TLDR: It’s broken, but It’s still a fun and enjoyable platform!
Very true. It's a lot more stable than it was even a couple months back - I used to upgrade my instance and run into constant problems, and now I can happily git pull without destroying everything.
From a user perspective, a lot of the issues you encountered early on were due to a couple factors - kbin.social was dealing with more traffic than it could handle, and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.
I would say that, aside from platform stability, the biggest looming threat on the horizon is spam. Think about email (the original federated message system) - nobody even thought about the possibility of spam when developing email, spam exploded in the 90s, and currently spam control is managed by whichever email platform you're on rather than by the protocol itself, as well as a sort of trust system where newly registered domains are more likely to be seen as spammers. The Fediverse needs to take lessons from email and start implementing the same sort of controls before the issue becomes unmanageable.
and the developers of lemmy added a sneaky thing that would specifically block kbin user agents from being able to federate out to lemmy instances, leading to constant error logs and issues.
Do you happen to know why they did it? Was it that kbin was causing them technical problems somehow and they chose to block it until they are resolved or was it just pettiness?
Unfortunately I don't know. It could very well have been that their own instances were being flooded by traffic from kbin.social and this was their solution. However, to my understanding this was added to the source code itself so all lemmy instances upgrading suddenly become an issue for kbin instances. I had to change the user agent in my own kbin instance to stop the flood of errors as it was absolutely messing up the.coolest.zone and I basically couldn't troubleshoot any legitimate failed messages.
Whatever the case is, I'm very glad it's resolved now.
IIRC the official reason was that some automated anti-spam code accidentally caught the kbin user agent and mistakenly added it to a block list, and the lemmy.ml admins were busy and didn't see it for over a week - but once one of them noticed it was promptly fixed.
Also, I recall this being specific to lemmy.ml - other instances run by other admins like lemmy.world and lemmy.ca weren't affected.
If you have a Mastodon account as well, it has the bookmark feature, so in a pinch I can bookmark by boosting and then switching to my Masto account and bookmarking it there. You just need to follow your kbin account from your Masto account.
It is not broken, it just completely stopped tallying. Apparently the free version of supersurvey has a limit of only fucking 25 responses, and of course they do not tell you this until you created an account and already sent out the survey and then asks you to pay $90 a month for this shitty webapp that breaks immediately.
I'm just going to have to make another survey; what a bust...
Yep I've been carefully looking, even when creating this one! They got me good, I'm actually surprised there isn't a free alternative webapp out there for such a simple concept. That is definitely something that I will develop myself in the near future. But so far I found one that has allows to share the result page. So I'm working on it!
Bearing in mind, of course, that there's a lot of biases in your sample. You're sampling the demographics of /m/kbin, not kbin as a whole, and you're primarily targeting English-speakers since that's the language you wrote in.
Yeah unfortunately it would be difficult to get a broad census on here. I would've posted in /m/askkbin, but that's explicitly disallowed. The English-speaking bias is a given, and that's why the countries list look the way it does, but kbin is probably vast majority English speaking, frankly.
They exist for sure, but the numbers are smaller and English speaking world has the plurality as well as the majority. Honestly I wish I could account for everyone equally as you would be surprised by whose on here.
I hate to lump Europe and Africa all together a well and then separate North America by country but as you can see in the results it's done out of pure necessity
The only way to resolve this situation is to get Ernest to delegate some of the instance moderation and amount. Every other path forward leads to failure.
If you're on a desktop (or other large screen), click on the user name to go to their user page and there's a block button in the sidebar on the right. If you're on a mobile device (or other small screen), go to their user page and the block button should be prominent on the right of the "follow" button.
You can easily report if you're using kbin website, don't know how it works if you're using an app. You just hover over the "more" link and a dropdown appears with "Report" as the first option.
Aaaah thanks so much... I feel dumb now XD
I never thought of checking that, I was kinda looking for a way to report the user itself, not the post... I will start doing this too.
I'm using the webpage from the browser by the way.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Good post. I really like your conclusion and your determination not to give up. And I hope that the annoying bugs will get ironed out soon.
/kbin
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