Hey, once again, I welcome the newcomers. It's great to see new faces here :) It seems that we've managed to resolve the server issue. Unfortunately, I had to temporarily disable certain features, such as content auto-refresh. It will be restored at the beginning of next week after the infrastructure change, so you'll get to experience kbin in its full glory then :) Currently, I'm working on a few critical things that I want to finish by Monday:
- Infrastructure improvement, optimization related to high traffic
- Admin guide - creating a new instance
- Fixes in notifications for post replies
- Attend to the new mod reports
- As soon as possible, I also want to get back to Codeberg Issues, private messages etc - there are many new topics there. Thanks to everyone for the that!
Some time ago I had an issue with bots, so registration process it might not be done perfectly. If the emial didn't reach or wasn't received in time, after a while and additional verification, the account will be manually activated.
If something important happens, please email me through the contact form - it's the fastest way to reach me. Now I'll get back to my tasks, and I wish you a great time exploring the fediverse :)
At some point, the registration will also be temporarily disabled. Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.
Have a great weekend!
rel: https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/p/417417/Alright-it-was-a-long-night-for-me-But-I-m
Each instance is it's own independent website, but with the ability to also export content to other websites using the same communication protocol (ActivityPub). So, if you create a community on kbin.social, let's say, to use your example, videos@kbin.social, then that is a singular community that lives here on this website, kbin.social.
Someone on another website, let's say lemmy.ml, can create their own videos community, which would be videos@lemmy.ml. They're as independent from each other as r/videos on Reddit and a Facebook group also called "Videos" would be. Only, here on kbin.social, you can choose to subscribe to the videos group on lemmy.ml, and see what people are talking about there. In doing so, you're requesting that lemmy.ml forward all future content posted to videos@lemmy.ml to kbin.social, and you're requesting that kbin.social populate your personal timeline with that content that it receives.
Similarly, if someone on lemmy.ml wants to see what people are talking about in your videos@kbin.social group, they can ask lemmy.ml to do the same.
Importantly, these websites will also pass along local posts and replies intended for remote communities back to the hosting server, so that things stay in sync.
But they remain totally separate websites. They're just separate websites that pass content back and forth between each other, at the behest of their users.
A lot of people have voiced some consternation about this in the last couple of days, as I guess they feel some angst around missing out on discussions on topics they care about, because they might be taking place in communities they're not following. But I don't see this as an issue. Not only, as many people keep pointing out, are there multiple groups covering the same topics on Reddit, just with different names, that people don't object to, but in large subreddits a majority of posts never even get seen by subscribers, because they just don't gain traction in the short amount of time necessary to reach 'Hot' before something else does. In this distributed model, there is the potential for average people to actually get their posts engaged with, and for a single space to be dominated by a handful of power users. Now, each instance can have its own set of power users on a topic.
It's also trivially easy to share posts between groups, as lemmy -- though, as far as I've found, not kbin -- has a cross-post button, just like Reddit. So, anything from small groups that will interest big ones can be pushed up and anything from big groups that people may want to discuss in a quieter space can be passed down with relative ease.
After all, what's the real value in being commenter # 72,641 on a post that's reached the top of r/videos? No one's going to even see your comment, let alone respond to it. And the OP definitely won't notice it. But if you're commenter # 72 in a group of 200, then there's meaningful engagement to be had.