I introduced kbin to someone today who asked what the fediverse was. I answered for them of course, but it made me realize that the concept is still technobabble for most people. The average joe probably doesn’t care or notice that server A is really talking to server B. Just have them find out on their own and if a mass migration does need to happen from A to B, just make a standard announcement.
As an alternative the UI could hide the fediverse-related technicality while showing basically all the magazines from all the kbin instances. When new users create an account, all the kbin instances should allow creation for any other instance. Just allow redirecting or something. There should be an advanced info button to show each kbin instance’s policies. They won’t matter for the average Joe.
You can’t show anyone anything “from all [blank] instances”, though. There’s no centralized server that they all phone home to. There’s no mechanism for them to learn about each other except through user exploration.
So there’s no way to see non-kbin content without going and subscribing to another instances magazines?
Bingo. Someone on the site has to follow remote content in order for the site to receive it. So long as one person is subscribed, it will land here, and become searchable via regular search.
New Fediverse sites pop up every day. They don’t register with any kind of central authority, and, indeed, if no one on those sites subscribes to remote users or groups, and no one off-site subscribes to local users or groups, the site is in effect unfederated.
Ooh I did not realize this but it makes sense.
A dumb follow-up then if I may… if I don’t see a particular magazine I’m looking for (so it either doesn’t exist or no one from this site has subscribed to it yet), how do I search other instances to see if it exists anywhere else?
If you’re staying here, this won’t be an actual problem going forward, for the most part. There are enough people here to make sure everything except the most niche remote groups are being followed, given a little bit of time.
But as an academic exercise, the easiest way is to use the search bar on another big server. Lemmy.world, Lemmy.one, Lemmy.ml, or beehaw.org should do. Once you’ve found something that’s out there that you want syncing here, copy the originating URL (found via the Fediverse’s rainbow network icon on Lemmy-based sites, or the “copy link to Fediverse” option under “more” on kbin-based sites) and then paste that into kbin.social’s searchbar.
Searching for direct URLs is seemingly how all Fediverse sites allow users to pull in remotely hosted content (its the same process on Mastodon, Misskey, Friendica, PixelFed, and Hubzilla, I believe). Once it’s been pulled in, you can subscribe and keep the content flowing.
Thanks for the primer! Added bonus, I now understand the function of “copy link to fediverse”. Much obliged.