First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
Abandoned large magazines are being bombarded with spam and admins are nowhere to be seen it seems. Hundreds of spam bot posts have not been deleted for months, see /infosec /internet /opensource /science, etc. and there are some posts about admins not responding to reports. So whats happening here?...
I hate to say it, because I've been really pleased with kbin for the most part. I've liked being able to dip my toes into the Mastodon side without yet another account; I like the interface; and my interactions with Ernest have been nothing but pleasant. I certainly hope all is well with him personally. But whether it's legitimate medical issues or undisclosed burnout, the instance and platform are struggling.
The good thing is that everything has been federating and most of us have been interacting with Lemmy and mbin users daily anyway; it's "just" a loss of fake internet points and comment history to move. I'm trying to put that off, but the mobile site/pwa is only okay, API rollout has stalled (meaning app development has stalled as well), admin activities can't happen with Ernest, and technical issues with the instance are becoming more common.
I think the Reddit API mini-exodus last year hit at that exact "sweet" spot, in terms of numbers and point in kbin development, where one dev/admin could almost keep up with it, but not quite. Suddenly this thing he was noodling with to combine Lemmy and Mastodon has thousands of people wanting it to be production ready. I don't begrudge him anything even if it is just burnout, but if that is the case then maybe it's time to bless mbin as a successor and start migrating people off kbin.social or find someone else to admin it and ugrade it to mbin. Ernest has built up a ton of goodwill; if he's done, then he's done (and of course, if he's ill then he's ill). Who among us could stand up a minimum viable product of a reddit clone and admin two instances? Not me, that's for sure.
Edit: I checked, and Ernest's Polish-language instance karab.in is completely down right now.
We have all been very lucky that these open source projects are there as an alternative, and there are ways Ernest can step back if being the sole PM of a sprawling social network project isn't good for him. I just don't want it to happen in a way where people are left with a bad taste in their mouths for the Fediverse or him personally.
I agree completely with you about the state of kbin and what it means for Ernest: if it's become too much for him, or he has medical issues, just ask for help.
That said, I don't know what to say about switching to mbin: I don't know what caused the split, and honestly the 2-3 threads by some noisy bozos going "KAY GUYS KBIN'S DEAD, YOU'RE ALL INVITED ON MBIN" don't exactly make me wanna rush there.
The initial split largely seemed to be that people were submitting code fixes and Ernest wasn't accepting them or updating /KBin fast enough for them. The lack of API that was already done and approved by Ernest and ready to go (that to my knowledge still hasn't been implemented on KBin!) seemed to have been the last straw that got them traction.
Ernest doesn't want to band aid fixes, he wants to fix the underlying problems and eliminate the "tech debt" he's already accumulated rather than letting it continue to pile on to the point that fixing anything becomes unmanageable due to all the band aids. This is GOOD, but it means everything will be much slower. MBin is just pedal to the metal and literally accepting any bit of code at all, which also isn't really sustainable for a product that people want to use.
At this point, I dunno though, Ernest has been gone for a month and the site has been super slow and blips up and down all the time. I REALLY hope he's ok, but I'm not sure of the long term viability of /KBin anymore and am wondering what if the next blip just doesn't get resolved???
I agree on the MBin bros thing, 100%. Their attitude has really made me not want to even consider their project at all. I don't like the tankie devs on the Lemmy side of things, but, at the same time don't really think that matters all that much. If they do something bad, people can break off and spin off like MBin did.
To me, ideal world, enough people donate that Ernest can pay himself to work on it full time and maybe hire an extra FT dev (Nabu Casa hires like 30 devs to work on Home Assistant without taking in any VC debt or 3rd party money, so, it's at least feasible, but they built up 5ish years of goodwill before they spun up Nabu Casa and people were still initially skeptical), but that's not going to be possible if he disappears constantly so it's a catch-22.
Seriously though, I really hope he's ok and this hasn't been because something happened to him. It's really ominous that his last communication indicated he had surgery coming up and then complete radio silence
A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for...
The issue was the use of a specific word, that is now uncouth, but with which OP identifies. They claim to not know the word had fallen out of favor. Other than the word itself, I don’t think there was anything wrong with the comment they left.
I’m not surprised. While I’ve created quite a corner of an online life for myself here, in the back of my mind there’s always the thought that I’m half a step from being misunderstood and reported, banned, or at least least dumped on.
I’ve encountered a bit too many people here who are paranoid and apparently only looking for the worst in everyone else. And since I’m probably older than average, and from the eastern half of Europe, I’m just more used to using abrasive language sometimes without needing to constantly announcing my tolerance for some particular selection of specific things that happens to be in the news this month. That’s obviously not the preferred vibe here.
I just saw Everything , everywhere, all at once, and was very pleasantly surprised that, even though it is centered on two female characters, it does not for a second use feminist talking points of "men did it", and concludes in part that the hero is unsatisfied in life because she has failed too see how wonderful her husband is.
I think I am against this, for 2 reasons. First, we want to encourage people who can't stand each other to get away from each other, not kill each other. Second, putting this option out there means people will try to use it, whether or not it actually applies.
The issue isn’t that those words hurt anyone’s feelings, the issue is that they skew the discussion because they’re established expressions and therefore give some undeserved credibility to whoever uses them.
We have always referred to toxic gender roles for women as misogyny or internalised misogyny, so I would argue that we should use the equivalent term, misandry instead of toxic masculinity.
This. Feminists don’t use the term “toxic femininity” (even though I’ve seen many claim it’s used—I’ve never seen an instance of a feminist using it), they say “internalized sexism/misogyny.” So, the equivalent term for men should be “internalized misandry.”
I agree that people should not use the terms toxic masculinity and patriarchy, as they are habitually used to generalize and discriminate against men. They are offensive and misandrist. (Maybe that's a better wording than "it hurts men's feelings", which some people have a problem with.)
And yes, when you mean egalitarianism, don't say feminism. Tho used as a term to refer to a misandrist movement, feminism is fine.
I have no problem with these terms. Toxic masculinity is a descriptive term for a harmful set of behaviors. It’s good to have descriptive terms.
Ok so it doesn't bother you... Who cares? It bothers ME and many other men. For comparison, the N-word doesn't really bother me personally in of itself. But I don't use it, I wouldn't tolerate anyone else using it in my presence because I know how much it bothers other people and what it means to them.
When it comes to "Toxic Masculinity". I personally find this terminology EXTREMELY insulting, reductive and I think it's harmful to the general gender discourse. If you have any empathy in you, I'd like you to consider trying to use alternatives. And I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Seriously, I find that terminology truly disgusting.
Someone who generalizes “toxic masculinity” to all male behavior is just wrong, and would be with or without the term.
Yes, and that's another huge problem. People get things wrong all the time. And in this case it can actually be quite harmful. All I'm asking is that you use less pejorative terminology.
And one of the weirdest thing with this one is the irony.
So I just did a web search for what is toxic masculinity. According to that page, one of the defining traits is this one:
Antifeminity: This involves the idea that men should reject anything that is considered to be feminine, such as showing emotion or accepting help.
Men in general will be averse to expressing their concerns because they're worried it will make them appear weak, emotional or feminine.
That's why it's so important for those of us engaged in the gender discourse to choose our terminology in an empathic and considerate manner.
It’s good to have descriptive terms.
And that is also my point. "Toxic" is not descriptive. Go search online for the word and I guarantee you that you'll find a ton of stuff trying to sell you useless things an mischaracterizing how bad the thing they're trying to "cure" really is and mischaracterizing in what way that thing is bad.
"Toxic Masculinity" is ripe for misinterpretation and I would never qualify it as being "descriptive".
Harmful gender expectations is descriptive. It's true that it may not be appropriate for all circumstances where someone might use "Toxic Masculinity" and that's a good thing. It's because it actually is a descriptive term, whereas "Toxic Masculinity" is kinda of an amorphous catch all term. It is not descriptive.
To put it in a different context. Let's say someone mentions "The problem of lazy Mexicans". And I tell him, please don't say that: it's racist. And the guy replies:
You misunderstood me. I was in no way implying that Mexicans are lazy. I was talking about a very well researched phenomenon that due to a combination of cultural and climate influences many Mexicans find themselves adopting a set of counterproductive behaviors. There is ample research on this and what steps can be taken to go from a lazy Mexican to a prosperous Mexican.
Unfortunately, changing habits and long held traditions is psychologically difficult to accept even when the benefits are so clear. This is why so many Mexicans seem to be focusing on the terminology instead of the actual discourse as some kind of ego defense mechanism.
Other than those reactionary Mexicans no one interprets it this way. So we're not going to start rewriting all of our literature just for this.
Toxic masculinity is a descriptive term for a harmful set of behaviors.
Most of which have very little (if anything) to do with masculinity. The way people generalise the term to mean any/all male behaviour is not a mistake.
Feminism is about achieving gender equality by advancing women’s rights.
This only makes sense on the presumption that women are unilaterally lacking in rights. If men were lacking a certain right, advocating for women's rights would not achieve any kind of equality.
there is a danger to dropping these terms as you suggest. The danger is that the related problems are not discussed.
The problems are only being discussed now because it was finally realised that men's gender expectations are negatively affecting women.
The men's movements of the 80s and 90s (which originally coined the term TM) already worked out that men suffer under harmful gender expectations. Nobody gave a crap. Here we are, 35-40 years later, and we only give a crap because of #metoo.
The devil himself... ( media.kbin.social )
Unmoderated and now extremely delayed federation - is it time to move? ( kbin.social )
First, I think Ernest has done a fantastic job and I've been rooting for him this whole time. But it's becoming clear it's all too much for him without the support of a larger team....
where are kbin admins? ( kbin.social )
Abandoned large magazines are being bombarded with spam and admins are nowhere to be seen it seems. Hundreds of spam bot posts have not been deleted for months, see /infosec /internet /opensource /science, etc. and there are some posts about admins not responding to reports. So whats happening here?...
An interesting case of moderation in the fediverse ( blog.ownlifeful.com )
A small group of people were offended by a joke that unintentionally came across transphobic, and as a result this persons account was blacklisted. Even after getting the account reinstated, there were lasting complications with the state of the account (these probably technical issues) and the account was basically lost for...
Tired of the anti-male messages in entertainment? Let’s make a list of recent pro-male movies, shows, etc. ( kbin.social )
I’ll start us off with:...
UK: Abused partners who kill their partner to get lighter sentences under Sally's law ( kbin.social )
https://web.archive.org/web/20230720051219/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/20/abused-partners-who-kill-lighter-sentences-new-sallys-law/...
People in the mainstream should stop saying "Toxic Masculinity", "Patriarchy", and yes, even "Feminism" ( kbin.social )
In short:...