/kbin meta @kbin.social roofuskit @kbin.social 1y ago

Kbin instances seem more isolated from each other than from Lemmy instances

EDIT: Sorry I did not make this clear. I am not presenting this as a techincal problem for admins to solve, but as a community problem. The kbin.social community as the larger instance is not seeking out communities from the smaller instances.

When searching for magazines (communities) the results almost always show either kbin.social or one of the major Lemmy instances.

I can pull the domains like https://kbin.social/d/fedia.io but when i try to pull a community like https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] I get a 404 error.

To compound the problem lemmy communities are much more discoverable because they are listed on https://browse.feddit.de/. So even kbin users are largely interacting more through lemmy communities.

As far as I know there is no such tool to browse or search communities across all kbin instances. Does anyone know if the lemmy browser can include kbin instances?

Fedia.io, the largest other kbin instance seems to have lots of communities on the vine because we largely do not interact with them. But they see the rest of the fediverse like we do.

If we want other instances to grow like kbin.social has we probably need to resolve this disconnect between kbin communities.

https://kbin.fediverse.observer/list

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Try https://kbin.social/search?q=boardgames%40fedia.io I just trigged it to federate into kbin.social for you

For lemmy federated communities you can trigger them by pasting the full https:// url in. For pulling in other kbin communities you want to use @[email protected]er for the search.

Reminder that you will only see new content, going forward from the time the first user searched on your instance for the same community
- Yooo thank you! I was trying to subscribe to the Knicks community from lemmy.world from kbin, but it wasn't showing up with the usual https://kbin.social/m/[email protected].
  
  Doing the search in the format you provided just triggered it for me.
  
  This is so cool, haha.
- I tried using the full https:// URL for a lemmy community I know exists, and the main instance is federated with kbin, but it's showing an "Empty" for me, while I know it's not. Am I doing it wrong?
  
  edit: Tried it again using [email protected] and now it works. I guess when there's a federation it still doesn't pull all the comunities at once? It wasn't working yesterday.
- Thank you, that did it!!!
- What happens when I search for an instance and nothing comes up in the search? Try again later?
  
  That almost certainly happens if you have the format wrong. What community were you trying to federate into kbin?
- New content from the time the first user on your instance subscribed to the community. Searching for it doesn't signal to the remote website that anything need to be delivered here in an ongoing fashion. It shoukd just create the local magazine.
  
  Correct
It's not easy enough to explore other instances and their communities, I feel. I love that we can get a list of mags on kbin.social, but I'd like to see and search communities on our whole federation. Like, if there's already an instance that has a community for, idk (first random thing on my desk) gummy bears, I don't want to make another. Awkward case sensitivity makes searching harder than it should be (gummybears? Gummybears? GummyBears?), and I'm often not aware there's a community I want to follow until it shows up in the random posts list in the sidebar.

But I'm optimistic this will improve with time. "Very early beta" after all!
- It should be possible, with some development, to get the full list of magazines on other sites that are currently known to your site. It's a much, much different thing to get the full list of ActivityPub enabled group-hosting websites, since there's no central, mandatory directory that they need to phone home to or register with.
Honestly, kbin isn't fully ready... it's very early in it's development cycle. But I entirely agree on this here. I think the main thing kbin needs to work on right now is becoming stable...
- Yeah, this is not really meant to be leveled as a complaint for admins to handle alone. There are things we can all do to increase the federation and interaction between kbin instances. @codingandcoffee has instructions for how to pull a specific instance or community the correct way.
I've spun up a new kbin instance and have no problem pulling magazines from <lemmy.ml> or <kbin.social>
- The thing I'm trying to point out that as the bigger instance kbin.social is not pulling in communities from smaller kbin instances because we the users are not pulling them in like we are the larger lemmy communities. It's less of a techincal issue and more of a community one.
Kbin magazines need to make more use of assigning themselves tags to auto federate content in from, and then to use those same tags when posting. But like, nobody uses hashtags lol

EDIT: I also put an issue request in (202 I think?) to allow setting up that sort of functionality by fediverse link
Fedia.io is fully defederated from everything. You shouldn't have any problems with smaller kbin instances that are federating.

25 comments