Federation is the process that pulls content in from other servers (e.g. lemmy.world, beehaw.org, fedia.io, mastodon.social, etc.) All of these different servers can communicate and share content with each other.
If you turn federation off, you only see content from your "home" server, which in your case is kbin.social (in mine it's remy.city).
There are ways to write links in such a way that they should keep you on your instance, but I'm not too familiar with them. I wonder if it would be possible to "precheck" links that load on a page, and if any point to content that can be federated, kick off the process of pulling that content in. Then when the user clicks that link, it would take them to the content on their home instance, where they can interact. That way users wouldn't need to deal with formatting links a certain way, it would just happen automatically (if your home instance software supports it).
That's the one--thanks!
That's a good breakdown, thanks! The bad thing is that I could see these issues happening even unintentionally, with the fact that we have a few large instances vs. many smaller ones. So far we seem to have everyone running the same code, straight from the repositories (at least functionality wise). For my own kbin instance though, I have technically changed things. I changed some code to make a custom logo appear nicely, I've added some padding here and there, etc. I have also thought about implementing an automatic job that clears posts tagged with 'nsfw' or other related things in the microblog feed.
I might implement that, and then submit it to the kbin devs if it works well. There's no guarantee that other admins/devs would do that as well. If they implement a feature that makes their community more popular, they would seem to have incentive to keep it private. And that's where stuff like Meta comes in. If they implement rigorous content filtering, I doubt that would make it into the actual AP protocol. It would be the differentiating factor between using their 'safe' instance, vs. going rugged on an independent instance.
They could say "we implement the ActivityPub protocol as specified" and they wouldn't be wrong. They would just have some extras added onto the top to make their experience more polished. Easy to do when you are a for-profit and have plenty of devs. They would just argue that those are the features that make their interface different, like kbin and lemmy are different.
The only way around it is for communities to agree that they will run the software as released, maybe with only cosmetic changes. Any improvements to functionality should be submitted to the devs so that the wider community can benefit.
A community can be made of very few people. It just takes a desire to keep it going!
I want to get into ham radio. Just like the fediverse, it's decentralized, and it's the original way to chat across the globe!
Wow, similar thing for me, I have a 'bicuspid aortic valve's which means the aortic valve in my heart is a bit funky and doesn't push blood through as it should. And that makes the FAA also seem me medically unfit. I think there is a process to get a medical exemption, but with the cost of getting a license so high already, I just decided to stick with MSFS. I get to 'fly' a 737 like I wanted as a kid, learn all about it, but I'm not shelling out thousands and years of my life (okay, maybe I am shelling out some money but I like pretty airports!)
That's something I want to get into. I want to set up that self hosted software, forget what it's called, but you can integrate with IoT devices just like you can with a mainstream assistant service like Google Home.
What I really want to do is automate my blinds, which are the chain loop type, so I can say "house, open the living room blinds" like they did in Smart House, the Disney channel original movie (or maybe that was Home Alone 4, but we don't talk about that one). I found a little motorized device that integrates with these chain blinds but it was a bit pricey. Of course if I tried to make it with my own Arduino etc it would be an ugly mess.
I'm in the process of getting those working--I've had some issues with the captcha plugin so far.
Good idea, I just looked however and they've changed the instances page to: https://fedidb.org/software/kbin. So any server that has federated with any other listed is on there, I believe. More Kbin instances out there than I thought!
On Lemmy that is. Kbin I believe replicates everything (unless I set my server up wrong). My server at the moment pulls in around 1.5 GB a day it seems. There is a pull request open on the kbin git repo for a feature to auto-remove old media. Personally I'd like the ability to turn on/off media replication. If an instance wants a complete copy in case of defederation/disconnection somehow, they can opt in and mirror all media that comes in. Most servers should just link to the original image source on the originating instance though.
There is also Kbin (that I use) which can communicate with Lemmy. Since they both share the "sections/communities/groups with threads in them" concept, they can interact pretty well.
I've seen folks calling it the "Threadiverse" because of the different software that servers run.