/kbin meta

@Treedrake

Most replies here are correct. To clarify and summarize:

1. The source of truth for a magazine/community is the server name that appears after the magazine name.

e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social <--- the source of truth is kbin.social.
2. ActivityPub and the Fediverse is a "Push" model. What does this mean?

Imagine subscribing to a real-world newspaper or magazine with home delivery(few these days will actually remember this, but try to imagine at least). You will get all new issues delivered to you from the moment you became a subscriber, but you don't get copies of all the newspapers or magazines they have ever printed delivered to you. You only get things moving forward. That's the same with the Fediverse. After you subscribe or follow something, you will get all the new content moving forward, but not what has been created so far.

1. To extend #2, it's a "push once" model. What does that mean? It means that if I create content from my instance (which is not kbin.social) to the magazine kbinMeta@kbin.social, my content will get pushed to kbin.social. Kbin.social, however, will not "re-push" that content to everyone that kbin.social knows is subscribed to the magazine.

So how does my new content that I created in kbinMeta@kbin.social show up on other instances that are not kbin.social? I thought you said your content only gets pushed once?

Correct. However, it's not quite as simple as my instance pushing just to kbin.social. Strictly speaking, (and this is based on experience with other platforms, not specifically how kbin works since I haven't verified this for kbin 100%) when I create the content, my instance will push to kbin.social and all other instances (not users) that my instance knows are also subscribed to specifically kbinMeta@kbin.social. So my instance actually knows a subset of the instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social and will push the new content to each of those other instances. My instance, however, won't necessarily know all the other instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social. As a result, some instances won't see my new content because it wasn't pushed to them.

1. As a result, to let users know about this potential gap, not only does it mean that older content doesn't automatically show up, it also means that not necessarily all new content will show up either.

Note on #3: I haven't fully verified this. This statement is based on how other, non-kbin instances handle federation. This is how "likes" work across platforms like Mastodon, Calckey, etc. I see no evidence (yet) that this is any different for kbin.

I'd like to know exactly how this works as well. I've seen people say there's no real downside to joining a smaller kbin instance as you can still get to other magazines in different instances, but this seems like it would be a drawback if you can't browse old threads in a remote magazine. Or would it eventually pull all the threads in? Would be nice to know what the expected behavior is.

Good question. Magazines that mention this often display a different number of posts compared to the original instance, just as the message says.
I also wonder whether this will be fixed or is there to stay because 100% synchronization is not achievable.

I see it as a just-in-case message, to let you know that you're browsing a non-kbin community and that some federation features may break on either side, even if they are not broken at the moment. There may also be some differences in how posts and comments are sorted between kbin and the original instance, and - I'm not sure if that's exactly how it works - potentially you may see different comments depending on who the two instances federate with.

This was something I noticed as well. All of my subscriptions across other instances are showing this message. At first they were pretty bare showing a handful of posts. After a day or two they seem to be picking up most new content.

Its confusing because I still don't know if kbin is displaying all new content? What about old content does that eventually sync up as well?

From what I’ve come to understand, which I am no expert, I think it means that the posts from those magazines start when someone on kbin subbed to that particular magazine. I had found a pretty small mag on Lemmy that only had maybe 5 posts when going to the original instance but after I subbed to it I would see nothing on kbin. They made 1 post after I subbed to it and that is the only post to show up on kbin, even to today even though it’s been a week or so since I subbed to it.

I had read somewhere on here that when it comes to the individual communities, kbin will only federate with that magazine after one person on here subs to it, after that anyone in kbin will see posts from that day forward.

Again, I could be very wrong, I’m just guessing based on my experience.

TLDR: the magazine only shows posts from when someone subbed forward so it will always be incomplete, I think.

This kind of an issue with Mastodon-Misskey interaction too.

This is a "feature", I think backfilling would be still a nice to have with kbin.