Groups On Fediverse

Just as everyone is is getting used to the idea that we can share a fediverse between micro-bloging software like Mastodon or Misskey or Frendica, that big old website Reddit has a capitalism-induced fit of user-hostility (Don’t visit, there’s a strike today, don’t cross the picket lines) and so now everyone’s talking about Lemmy and KBin so what is that all about now?

Why?

Having your own little microblog that you post on and others can read and comment is nice, but it doesn’t really in of itself build a community. To do that you need something topic-based, not person-based, and to be able to post a message to everyone in the group, and read messages that people post to the group.

*Stable Diffusion renders Lemmy’s mouse-logo stuck in a K-bin.*

You can maybe use hashtags, but then they can’t be moderated, and there’s nothing to stop hashtag clash if someone else wants to use the same one.

So the fediverse has a groups function too. The groups generally look like users, with an @-@ user-handle like @pre@boing.world , but with the account marked as a group: so the profile displays with a group icon.

One example of a fediverse group is @fediversenews@venera.social so look up that account in your usual fediverse app and you’ll see what groups look like there.

That one’s hosted at Friendica. Check out what it looks like on Frendica:

https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews

You can follow it, and it’ll boost every post that mentions it to all it’s followers: A group!

Which is okay, I guess.

But all the posts from it just get mixed up in the your home-feed, which is then polluted with all these group-posts. Plus the only way to check up what’s going on with the group lately is to look down the group’s profile page.

What you really want is some page which can index the group, allow the group members to assign priority in some sense, keep all the follow-up messages in once place, separate top-posts from replies.

That’s where the currently hot fediverse apps Lemmy and KBin come in.

They allow you to create and view groups, and also to view index pages of posts to those groups sorted by up-vote or recent-replies or newness or hotness.

In that sense they look a lot more like Reddit: They have a page listing their groups (“Communities” in Lemmy, “Magazines” in Kbin), each of the groups have index pages with list recent posts or highest-upvoted posts.

Because it’s all Activitypub it’s on the fediverse so you can read Lemmy groups from a Kbin server or post to a Kbin group from your Lemmy account etc.

You can even post and subscribe to them all from Mastodon or Calckey or whatever, but then you’re missing all the index pages and have to have all the groups mixed up in your home feed (or faff with filters)

Some are calling it the threadiverse, coz the messages are more threaded into discussions you see.

What’s the difference then?

Lemmy has been around for years, but the developer’s own server’s user’s are pretty communist. Not in the “nobody has tried real Marxism” sense, but in the “we support the USSR, Stalin was great, lets have a revolution here too” sense. Which was off-putting to many.

Kbin launched less than six months ago and is in an alpha state and presumably fairly buggy, with not that many servers set up yet. It is getting stress-tested by the Reddit implosion more than it was really hoping for at this stage.

Differences admins might care about:

Lemmy is written in Rust and Node, runs it’s own service.

Kbin is written in PHP and Symfony and uses Rabbit for queues.

They both have Docker images.

Differences users might care about:

Lemmy is all about the groups, whereas KBin also has more of the micro-blogging type functions. You can do a post that doesn’t go to any groups and just goes on your “microblog”, and you can view other user’s microblogs.

Kbin distinguishes between “Article” posts, which have headlines and formatting and titles, and “Microblog” posts, which don’t have those things.

Kbin calls it’s groups “Magazines” for some reason and Lemmy calls them “Communities”.

A group admin can make a Kbin group follow a hashtag, so all the posts with that hashtag anywhere in the federation can show up in the group. (note that “the federation” means accounts your server knows about, not all accounts everywhere).

KBin looks slightly prettier to me, but I’ve heard others say the opposite so probably depends what you like.

How?

I mean how in actual practice does someone on Mastodon follow a Lemmy group or someone on Lemmy follow Calckey user or whatever?

Mostly: The search bar on the site.

Paste in the @-@ or sometimes just the URL of the fediverse person, comment or group that you want to interact with into Mastodon, or Calckey, or Misskey, Or Frendica, or Lemmy, or Kbin, and then you’ll see it in your app with the usual interaction buttons that you see. Follow or reply away.

Some instances

lemmy.ml is the dev’s main instance, and lemmygrad.ml is their second one. lemmy.world and beehaw.org seem to be fast-growing and doing okay with non-soviet-revolutionary userbases.

kbin.social is the dev’s main instance, and I’m aware of fedia.io as a new instance run by the admin at infosec.exchange, the instance is barely a day old and filling out quickly!

Here’s some good Index Pages:

Some others

Other link-farm/forum type software for fediverse that I don’t really know much about:

Some groups

@technology@beehaw.org – Tech stuff
@gaming@beehaw.org – Gaming stuff
@infosec@kbin.social – Info security stuff
@fedia@fedia.io – A forum about the instance
@communism@lemmygrad.ml – See? Told you.
@fediverse@lemmy.world – talk about the fediverse on the fediverse
@fediVRse.@fedia.io – my own VR group with just one post so far.

Some downsides

It is currently impossible to move accounts or groups from their home-instance on either of these systems. Perhaps that function will be added later.

They are all suffering under a massive influx of users and so are overloaded and posts aren’t flowing around the network as well as they might. Hopefully that’ll get better.

Some servers have had to turn on attack-protection, which means a are-you-human-test when you visit, and more importantly that federation won’t work since that isn’t humans fetching posts for federation it’s servers doing it. Lets hope they can scale without breaking federation.

Document status

Fairly speculative and opinionated, if there’s something wrong here reply on Fedi and I’ll fix it.