If you're on a centralised platform like Reddit, this is what they can do. Centralised platforms have all-powerful leaders who can do whatever they want, and you have no alternatives if you disagree.
The point of the Fediverse being on lots of servers is that each server's power is limited. If you disagree with one server's actions, you can move.
p.s. Have had lot of people asking similar questions, so here are some answers:
Kbin's website is at https://kbin.pub, they have a flagship server at https://kbin.social. There's no app yet, but you can use Kbin servers through their websites.
The lead developer of Kbin is @ernest, at the moment that's the account to follow for news on the project.
@feditips@alastair87@ernest@stemy@Fr_g I think collectively, internet users have fallen into the trap that a service has to exist to use it, and that they then must choose from the "bestest" service providers or make do with nothing.
I dont know how this narrative came to be the "received wisdom", but its simply not true.
With a small VPS you can run nearly anything yourself. Need DNS? bind. mail? exim, postfix, dovecot, sendmail... Social media? friendica, masto, diaspora... maps.
The whole point of DNS was to distribute the task - not make it something you leave to a handful of giants.
@spyro@feditips@ernest@stemy@Fr_g 99% of the population do not have the technical knowledge nor the time to maintain their own infrastructure like that. There should be many more smaller options, but your expectation sometime seems akin to expecting people to forego car mechanics or seeing their GP and do it all themselves whilst still having time for the rest of their lives. Fine in this case if it's a special interest, not so much if not and especially not for the people who have no technical aptitude.
I say that as someone who self-hosts several of my services on a VPS (private DNS resolver, cloud storage, code repositories in gitea, personal web site) and other fully private ones on a server in my own home where I have several terabytes of HDD storage connected.
However from an ethical point of view there have been serious issues with them failing to limit access to sites that promoted abuse and worse against trans and neurodivergent people.
I haven't fully cut them out of my stack yet, they still handle the DNS routing for services running on my servers but I will get round to fixing this soon.
@spyro@feditips@ernest@stemy@Fr_g I tried editing it, now it just seems to have hidden that line entirely but it might be my settings as I attempted to turn off CWs (for me, not other people seeing my content).
@feditips@ernest@stemy The thing that gets to me about Cloudflare is not the big picture on privacy with their services, it's the appalling decision to share details of complainants with hate sites (which I'd forgotten about until I saw your post). Of course if they did that it throws everything else about them into question.
@alastair87@feditips@alastair87@ernest wow!! I never knew that!! that is hidious! moved my domains to them due to them being an at cost registrar, might look again for someone else who also interfaces with my yunohost instance ie can push records to the registrar automatically.
Now, rather than managing DNS on some crappy web interfaces, I can just edit the zone files on my primary DNS server, and it "just works".
All I had to do with my domain registrar is replace the DNS record info they held before (which is now on my servers) and enter my three nameservers into their interface. Job done.
@spyro@spyro@feditips@alastair87@ernest wow!! impressive. although I prefer a web interface, to be fair. also, yunohost which I use on my cloud server, links up with cloudflares API, so say when I create, example.gm-cloud.org.uk it will automatically push the dns records for that to cloudflare with one click. not that this forgives cloudflare for their hidious policy of giving info to hate sites.
(I've added more disk now as its handling a lot more stuff now.)
Apart from pushing DNS with one click (not that you need to do that anyway, if you run your own), why do you want a web interface to configure the machine - its just one more vulnerability.
@spyro@spyro@feditips@alastair87@ernest awww. thank you, really appreciate it. will do if I ever run into an issue, though for day to day stuff I like an easy life haha!
@feditips@alastair87@ernest@guiltmanager I actually switched from the DNS providers web interfaces (123 and fasthosts) to doing it "properly" precisely because it was much easier to ssh in and edit a zone file on my primary DNS and run 'rndc reload', rather than to go to their site (after working out if the domain was 123 or fasthosts reg), then logging in, 2FA, navigate past the ads, find where they moved stuff to (looking at you, 123), and finally edit. the. records. one. at. a. time. via their crappy web interface.
I can update DNS for any/all of my half a dozen domains in about 30 seconds, rather than several minutes. I can even schedule the changes with cron if I want to.
@spyro@spyro@feditips@alastair87@ernest wow!! i think its a bit different for me being blind I use a screen reader, not figured out how to edit a file in ssh, what I have to do is, ftp into my server, download file, edit, upload again. which actually sounds quicker than all the steps you've just outlined! for its apparent hidious faults, cloudflares api works pretty well in conjunction with yunohost.
@feditips@alastair87@ernest@guiltmanager I dont have direct experience of using a screen reader, but it seems to me that the command line might be easier to use in this regard?
to edit (say) a zone file on my server, I can do:
ssh me@my.server.com
vim /etc/bind/zones/db.my.zone
rndc reload
alternatively, if I have a local copy, I could edit that and upload it directly into place with:
@spyro@spyro@feditips@alastair87@ernest oh command line is pretty accessible, to be fair. its just when putty loads file its hard to know how to deal with it, and i dont want to end up doing the wrong thing, editing it or thinking ive edited it right, and mucking it up. its also remembering the commands, putty is very difficult to paste from windows clipboard, to putty, for instance, ctrl V doesnt work,
Yeah, I've been getting this multiple times for the past hour or so. All it takes is being inactive for too long and I'm basically timed out. Better than being logged out, though. 🤔
The admin of Kbin posted today that they're giving priority to documenting how to set up Kbin servers, to speed up the process of more servers being set up.
@donelias@feditips@Bees@luana I’m currently working to make the installation work with @yunohost to make things more smooth, but I’m still learning the scripting system
@feditips
I'm putting a lot of my energy into setting up a kbin backup for my favorite subreddits so their moderators have less work to do if they choose to migrate the community.
@feditips sorry for a really dumb question on Kban…how do I sign up with my mastodon user name? What’s the proper format? I keep getting a “match format” message. I’m not sure why I’m struggling with. Mastodon was a breeze compared to this. 😔
If you want to sign up on another server, you need to create an account on that server.
Your Mastodon account is tied to the Mastodon server where you signed up, you can't use it to sign in on any other server.
It's like with email, you can't use your Gmail account to sign in on Yahoo Mail, even though you can send emails between Gmail and Yahoo Mail accounts.
@feditips ok, I think I understand that, but when I look at users on kban it displays their other instance info as well (eg: FEDITIPS @feditips). I’ve just created a kban account displaying USERNAME @username which isn’t what I want. Does that make sense or am I totally missing something. Thanks for your patience, I don’t know why I don’t get this.
The users you can see with other instance info are on other instances. They may not be on Kban at all, or they might be on different Kban servers.
The idea of the Fediverse is people are spread out on thousands of different servers, but the servers communicate seamlessly so that people from many different servers can have conversations together.
You and I are on different servers but we are able to talk like this, because the servers we signed up on communicate with each other.
@feditips guess they really are fearful of people moving off Reddit after all.
Surely they should support a free and open internet...
The idea of people hating and leaving Reddit terrifies them. If Reddit was such a great platform they shouldn't have anything to worry about. Yet years of never delivering on promises has finally and justly come back to haunt them.
It is in the design, centralised platforms should be discouraged. Its just not safe when going beyond a certain size and also not democratic. Substandard hence. Rules and regulations can help here, given the potential high impact we have seen with these platforms on society…
A multi-language selection menu appears on the website when clicking on the menu button of https://jointhefediverse.net/: "Deutsch (DE) English (US) Español (ES) Suomi Français Nederlands Polski Português (BR) Русский Slovenčina" It seems the project could use translation help for none-European languages, in particular from #Asia-#Pacific and #Africa, also for ethnic minorities.
@feditips I went and overwrote every question and answer I had on my over 5 year old account on reddit and then deleted my account in a protest after the AMA.
As many people have pointed out, reddit's value comes from its userbase who contribute on the website. Many people like me often google with "reddit" as a prefix to find answers to questions.
So glad r/RedditAlternatives pointed me towards fediverse!
@feditips Thanks for making me aware of Kbin :PinkHeart: I was only previously aware of Lemmy, which (as you've covered yourself) is not really a viable option.
@SleepyCatten@feditips why is kbin more viable than lemmy? i checked kbim just now and at first glance it's both slower and has a less polished interface.
Add comment