I mean, you know they aren't going to have adequate content moderation because they ALREADY don't. Lack of moderation is the #1, #2, and #3 best reasons to defederate.
Wanting to see proof before taking positive action is valid and sensible. But you can't pretend it isn't something you can already make reasonable inferences about. This is not a new unknown and pretending it is is ridiculous.
Email servers do not automatically feed content into and pull content out of your system. They only send and deliver to specific people at specific addresses. Federation is a firehose. You can close the hydrant before or after it gets hooked up to city water, but at the end of the day only people that chose to do things the sensible way will have dry socks and no water damage.
this is just not true, sorry. instances only retrieve/pushed specified actions/actors. . pretending it is is ridiculous. this is now a new unknown, this is how the ap protocol works.
and your shit is already public, if they want to suck it all in there is literally nothing stopping them right now. federation or not.
Like I linked in the OP post, the problem isn't their implementation of the protocol, but what FB is, and what it has done; and it probably would not stop doing it in the Fediverse. If Hannnibal Lecter moved in the neighbourhood I wouldn't answer his dinner invite, just to see what's on the menu.
whatever. i hate facebook, i dont use their crap. but im not going out of my way to block their AP protocol any more than i would their SMTP protocol.
when their activity in a specific context demonstrably, negatively affects my system, ill take action as i would any negative impact from any protocol on any of my services.
when i get a spammer, i block them. but again, im not going out of my way to spite some big asshole company, and potentially lose out on coordinating an offramp for those trapped in its walls.
everyone here as proven one thing: there is no technical reason to block threads. its entirely political/moral/spite and a lot of 'maybes'.
i hate facebook, i dont use their crap.
when their activity negatively affects my system, ill take action
You made it black and white. But don't mind me, dismiss what I say; just don't go crying the next time someone you know dies from covid cause they read on Threads that vaccines are bad.
More visible promotion of active magazines would go a long way too. Almost every suggested magazine across the top of my nav bar is an empty ghost community, probably made on a whim during the Reddit kerfuffle and then abandoned.
It also feels bad when me and one other person are the only active people in a community and I’ve already advertised. I want to advertise again but don’t want to come off as an annoying spammer.
I’m taking the risk I’ll be annoying—I’m specifically referring to !musicals (@musicals or [email protected] in case the link does not work for you—kbin has been having a bug that makes !communityName@instance links like the one I just wrote not always federate out properly from kbin).
Very good point. I understand the desire to give all communities equal opportunity to be promoted, but if the promotions are towards dead-ends, it really does a disservice to the fediverse as a whole
It’s good to see Lemmy getting some love, athough I did get a chuckle at the “this whole fediverse concept is so hard to get your head around” stuff. They are so used to being fed what the algorithm delivers that they are lost without it. It’s so touchingly Orwellian.
Counterpoint: Being proud of something you did not choose to participate in is a post-hoc rationalisation and just a bit self-delusional.
The statement: "I am proud to be a man", makes as much sense to me as "I am proud to be right-handed".
I am proud of several achievements in my life and ashamed of my behaviour in others. A statement I assume applies to most people. My gender has nothing to do with either.
I do not take credit for the achievements of others of my gender (or of the right-handed...) the same way that I am not responsible for their crimes.
Humans, by our social, tribal nature, love to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups usually to the detriment of all.
Being gay or trans is also inherent, and because of societal push back, we've decided that being proud of those immutable attributes is appropriate. Masculinity gets a bad wrap in a lot of ways, and the healthy expressions of it should be something to be proud of, in my opinion.
Good point but Lgbt+ people have been shamed and criminalised for simply existing for centuries. Their use of pride is in reaction to that imposed shame. The black pride movement in the 1970s is the same, a group rejecting an innate trait as a reason for shame.
While males have been the dominate gender for basically all of recorded history. While aspects of male behaviour have come under, in my opinion, much needed scrutiny in recent times, I think talking about the issues of males violence (against man and woman) and other problematic behaviours needing to change is a long way from telling a gay or trans person to stop existing.
I'm not keeping score here. Even if I were, I wouldn't argue that men have it "as bad" as these hyper-marginalized groups. But I do think that there are positive and healthy aspects of masculinity that should be celebrated and that we should be proud of. Just like femininity.
Is it really true that men have been the dominant gender for most of history though? As I understand it, men and women have both been subject to rigid gender roles that they could not choose or get away from, so overall it was equally hard on everyone. It is just that with the advent of feminism, the struggles of women have received more of a focus.
men and women have both been subject to rigid gender roles that they could not choose or get away from
Very true. But you must also consider that while the role in society for pretty much all people in pre-modern life was rigidly defined, in all cases that I have read about the role of women was much more constrained and restricted.
To give a specific example from a period I studied.
The life of a peasant man in Tudor England was rigidly defined and pretty much at the whim of his Lord. But inside his home he had the same authority over his wife and family. The average man had little rights, the average woman had none.
In no way we’re women more socially constrained than men, at any point in history
Simply look at all the male deaths. You’re putting that against your perception that women weren’t allowed to leave the kitchen (which is wrong) and just completely dismissing all of the far, far worse and more burdensome things men were expected to do under threat of violence and death
Adding on to this, it's also weird to me to never hear class or race acknowledged in their one dimensional view of history as something that solely benefited men at all times. Like are they gonna seriously argue the black men who were literally hunted down and tortured for sport in American history were still somehow above the white women sitting comfortable at the sides?
Apex fallacy and basically patriarchy theory, which we know to be wrong
A very few men had power in the past, as did a few women. To blame men as a whole is the same shaming bullshit that you justify lgbt people having pride for, contradicting your whole point.
@raphael Why is that? To prevent the site and posts becoming ad focused? I mean I can see that as a benefit. But on the other side, content that is not indexed by search machines is not much different from Discord. I always criticized Discord content for not being indexed, when arguing with my bro, and tell why Reddit (or any other open platform) is much better to post. Honestly, kbin disallowing crawlers to index the site is a big blow to me! I don't like that at all.
🤷♂️
It is just a decision that every instance owner can make for themselves (if they are aware of it).
It will be a huge headache for search engines anyways, all posts are basically replicated across all instances and look local to a search engine. So for a single post it will have hundreds of copies in its database and probably outputting all of them as results (for now).
@raphael I didn't know the instances would copy the messages. Interesting! I think search engines need to be redesigned to respect robots of the origin instance then. If they are not designed for this, it surely looks local. That's kind of a mess then, from search engine perspective.
Strange enough, if I search with my search engine based on SearXNG the terms "final fantasy site:kbin.social", then it finds a few links. They are only based on tags or person, not the actual content. So maybe use tags, if you want to get indexed anyway.
Is it possible/reasonable to have some sort of a fediverse-encompassing api for search engines that would help index only the original threads? A separate instance maybe? Or is it going to stay as is?
The search engines are going to have to deal with that. However you can provide context in the instance in the form of a canonical URL, to tell a search engine where content originated.
@fearout It just occurred to me that all you need is your own server and you just need to index that server only. It basically gets data from all other instances through the standard activityPub protocol. It works differently than traditional crawlers, but the outcome is the same.
This seems like a roadblock to people discovering any community here. It removes the Reddit effect, where adding 'Reddit' to a search led to non-ad posts with first-person relevance, and eliminates the easiest way for someone who's not part of the federated universe to find the federated universe.
Thanks, I totally forgot that robots.txt existed. Since you are replying, do you know the difference between badges and tags?
I wonder if there some way for instances to use the canonical tag to point to the original and make it less annoying for search engines.
That said, I guess id rather see it crawled and let search engines figure it out then have it not crawled at all. Not really sure where that feedback goes though.
"Tags" are similar to twitter hashtags, you can use them to categorize a post. For example, if you create a post about Android you can add the tag "android" (without "#"). When you manage a magazine you can add one or more tags (always without "#") to see posts of the fediverse with that tag.
I have no idea about "badges" :)
I agree - there are plenty of empty magazines setup as subreddit clones. What we really need is a push encouraging content and comment submissions more than anything else. That's what's going to drive the development of a vibrant community on kbin.social.
Generally, unless you have at least 20 pieces of content from multiple users with active commentary, most folks will assume it's a dead community and move on to a bigger community on lemmy.world or similar to find more content. One thing I would suggest for the moderators of growing communities is to always comment on, upvote and boost your contributors' submissions in the beginning stages of community growth. Your personal engagement of the content is the first step in encouraging your readers to do the same.
That being said, I'd love for folks to create more new niche communities that didn't exist on Reddit. There's a lot more freedom here - we should take advantage of it.
I’m a poster on a small magazine and I upvote and boost all posted content. Also, lurkers of small magazines need to just put some content out there! Put you’re voice in! I can almost guarantee you will be well received if it’s relevant and on topic.
It really just depends. I was a lurker (and occasionally commented) in a couple of Pokemon TCG groups on Reddit and I never felt a need to contribute because there was so much content already. I now create posts and comment because I recognize the magazine needs content to thrive. If there are others out there who are the same as me, and want the community to thrive, I don’t think asking them to make content if they can is too much. It’s not anyone is requiring it, but it’s a way to build and give back to your community. And it’s not too hard to do on a Pokémon TCG community, though I can see how it might be difficult on others such as a tech news magazine.
This is definitely a thing. I don’t like making a comment or post that has already been made 80 times, and I’m used to that being the case. Once I get used to the fact that I might be the first one to post something (and possibly the only one who wants to, lol), I will probably get used to posting regularly.
Another, more complicated, possibility would be to include a user editable wiki with each community
This would be my preference. Given some of the big tasks that still need to be done (advanced moderation tools, for example) adding a wiki is relatively trivial - you can piggyback off the existing user authentication and markdown regular expressions which are all the diffcult bits. I wrote my own wiki 10+ years ago and it was pretty straightforward.
I'm thinking more in terms of syncing and storage. It all depends on how it's implemented. Does each community have a wiki that's synced with individual users' wikis? A separate wiki per instance? How to handle edit conflicts, etc.
You're right that just making a wiki isn't too tough, but in the case of decentralized, editable, moderated content, it's probably different enough to warrant an approach significantly different from a traditional, single site/many edit centralized version.
(We could always temporarily have a centralized wiki and roadmap out the transition later, too.)
Yes, the technical aspects are straightforward, the conceptual ones might need a bit of chewing over.
The way I see it, each community would have their own wiki but an instance could also have its own wiki for FAQs and the like which would then also act as the top level, linking to all the different wikis so it would appear as one cohesive wiki. Admins could edit any page, moderators could only edit their own wikis. You could either have a system to allow users to submit a draft edit or you could do that in a post in the community. Unlike, say, Wikipedia, there probably wouldn’t need to be large numbers of edits to a page in quick succession, so community members could thrash out a proposed update or addition in the discussion.
So, for example, I started a Home Video community and so I might want one page for a list of boutique Blu-ray releasers and another for a guide to buying a multiregional Blu-ray player. Over on Reddit I created a list of third party suppliers of STLs for the game Star Wars Legion that was well-received (which reminds me I must copy that over) which could be worth a page. Those pages would tend to be relatively static - only getting an update if a new Blu-ray publisher or STL maker popped up.
There are lots of details to be ironed out if we go the wiki way, which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start. Start getting the data and develop the larger structure over time. Once we need the data to populate the wikis/dbs/whatever, any mod can filter the posts pretty easily.
Other problems I see happening - conflicts between mods on entries, keep or throw out entries when an instance defederates (the c/politics folks might not want the entries on Biden being a lizardman from Nova Scotia, but c/iliketohitmyheadwithbricks does), bad blood if some mods want tighter control over wiki content, syncing when federating impact if larger media elements added, multiple wikis covering multiple topics while there are multiple instances covering multiple topics (multiplicative duplication due to the multiple hierarchies of equal importance), and I'm sure plenty more.
which is why I think the tagged route would be the best start.
I think we’d need to do that anyway as a stop-gap measure because you could start that right now. If there’s a will for it, a wiki could be thrown together quickly but there’d need to be testing and the developers of Lemmy would want to be assured it won’t break anything or leave a security vulnerability.
If correctly formatted, the content could then just be scooped up and used to populate a wiki when it arrives.
Other problems I see happening
A lot of those are federation issues in general - for example, the wiki would be clearly part of another instances community, so a post about Biden being a lizard in a humansuit and a wiki entry on the same topic would be essentially the same.
I totally agree on the first point, and might have a response in this thread stating much the same.
On the federation/syncing, I think it might need a more unique approach. Communities already have the problem of multiple posts linking the same article across several instances and communities, which don't sync comments. Making sure the complete wiki for a given community is resilient to instances defederating, shutting down, or vandalizing should be top priority, IMO. I don't know what the solution is, but I think we should be open to it looking different from the basic Lemmy sync setup.
For example, the wiki/extracted posts don't really need to sync as quickly as thread comments. Also, there should be some form of versioning in case of a credentials bug, hack, or intentional mass deletion or vandalism. We could aggregate points of conflict between instances/communities in a topic's main thread/stream/article and assign some for of weighting alongside the choice to continue reading from a particular wiki, which are return to the original thread/stream/article.
So, in the Biden-lizard example, the primary Biden entry that's synced everywhere could have a "Controversy" section with generally agreed on, real issues (like age, which is true for almost all US politicians) and fringe disagreements. Each fringe entry in the list would link to the page synced between instances that subscribe to those beliefs, but that page would not be a part of the larger synced Biden pages' contents. That keeps the lizard lovers' content off the larger, community-focused instances.
I guess I'm worried about conspiracy theories pulling users of the 'realistic' path, while increasing load on dissenting instances. I don't think Biden's a lizardman, so I shouldn't have to host the 12 hour long documentary on it. (We all know he's a reincarnated demon-angel hybrid. Oh, so now you don't agree? Fine, I'll host my 36 part finger puppet reenactment of the situation myself!)
Anyhow, I'm kinda babbling. These are just some general ideas off the cuff I wanted to get out there. I'm not a mod or an admin, so I'm hoping to get the conversation restarted among those with the ability to enact some of these changes. Reddit is still a knowledgebase of useful past discussions, and while new content is great, the more we can pull into the fediverse, the better.
I think you're right: a wiki is probably the best place/format for this type of information. I think this post is more interested in the preservation of information than it's formating. In that regard I think the most simple way to get the most copies produced is probably the best.
Hashtags exist for that purpose. You can follow them to be put into your home feed. As well, if you use the advanced web interface (like tweet deck), you can create a column with modifiers. Such as, I have a column that searches for both #pixelart and #lowpoly, but excludes posts with #NSFW or #Lewd, as well as #Pokemon (because I have a separate column for pokemon pixel artwork & lowpoly specifically)
I have heard misskey and calckey have a sort of trending feed, but not quite algorithmic, but unsure completely.
You missed my point. They're not on IG to bitch about IG, they're on IG to talk about art and they're bitching about IG on the side. They're ostensibly there to share their art, and that's why you follow them, right?
And yeah, some people go there to teach you how to be an influencer, but we're all aware that they irredeemably suck.
I don't think most people who are new to the fediverse really want to see three dozen threads about the fediverse as they scroll. I couldn't possibly convince somebody to join the fediverse to talk about fashion, because there's nobody here talking about fashion, it's like going to a baseball stadium to talk about library science.
People are going to Threads instead. When I point out how shitty Threads is and how people should use Mastodon instead, they say, "you're right! Threads is shitty! I'm gonna go use threads." Because threads is a social network and mastodon is a theory.
In my experience which is worth one (1) datapoint, people talk about all sorts of stuff.
Yes, people do talk about the fediverse as part of it, but usually it's about how we can make it better rather than how our corporate overlords have made it worse.
And I'd say that fediverse metacontent is less than 1% of my feed, so it's not universal, it's very much down to how you set things up.
Places like kbin will get more because they're newer. I'm not on Threads or Blue sky or whatever but I imagine a lot of the chat there is about their own shiny new thing as well.
The sole maintainer of the project has been totally MIA for a month and the site has gone down or partially not worked repeatedly for months now. Now we've got issues with post federating on time and spam bots. It's not sustainable like this. I really appreciate what Ernest has done and am a big fan of Kbin, but he's clearly spread too thin and apparently wont allow people to help him.
I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.
It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.
If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".
I get where you're coming from, but don't really agree that because it's been bad it's fine that it continues to be bad or even worse when these are solvable problems. The issue with recent posts federating in a timely fashion is pretty concerning for one.
But even if I did agree with you about the site errors, the huge gaps in any communication are a big issue. It'd be great to know what's going on. And not being able to get an account deletion honored is frankly unacceptable. I've had one pending for close to a month. And having the entire project tied up with one person who just disappears without warning is also a big problem. Administering this instance all by one's self is already impractical. But doing that and also single-handedly running a software project of this complexity and magnitude on top of that is really hard to rationalize.
Anybody remember what happened Artemis? All that effort and community support poured into an app with a single dev holding the whole thing together and poof. She's gone and the app is no more. I still don't think anybody's heard from her since.
Huge props to him for what he's achieved, but Ernest needs to accept help. It's that simple.
Yep I decided to switch accounts to this username from another one I had been using that is kinda attached to my freelance business. I felt like it wasn't the wisest move to get into occasional debates with strangers like that. Some people just lose their mind if you disagree with them online.
So I requested deletion close to a month ago and it still hasn't gone through. Will it ever? Who knows
I appreciate kbin a lot and I hope Ernest will get back to development when he's ready, but I don't think it makes sense for him also to be responsible for administrating a major instance. That's a huge job.
I'm not entirely sure where I'd move to yet, but if kbin.social is not properly moderated it makes sense to go elsewhere. At some point other instances might have no choice but to defederate.
That's different from giving up on the software - I do still appreciate Kbin a lot. :)
I see alot of people complaining about this or that on the site, but not interacting with what people who are posting are still posting. Not posting anything of their own save complains about the site being as fucked ever it was or instigating jumping ship.
Honestly it's hard to tell what people want at times.
I guess the beautiful thing of being federated is that the content is separate from the software. If people enjoy the software but find kbin.social to be too unstable, they might very well jump ship to https://fedia.io/ or something (or even start their own instance), and we will still get to enjoy their content. :)
I don't have much patience for people complaining about how their instances are being run considering how easy it is to move somewhere else. Discussions and constructive criticism is of course a different matter, but the beauty of the fediverse as far as I'm concerned is that you can take the "if you don't like it, go somewhere else" attitude to the extreme without really being a jerk. :)
Kbin and Lemmy are better built than Reddit in several ways to handle those behaviours to a certain point:
Karma: it's hidden on Kbin, and I can't find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That's what I'm talking about.
Instances with their own rules: every instance has its own administrator(s), and they can set different rules for them and apply them. Some are more tolerant than others, so in the end,your experience depends on what instance your account is. Besides, some instances don't have downvotes, so that's a big plus too.
People: we all, or the most of us, know how situation was on Reddit, how we struggled to make our experience be positive, with no success. Because we know that, we don't want that situation to replicate on these places. It's difficult sometimes, but we do what we can.
Defederation: as someone said here, if situation inside an instance is too hard to tackle, to the point that those bad entities harass users on other instances, then defederation is key, until the situation comes back to normal.
And there are other things, like algorithm (or lack of), code open sourced to fork if you wish, etc.
i’m new to lemmy, and am using the old.lemmy.world interface, and see no options for blocking users. Ill check another instance I suppose. Thanks for the feedback
Blocking entire instances still seems to be bugged, in my experience. I've blocked a handful of German-language instances because I speak 0 German, but still see posts from those instances every now and then.
No. That's what the instance block will do when we get it. Right now with the domain block, the point of it is for example, say you hate imgur.com. Why? Doesn't matter, you just do. You can block the imgur domain so nothing from imgur, regardless of where it's posted, will appear in your feed on kbin. If I post a picture linked from imgur on m/gaming, you won't see it when you browse that magazine.
If you try to block an instance with that same method, posts and comments still come through fine. I've blocked a bunch of European instances due to language issues but the posts still sometimes comes through regardless (and many other people have commented saying the same over the last month, hence why we'll be getting a proper instance block soonish).
When I posted a few weeks back about doing the same, someone pointed out that feddit.de (the biggest German instance) also hosts quite a few English language communities. So, I just blocked the few big German communities that kept popping up in my feed instead. Maybe consider doing the same?
Vielen gruss aus Deutschland! Wilkommen und herzliche Wiedervereinigung mit uns. Wir sprechen gern Computor mit ihr!!
(Sorry to all involved about that thing that just happened there. I'm actually enjoying the German instances that I can understand about 35-65% of. IEL)
I really don't see the purpose of karma and why places like Lemmy and Kbin feel that they have to implement. Karma isn't my concern, it has only been my concern when it comes to Reddit because they tie karma directly to your account to where it affects how much you post and where. If that doesn't happen at all in either Lemmy or Kbin - why have it at all?
Quite frankly, karma systems across all walks of all social media platforms is it's own disease. Even if it serves no purpose, it has a hold on many people to think and act in reflection to how much karma they've accumulated. I've noticed the more karma someone has, the more narcissistic they become, the more that they feel they've above someone and feeling untouchable. Why, because their count outnumbers yours. People with low karma count don't really care, because unless you're on Reddit, no affects. However that routes back to my earlier point.
I can talk about a similar (karma-like) system on another site. It was a wiki-style site popular from 2006-2010.
Their original system counted a user's creations and edits. There was the expected amount of drama around who had more creations vs edits. Creators tended to add a lot of high volume but low effort crap. Editors would get a lot of grief over 'stealing' entries because the idiots who created the site put the username of the last editor at the bottom of the entry.
It got worse.
Around 2008 the idiots reimagined the site and expanded the scope. They kept the shitty idea of keeping the last editor's username, but they added a points system tied to how many new features were added. For example: if you added a town you were awarded 1 point, but if you added a street or river you were awarded 1 point for each kilometer of road or river. Shit got real weird.
It was a race towards crap. AngrySteve59 was no longer at the top of the list. He was replaced by GamerJoe84 who had racked up shit points using the new system.
Points just seem to make people crazy. "Rate me! Evaluate my work" - Lisa Simpson
Most of these are very good things except the downvotes thing. Or at least if I understand correctly, it could be the same as with tutorials after youtube removed dislikes.
Karma: it's hidden on Kbin, and I can't find it on Lemmy. So, there is no pressure to post or comment something. Do you know that feeling on Reddit when you have 500 karma, you write a comment, and later you have 480 karma? That's what I'm talking about.
Eh?
You have 3140 karma ("reputation"). It's not hidden.
I cannot see it unless I go to my profile page, so it's hidden to me. It's not like on Reddit, where you could see it at the upper right corner, no matter the Reddit page you where on.
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