcasm), and hostility (“nah that’s stupid, go !@#$ yourself”).

    The first 2 categories are the lifeblood of a very large number of thriving online communities. The last category needs to be unilaterally expelled from every corner possible.