Hey Reddit refugees! You may have noticed that kbin.social is taking forever to load because of all of the traffic it’s getting.
Luckily, there are a few other kbin instances that you can use right now! kilioa.org and fedia.io have recently popped up over the last few days, and they’re still running smoothly during the Reddit blackout. They’re also still federating with Lemmy, so you can see posts from beehaw.org and lemmy.ml (federation is currently disabled on kbin.social due to the cloudflare protection).
noob question, how can I comment on kilioa.org or fedia.io from kbin.social?
Good news, you don’t need to do anything special. If you post to a magazine that a user on those instances subscribes to, they’ll see your content; and same in reverse where you’ll see the content you’re subscribed to regardless of the instance that content is posted from. If you comment on a post that they posted, they’ll see that too.
Yeah, but how?
Let’s say I want to reply to this thread:
https://kilioa.org/m/apexlegends/t/87/Welcome-to-Apex-Legends
I’m asked to log-in, but credentials from kbin.social do not work, so, how do I do it?
Basically you need to go to that thread using the kbin.social UI, that means avoiding following links directly to external instances.
Make sure you follow that magazine by using the search on kbin.social to search for “apexlegends@kilioa.org”, you can click on the name in the search result to go to the community without going out to kilioa.org where it would want you to log in with a kilioa account. You will also see the posts from there showing up on your feed here on kbin.social, where you will be able to directly interact from kbin.social using your kbin.social account.
Here’s the link to apexlegends@kilioa.org page on kbin.social, which lets you use your kbin.social to vote and comment: https://kbin.social/m/apexlegends@kilioa.org - you should have landed there when you click on the community name when you see content show up on kbin.social
Hope this helps and isn’t too complicated of an explanation - in short if you can navigate to posts and communities by clicking on the name of the posts or communities, it should show you the remote content but within kbin.social. If you follow links to posts or communities that other people post in comments, they might be accidentally linking you out to the external instance, so that’s what you should watch out for to avoid confusion.
How is this going to work when links show up in Google? Let’s say I’m going to search for some “how to” guide on Google and the first result points to a post on Kilioa or any other fediverse instance, I will be redirected there where I didn’t sign up. Do I still need to sign up to different instances or copy the url to my instance?
I love the idea, but is this not practical at all, or am I missing something?
The “correct” answer currently would be to copy the link to the instance you have an account with if you want to interact with it.
I would expect that, as federated services get more traction and are inhabited by a larger proportion of non-hobbyists, these clunky areas will get more work. The majority of people using these services now are hobbyists and they’re willing to accept the jank for something that they want. Most “normal” people wouldn’t, but there haven’t been very many “normal” people in federated spaces yet - in no small part because of the jank being a barrier to entry.
You need to find that thread on kbin.social and reply from kbin.social.
Here’s that same thread on kbin.social:
https://kbin.social/m/apexlegends@kilioa.org/t/7981/Welcome-to-Apex-Legends
And yes, there definitely needs to be an easier way to navigate this stuff. I’m sure someone’s gonna figure something out eventually.
Thanks for sharing that info - I signed up for an account on kbin.social just a while ago - are the logins unique & federated? How does the system handle it if another user signs up with my handle on fedia.io for example?
If they are not unique, I’m assuming it prepends my user with something like https://kbin.social/u/massacre to the post or uses @massacre or similar? Thanks for helping everyone as we figure this out.
So just like email, your username is the full @user@domain. In your case your username is @massacre@kbin.social. A user at a different instance with the same name is a different user. Just like massacre@hotmail.com and massacre@gmail.com are different
You’re just about right, at least as I understand it. You are @massacre (at massacre at kbin.social) to the rest of the fediverse. They would be @massacre (at massacre at lemmy.world) or whatever. The UI just obfuscates that a bit.
The instance name is part of your handle. Think of it like an email address. With a domain part.