Anyone know why I keep getting this message when I try to access a community/magazine through kbin?
This is a great question and certainly confusing for those not used to the federation aspect.
A quick explanation:
If the magazine has a domain name at the end of it that isn’t the same as your kbin account, then it means that the magazine’s “home” is on a different instance.
Example:
technology@fedia.ioThat means that all the instances (servers) will push content and updates to the “home” instance and receive updates and content from the “home” instance.
When an instance (server) subscribes for the first time to a magazine on a different instance, it will start to receive new content from that moment forward. However, older content isn’t pushed out to the newly subscribing instance. You can think of it as subscribing to a newsletter or something. You won’t automatically be sent copies of all the older content but you will get new things moving forward.
You can have older content show up by manually entering the direct link to the older content into the search bar on your home instance (in this case kbin.social) but it’s a manual process.
That why the message shows up about “may not be complete” since it doesn’t know how much total content there is on the remote instance.
This topic (called “backfilling posts/contents”) is one that has been discussed on the Fediverse for some time.
Thank you for the explanation! Interestingly, older content is showing up for me but not newer content. Your explanation makes it seem like older content would be “delayed”, but is the same true for newer content?
Older content won’t be delayed. It won’t show up at all, unless someone on another server boosts it.
Newer content can be delayed just due to volume of traffic.
this isnt right, new content from the home instance still isnt displaying when viewed from kbin
It’s because kbin hasn’t fully imported all the content that would be displayed on that page in the actual instance.
It’s not local community, and as the federation in kbin is still spotty, you’re gonna keep seeing until it improves.
I have simple goals trying to migrate from reddit: find and join communities, and see and participate in the content of those communities. So far the fediverse has been broken on both aspects, there are communities that are invisible to the search engine, by design, and content that is invisible to any other instance.
On kbin.social, a lot of communities should be available since it’s a big server. Which ones are you trying to find?
Yeah, i started on some lemmy instances and it was a problem there, so far i havent run into it on kbin yet. But then, theres content in lemmy communities that dont show up on kbin
Which lemmy instances were you on? It could be you were on smaller instances? Kbin.social is a large instance, so most of the forums are already added there. They can improve by making the UI more clear hopefully in the future, but for the smaller instances, you have to do a search for the link of the forum you want, then subscribe to it. Thats the only way it becomes searchable on the instance. Since kbin is working for you, stay on kbin. I’m using kbin.social too and a small instance called lemmy.studio. If you have more questions about adding the community/magazine, make sure to ask :)
What kind of content do you mean is missing?
No I get how it works now and how to add communities that dont appear in search, but it’s dumb, because I go to one of several sites that lists all of the fediverse communities to find the url to add…why cant the instances access that list of communities?
as for missing content, if you go to many of the communities from kbin, you’ll see “The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.” If you go to the original instance you’ll see many posts that dont show up when viewed from kbin. some communities will not show any posts from the original instance on kbin. And even if I go to the trouble of hopping multiple instances to see more of the content on those communities, Im signed up on kbin, I cant interact with the content from another instance.
I’ve heard from others that it’s just lag. I think it’s the same way from lemmy account browsing a kbin magazine, they just don’t have that message. It does show up, just takes more time to sync up. I kind of ignore the message. I’m not sure what can be done to improve the experience, but idk, feel free to swap to lemmy, I haven’t felt the consequence of that yet even though I’m mostly on kbin and browsing primarily lemmy communities.
It is kind of a sucky experience at the moment like if you google search something, and the article is from say lemmy.one, but you’re on lemmy.world, then the link goes to lemmy.one, and you still can’t actually make any comments/upvote/save, etc. You’d have to like prepend your lemmy.world site before it in some way so you can actually see the version of that article on your server and be able to interact. That extra step is definitely a con, but there could be ways to improve that in the future.
Like maybe there could be a website that lets you type in which server your account is on - say lemmy.world. Then you log in, without having to navigate to the correct website, and maybe when you do go to an article that’s on lemmy.one, then when you go to that site, it checks if you’re logged in to a fediverse server (maybe by checking a cookie?), and then takes you instead to the lemmy.world version of that lemmy.one article. I think there’s possibilities that the UI experience can change in the future to not be more seamless
I’m on Lemmy, but my instance was defederated from beehaw.org which is where I got a lot of my content from, so I don’t want to deal with juggling accounts, or submitting an essay to request access to another instance.
