/kbin meta

I've been using #Kbin for a while since reddit exodus, but it wasn't until like a week ago that I decided to create an account. It's been great, it is the best way for me to experience the #fediverse, I used mastodon and firefish before, but I think I like more the community format, and not losing the possibility to follow accounts and see their posts it's just awesome, one of the reasons why I chose it over #Lemmy.

Another project I'm really invested is #peertube, I tried to follow a channel and it shows on kbin with the magazine format and on lemmy like a community. Why is that? Wouldn't make more sense to be a profile? While being a magazine/community, everyone is able to post there. (At least to my understanding)

I was looking at @dot_social and in Kbin, it does not show any content, nor does @thelinuxexperiment_channel, while on lemmy @thelinuxexperiment_channel does show the description of the video, but @dot_social doesn't but it shows a post made from mastodon by one of the members of flipboard.

Is this something intended to be like this? I don't really understand the #ActivityPub at a low level, recently I was told it has two formats notes and pages, does it have to do with this?

I started on kbin.social with this account, then moved out to kbin.cafe to try to avoid overloading the flagship instance and help out with decentralization. Then the admin went inactive, so I fled to kbin.run. This is active and I am satisfied, but it is also running Mbin, a fork of Kbin. I'd like to try regular Kbin again, but I don't want to go to the flagship instance and be yet another person concentrated there, only further centralizing the Fediverse when it was probably supposed to be decentralized. Is there a known instance with an active mod?

I also posted this already to kbinMeta through kbin.run but got very few responses, so I decided to check kbin.social in case something happened with the federation. It didn't show up when searching by New on kbin.social, so here I am, dragging out the old kbin.social account and posting again.

For some reason, my comments occasionally duplicate when I post them. Only started experiencing this issue today.

Not sure how long it's been there, but it's finally there. Nice QoL improvement.

Currently moderate m/Cars, m/AskKbin, m/RedditMigration, and while testing out to see if federation works through my lemmy.world dummy account, I can't seem to find m/AskKbin like I used to, same with m/cars.

is anyone else facing this? This is negatively affecting both Kbin mainly and also Lemmy. Would be great if this can be addressed.

EDIT: Check this announcement from lemmy.world's admins 3 months ago.

But the "spam" is no longer the issue, as ever since then, mod requests system has been implemented, allowing many new moderators to takeover communities with inactive moderators, as a result allowing spam to exist within these communities.

So I do hope lemmy.world admins can bring back to showing Kbin's communities, although for now they have seem to done in a manner that us from Kbin can see their content, but people from there can't see our communities.

Check my post here and do support it, thank you.

Full credit goes to: /u/Pamasich for working on it and helping me out with CSS, the below CSS I will mention is fully made by he/her with my feedback, again thank you!

To all kbin magazine moderators,

Below is the CSS you can use to include your own banner of choice to your Kbin magazine/community:

h1[hidden] {
    height: 12vh;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png);
    background-size: cover;
    background-position: center;
    display: block;
    color: transparent;
    user-select: none;
}

DEMO: Check m/cars using this CSS

NOTE: Change height's value according to your needs to fit your banner accordingly. You should also replace the image link in the above CSS with your choice, I used imgur to upload the image there, and copy/paste the image's address/link here.

This is what we have so far thanks to /u/Pamasich, and I hope this comes to rescue all of the moderators just like myself.

Why should you add a banner? This simply makes the community look more appealing and welcoming for users to participate, depending on what kind of topic your magazine is based on, a banner is invaluable.

And if you guys have your own further modifications to the given CSS above, feel free to mention them in the comments so everyone else can find this thread useful in the future!

In the world of kbin where the stories lie,
and where users let the pesky bots to die,
you can find many different jolly magazines,
to enjoy everything for weeks and weeks.

At this time of the year a celebration arrives.
Christmas comes, postponing weeps and cries.
It tries to close in, into every heart and
soul,
with lots of sweets and candy it fills up the bowls!

But is Christmas truly welcome at kbin’s doors?
you see - one thing is missing on these floors!
We do not have a place for Christmas to stay!
We don’t have a magazine for it, at this day!

Who among us will be the One, the brave soul?
Who will create the magazine, to undo this foul?
Who will save our Christmas in our fediverse?
It needs to belong also in our growing universe!

While UI tweaks definitely aren't the top development priority as of now, the header currently feels a bit cluttered and unintuitive. When @ernest does get around to improving it, here are a few changes I suggest:

• Add a number next to the All Content tab like the Threads & Microblog tabs do. This would help make what it does much clearer.
• Add a number to the People tab if possible. Right now, it's not at all obvious that this tab depends on the magazine you're on, and giving it a number like the Threads and Microblog tabs would help communciate that.
• Have something I can click to pull up a list of my subscribed magazines and favorited collections. Maybe include that list with the current channel list button (the one that lets you select between All, Subscribed, Moderated, and Favorites).
• Have a notification bell that you can click to see notifications, like what KES does.
• Replace the Magazines & Collections button with a single tab, which could be called "Explore" or "Browse Magazines". I'd combine this with my suggestions in this post: cleaning up the sort options and just having 3 tabs for magazines, abandoned magazines, and collections.

There used to be an interface for quickly searching available magazines, subscribing, seeing population counts, etc. Does this not exist anymore, or am I just missing it?

With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't think those are the main issues. Imo, Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.

Let's start with these three statements, which should hopefully seem pretty reasonable:

1. It's dangerous for one entity to dominate the activity pool. If, say, one person's instance contributes 95% of the content, then the rest of the fediverse becomes dependent on that instance. Should that instance defederate, everyone else will have to either live with 1/20 of the content or move to that instance, and good luck getting the fediverse to grow after that. By making everyone dependent on their instance for content, that one person gains the power to kill the fediverse by defederating.
2. Profit-driven media should not be the primary way people interact with the fediverse. Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances. Furthermore, lots of people went to the fediverse to avoid the influence of these large corporations on social media, and it should still uphold this purpose.
3. People should enter the fediverse with an idea of its purpose. If someone's on the fediverse, they should be aware of that fact and aware of the fediverse's goal of decentralized media. People should think of the fediverse as every instance contributing to a decentralized pool of content, not other instances tapping in to their instance as the main pool.

Now, let's apply these to federating with Threads:

1. This point alone is more than enough reason to defederate from Threads. Threads has millions more active users than all of the fediverse combined, and it's in much better of a position to grow its userbase due to its integration with Instagram. If we federate with Threads, it will dominate content. And that's not mentioning all of the company accounts on Threads that people have expressed an interest in following. While all of this new activity may seem like a good thing, it puts everyone in a position of dependence on Threads. People are going to get used to the massive increase in content from Threads, and if it ever defederates, tons of people on other instances are going to leave with it. Essentially, Zuckerberg will eventually be able to kill the fediverse's growth prospects when he wishes and nab a bunch of users in the process, both of which he has incentive to do.
2. If we federate with Threads, Threads is undoubtedly going to seem like the easiest way to access our pool of content (at least on the microblog side of things). Newcomers already get intimidated by having to choose a Mastodon instance; give them access via essentially just logging into their Instagram account, and they'll take that over the non-corporate alternatives. Federation with Threads means that most of the people who want to see the content we make are going to go to Threads, meaning platforms like Mastodon & Kbin will be less able to grow.
3. When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account. I'd bet that when Threads gets federation up and running, most people on Threads won't have a clue that they're on the fediverse. Those who do know will probably think of it as all of these small, niche platforms that are kinda offshoots of Threads. That's not the mentality that should pervade the fediverse.

I think that all of this is makes defederating from Threads a no-brainer. If we don't, we'll depend on Meta for activity, platforms that aren't Threads won't grow, and the fediverse will be primarily composed of people who don't have even a vague idea of the purpose behind it. I want more activity as much as the next guy, but that activity being beholden to the corporations most of us want to avoid seems like the worst-case scenario.

"But why not defederate later?"

If we don't defederate now, I don't think we're ever going to defederate. Once the fediverse becomes dependent on Threads for most of its content, there's no going back. If anything, it'd get worse as Threads outpaces the rest of the fediverse in growth and thus makes up a larger and larger share of activity. Look at how desperate everyone is for activity — even if it means the fediverse being carried by Meta — right now, when we're not used to it. Trying to get instances to defederate later will be nigh impossible.

"Why not just block Threads yourself?"

Even if that were a feature, it completely ignores the problem. I don't dislike the people on Threads, and I don't think their content will necessarily be horrendous. The threat is people on non-corporate fediverse platforms becoming dependent on Daddy Zuck for content, and that's something that can only be fought with defederation.

To close, imagine if Steve Huffman said that Reddit was going to implement ActivityPub and federate with Lemmy & Kbin. Would you want the fediverse to be dependent on Reddit for activity? Would you trust Huffman, who has all the incentive in the world to pull the plug on federation once everyone on Lemmy & Kbin is hooked to Reddit content? This is the situation we're in, just with a different untrustworthy corporation. The fediverse should not be at the mercy of Threads, Reddit, The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, or any other corporate platform. It's better to grow slowly but surely than to put what we have in the hands of these people.

I currently have to stare at what is presumably @RichardvanDaalen being anally penetrated on the main page, no matter that I have blocked him, and no matter that I have hit refresh several times.

I could post a screenshot, but you'd probably rather I didn't.

Posting pictures from Lemmy.world since I still have trouble uploading on Kbin, but sometimes the pictures don't appear as a thumbnail on Kbin regardless of how long I wait for it to federate. Clicking on it still opens the direct image link, but there's no thumbnail when scrolling past in the feed. Is there a max image size or something I'm hitting for federation?

Been helping moderate some many huge communities here on kbin such as m/AskKbin, m/Redditmigration and so on, trying to contribute in ways I can.

And over the course of my time here at Kbin, here are some of the features I really, really wish comes to Kbin one day.

• Banners for magazines: Right now we moderators are only able to make new logos and use that for our communities, but unlike Reddit or Lemmy, Kbin has been lacking the ability to make a banner apart from the Logo, the banner would help a lot more with not only the customization of the magazine but the overall appeal to it. This of-course should be optional as not every community would be going for this kind of look based on it's topic, but for the majority, this can really add more to the experience.

• More optional applicable permissions to moderators when owners add them: Right now, when I add a moderator, they can only delete, ban and moderate posts in general, but accessing the mod panel is impossible unless you are an admin, so this means, moderators can't help owners with community rules, description, or even attach a new logo. There should atleast be some kind of supermod option or role that I could enable for the mods, so that this remains an optional but needed feature for some (and I am one of them).

• Community Engagement: This is just, to put it lightly, lacking. For example, if someone make a really good post, everyone else is immediately ready to upvote/downvote and jump on the comments, but taking that first step of posting a good thread is just really, lacking. One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight. To solve this, we could implement online status (OPTIONAL, I know not everyone will be into this), but we seriously need to figure out a way to make the site look more live and active, online status like Discord or Reddit (oh yes, reddit has this too, but this is optional and can be disabled) can really help add a more live and active feel to the community, this can in-directly encourage more engagement and the users will feel more inclined to particpate when they see others online.

Reddit also has some other features like showing "X number of people are viewing this thread", again adding that more of a live engaging feeling to the platform.

• Wiki: I seriously hope we can get a dedicated area to put our wiki stuff similar to on Reddit, right now I have so far done this by making a thread and pinning it, but a wiki built into the sidepanel would a lot more seamless and integrated, plus people wouldn't have to look for in multiple places and will be good to have rules, description and everything in the sidepanel.

If yall have more, add them in the comments, this is what I remember so far.

Thank you for reading!

With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site. The site is really not suited for mobile devices however, and there have been minimal user-facing changes in the last few months.

I know Ernest is trying his best, however with the current pace I worry about growth (and I'm not alone, as shown by mbin). If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone. Some of the gripes are below:

• With the "+" button, what is the difference between the four types? I know the answer (as do experienced kbin users) but it is not "newbie friendly"

• When you go back, you are forced to randomly scroll up and down the feed to find the post you were just looking at (this has been an issue for months)

• Images load when they enter the viewport instead of just before (also, images are not cached and as a result they need to load again when you back out of a post, leading to excessive data usage)

• A slight but very noticeable lag when backing out of posts or clicking on them (presumably while data fetching is happening)

... etc. There are more (such as issues with certain HTML / code templating stuff, seeing "span" and other tags instead of the actual code block), but these are the main ones in my eyes. I was assuming that there would be fixes by this point for these sort of issues, but I haven't noticed the interface change for a hot minute and it's seriously hampering the experience (as a solely-mobile user).

When can we expect stuff like this to be addressed? I don't mean to be a downer or belittle the efforts by the kbin contributors (I love kbin, that's why I care enough to make this post!), but this has all been consistent since July and I worry that these will just become cruft that never gets addressed and will simply be something new users need to "deal with" or "learn", when we are the only site that has this unusual flow and these bugs.

Thank you!

Every single poster I've seen responding to articles on Lemmy and kbin from this site have been shitty, angry little pricks with regressive takes on everything. We need to block these trolls before they ruin engagement from well-reasoned humans.

Anyone else not being able to find their comment in a thread?
I have a notification of two replies but I cannot find even my own comment let alone their replies.

#kbinMeta

Posting to raise awareness of this behavior with kbin. Maybe it's something Ernest can address in the ActivityPub rewrite, maybe it's something that doesn't need to be (or can be) addressed at all.

On Mastodon, if you don't like your instance or it's in the process of shutting down, you can migrate your account to another instance. I was aware of this feature, but I hadn't considered how such a move federates to kbin, until now.

I had blocked a user of a niche Mastodon instance, and then they migrated to a larger instance. After the migration, I started seeing their posts again, with my blocklist only containing the old account, not the new one.

Now to my knowledge, this feature of Mastodon is not a standard component of ActivityPub. I think it's a great feature actually, but I'm concerned that enables a sort of harassment whereby an attacker can harass someone, get blocked, migrate to another instance, and continue harassing their target. This feature being non-standard, I don't know how it gets broadcast to other instances, let alone if/how kbin should handle it.

Should kbin automatically update blocklists with the newly migrated account name and instance name? That feels like the ideal solution, but I don't know how feasible it is. Just wanted to open this up for discussion and awareness.

Should blocking a user still allow them to vote on your posts? I'd rather have nothing to do with particular users, and it seems that they continue to show up in the activity for every single post I make around kbin.

I've been working for the past week on a new kbin app. At the moment, it's just a prototype and only the "Feed" view has content (you can't sign into an account or post anything yet); you can see threads, thread images, thread comments, thread links, and thread votes/boosts. You can also change the "Theme Mode" and "Instance Host" in the settings.

Here's a link to the source code (contributions welcome for those that know flutter): github.com/jwr1/interstellar.
For testers, here's the link to the latest working build: github.com/jwr1/interstellar/releases (AppImage and APK).

Feel free to post any bugs or suggestions in the comments, on GitHub, or on the Interstellar magazine.

Again, this is just a prototype. If someone else is working on a better kbin app, I might just use that instead.

@testing Can you repeat your tests regarding tags between kbin and other instances? It should be significantly better ;)

#kbinMeta

https://kbin.social/u/Zamilhost has been posting a bunch of spam posts for free movie downloads with suspicious links that use a link shortener.
Edit: There is a second one. https://kbin.social/u/kolomonggo

A few days ago I downvoted someone's comment, and the next day I happened to notice every single comment I've ever made had at least one downvote. All from the person I dared to downvote the ONE time. I straight up asked why they did it, and they seem to think I'm an "obvious" troll account that "apparently just exist to downvote other people". I assure you I'm no troll account, and ironically don't really downvote all that often.
I know the topic of public downvotes has been discussed before, but I never used to care either way. Now I'm kinda leaning in the "I don't like it" side. Honestly, I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little offended, maybe even attacked. Also, there goes all my imaginary internet points. Lol
Has anyone else had something like this happen to them, or am I just unlucky?

@ernest, I just have a quick question. Looking at the kbin oauth documentation on codeberg and swagger, I got the impression that an authorization client needs to be registered on a server before a user can start using the API. This would be fine if kbin weren't federated, but what if a user wants to sign in to a different instance that doesn't have the oauth client I set up? Basically, I'm asking if there's a way to use the API without setting up the oauth client, but still be able to login to an account. Thanks

#kbinMeta

Today, there may be transient issues with voting, counters, etc. I'm working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Also, there might be 2-3 brief interruptions in the website's operation. Thank you for your patience!

@ernest RTR#32 Voting Bug Report:

Wasn't able to upvote, downvote, or boost anything in my sub feed without getting an error.

• Opening a new tab fixed the problem.
• Refreshing the page fixed the problem.
• Going back to previous pages and then returning did not fix the problem.

#kbinMeta