As one Admin to another, I'm sad to hear that we're losing a good instance. And, I'm sorry that people ruined your fun.

Thanks for all you've done. All the best to you.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you'll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it's quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.

• I ignored the thing about kbin.localhost and everything on https://feddit.online is working well, also in my test environment. So, you can probably skip it too.

• The "var" folder will not be found in the kbin folder so the chown will not work. What I did, and from other comments that I've read, I think this is what it should have been, "sudo chown 82:82 /var"

Here's my .env file without the secrets.
Where I mention a long secret, you can use this Linux command to generate a strong 32-character secret
openssl rand -hex 32

kbin variables

SERVER_NAME="feddit.online"
KBIN_DOMAIN=feddit.online
KBIN_TITLE=/kbin
KBIN_DEFAULT_LANG=en
KBIN_FEDERATION_ENABLED=true
KBIN_CONTACT_EMAIL=admin@feddit.online
KBIN_SENDER_EMAIL=notifications@feddit.online
KBIN_JS_ENABLED=true
KBIN_REGISTRATIONS_ENABLED=true
KBIN_API_ITEMS_PER_PAGE=25
#Frankly unsure if the next line does anything
KBIN_STORAGE_URL=https://media.feddit.online
KBIN_META_TITLE="Kbin Lab"
KBIN_META_DESCRIPTION="content aggregator and micro-blogging platform for the fediverse"
KBIN_META_KEYWORDS="kbin, content agregator, open source, fediverse"
KBIN_HEADER_LOGO=false
KBIN_CAPTCHA_ENABLED=true

Redis

REDIS_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
REDIS_DNS=redis://${REDIS_PASSWORD}@redis

S3 storage (optional) THIS DOES NOTHING. TURNS OUT IT ONLY WORKS WITH AWS S3 AND I WANT TO USE WASAB

SO THESE SETTINGS ARE NOT USED

S3_KEY=<key>
S3_SECRET=<secret>
S3_BUCKET=media.feddit.online
S3_REGION=us-east-1
S3_VERSION=latest

oAuth (optional)

OAUTH_FACEBOOK_ID=
OAUTH_FACEBOOK_SECRET=
OAUTH_GOOGLE_ID=
OAUTH_GOOGLE_SECRET=
OAUTH_GITHUB_ID=
OAUTH_GITHUB_SECRET=

###> symfony/framework-bundle ###
APP_ENV=prod
APP_SECRET=427f5e2940e5b2472c1b44b2d06e0525
###< symfony/framework-bundle ###

###> doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###

Format described at https://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/doctrine-dbal/en/latest/reference/configuration.html#connecting-using-a-url

IMPORTANT: You MUST configure your server version, either here or in config/packages/doctrine.yaml

==========

POSTGRES_DB=kbin
POSTGRES_USER=kbin
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
POSTGRES_VERSION=13
DATABASE_URL="postgresql://${POSTGRES_USER}:${POSTGRES_PASSWORD}@127.0.0.1:5432/${POSTGRES_DB}?serverVersion=${POSTGRES_VERSION}&charset=utf8"
###< doctrine/doctrine-bundle ###

###> symfony/messenger ###

Choose one of the transports below

RABBITMQ_PASSWORD=password_here_that_you_make_up
MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=amqp://kbin:${RABBITMQ_PASSWORD}@rabbitmq:5672/%2f/messages
#MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=doctrine://default
#MESSENGER_TRANSPORT_DSN=redis://${REDIS_PASSWORD}@redis:6379/messages
###< symfony/messenger ###

###> symfony/mailer ###
#MAILER_DSN=smtp://localhost
###< symfony/mailer ###

###> symfony/mailgun-mailer ###

MAILER_DSN=mailgun://KEY:DOMAIN@default?region=us

#MAILER_DSN=mailgun+smtp://postmaster@sandboxxx.mailgun.org:key@default?region=us
MAILER_DSN=smtp://notifications@feddit.online:<password here>@smtp.dreamhost.com:587
###< symfony/mailgun-mailer ###

###> symfony/mercure-bundle ###

See https://symfony.com/doc/current/mercure.html#configuration

The URL of the Mercure hub, used by the app to publish updates (can be a local URL)

MERCURE_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure

The public URL of the Mercure hub, used by the browser to connect

MERCURE_PUBLIC_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure

The secret used to sign the JWTs

MERCURE_JWT_SECRET=long_password_here_that_you_make_up

Docker

CADDY_MERCURE_URL=https://feddit.online/.well-known/mercure
CADDY_MERCURE_JWT_SECRET=long_password_here_that_you_make_up
###< symfony/mercure-bundle ###

###> nelmio/cors-bundle ###
CORS_ALLOW_ORIGIN='^https?://(kbin.localhost|127.0.0.1)(:[0-9]+)?$'
###< nelmio/cors-bundle ###

###> symfony/lock ###

Choose one of the stores below

postgresql+advisory://db_user:db_password@localhost/db_name

LOCK_DSN=flock
###< symfony/lock ###

###> lexik/jwt-authentication-bundle ###
JWT_SECRET_KEY=%kernel.project_dir%/config/jwt/private.pem
JWT_PUBLIC_KEY=%kernel.project_dir%/config/jwt/public.pem
JWT_PASSPHRASE=
###< lexik/jwt-authentication-bundle ###

###> meteo-concept/hcaptcha-bundle ###
HCAPTCHA_SITE_KEY=<key>
HCAPTCHA_SECRET=<secret>
###< meteo-concept/hcaptcha-bundle ###

For others reading this, there are 2 others that I know well: https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io

You can find bunches here: https://kbin.pub/en

RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server

Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in

There's a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:

https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
https://bigrelay.social/inbox

In the Administration section, there's a Relay page where you can put these in.

For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn't enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.

For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/

Hope this helps

kbin.social must still be having severe problems. Ernest posted this a day ago:

    ernest@kbin.social

    We're experiencing massive delays on the queues today. We're actively working on a solution,
    and I think we're getting really close. Just wanted to let you know ;)

One thing you might try doing is switching to a different KBIN server. The smaller ones are probably Federating just fine with Lemmy and the other KBIN instances, although everyone will have trouble Federating with kbin.social.

I wonder why Ernest doesn't turn off new sign ups on kbin.social and ask people who want to join KBIN to do so on a different instance so the problems there aren't exasperated?

1. Before joining an instance you can go to their /terms page and see if they will tolerate you because you're just making stuff up and your ignorance will hurt and endanger people. Most KBIN and Lemmy servers will, fortunately, not willingly host you because of this.
2. I won't tolerate you, so don't join my instance. So, 1 down.

I think you perfectly got it right. Everything that you wrote includes exactly the same questions and conclusions I've come to.

"It seems like it’s trying to be a link aggregator and a microblogging software"

I think too this is its purpose; To to be a link and content aggregator plus a microblogging platform. Therefore it confusingly has both Reddit-like and Mastodon-like behavior.

It's almost there. If it automatically aggregated magazines and communities into one place on a server as well, I think it would achieve its purpose as an aggregator. For now, there could be a dozen magazines and communities with the same subject that aren't connected because instances have no automated view of what is on other instances and so redundant magazines get created.

Whether we need what it's trying to be, I don't know. For me, I use Mastodon and so I haven't used anything on KBIN except the magazines, at least, so far, in my one week of experience.

I'm surprised it offer the option to sign up with Google since I don't have that enabled. Only email address registration works now. I'll have to play with Federated sign ups. Maybe this weekend

The cost depends on who you use for hosting. I use Digital Ocean which is a bit more expensive than others, like Hetzner, but Digital Ocean has some additional services that make life a bit easier, so I use it.

I also use Cloudflare for caching and protection, but it's free for hobbyists and small businesses.

There are some small costs for keeping snapshots. Less than a couple of dollars/month.

At Digital Ocean, a 4 vCPU, 8GB server is $48/month. Snapshots might be a couple more dollars a month. I'm currently running KBIN on a server half this size but I will be bumping it up to the $48/month option in the next few days.

Another incidental cost would be domain name registration.

I can't think of anything else you would need to pay for.

Yeah. I noticed the typo right after I uploaded the message. I quickly edited it but I find that changes made to a message take a while to replace the original.

I currently have 303 magazines, 301 pointing to several other KBIN and Lemmy instances. I visited several instances and manually linked to magazines that had a lot of users. Magazines from anywhere else can be added by using the global search (the search icon at the very top), not the search associated with the magazine listings, and using the full name, like @linux

The magazines can be seen at https://feddit.online/magazines

I just tried it myself on kbin.social and you are right. If you use the search at the top of the page then it will not find your magazine. If you use the search that is part of the magazine page, then it will find your magazine.

I think your question is specifically about the search at the top of the page, the global search, correct? If so, yeah, it doesn't appear to find magazines. I don't know if it's by design or a defect.

I also tried finding your new magazine from two other KBIN instances, https://feddit.online and https://fedia.io and in both instances, using either the search at the top of the page or the search on the magazine page, I was not able to see your new magazine if I didn't add @kbin.social to the name (if I already knew where it was). And I don't think they will ever be able to because I have been unable to find any magazines that exist external to any KBIN instance that is not already added to the local server unless I first visited the instance where it exists so I can give the domain name as well with the exact name in the search.

It sucks. If I want to see, for example, all magazines about Linux across KBIN and Lemmy, either because it's part of the magazine name, or it's in a magazine's description, I don't see how to do this.

This is a bummer. When someone gets onto a new instance and they want to subscribe to an interesting magazine, I don't see any way that they can find them outside of their local instance.

I'd love to be wrong about this. Has anyone had a different experience?

I know this is kind of off topic but it relates so I've extended the conversation.