It's crazy to me that people find those types of racist and distasteful posts funny. Does anyone here know if kbin has already defederated with exploding-heads? And yes I have already blocked the domain. This type of shit doesn't belong on the fediverse.
Yeah I'm not urging him to do anything, he shall taketh as much time as he needs. Was just asking, but meanwhile blocking the domain individually suffices I'm pretty sure.
I don't think they've targeted kbin in the same way exploding-heads seem to have targeted other Lemmy instances, but when I checked a day or so ago we were still federated. I blocked the whole instance ...but I can't now remember how that was done. Somehow you can make an instance appear like a magazine from kbin, then you can follow or block it in much the same way too.
Edit:
From the comments below, head to https://kbin.social/d/exploding-heads.com
Then at the bottom of the page, or from the kbin menu, choose the no-entry (i.e. block) symbol which is next to the subscribe button.
Yes you have to go to kbin.social/d/exploding-heads.com and it should show up as a "magazine" then you can block it (For anyone that hasn't done it yet)
edit: forgot .com at the end of the domain, thanks jalda
One thing worth mentioning is that this only blocks the threads. You'll still see users if they hop into a thread on an instance you haven't blocked.
Tested this by temporarily blocking lemmy-world and checking some redditmigration (a kbin magazine) threads. The users on lemmy-world will still show even if it's blocked.
That's the magazine on kbin. It's not their instance. If it were federated with kbin.social it would be accessible like this: https://kbin.social/m/main@exploding-heads.com, but it's not. There's no way to see which instances are federated on kbin, so maybe it's already gone.
The “d” in the URL actually stands for domain. It’s actually the entire instance not a magazine. It’s the correct way to block an entire instance individually as a Kbin user.
This is wrong, the reason it doesn't load your link is because there is no community/magazine called "main" on that domain. If you go to https://kbin.social/m/freeforum@exploding-heads.com instead, you will see it as normal.
Also, the user above is indeed talking about blocking the whole instance, not just one magazine. If you go to that link with /d/ it is for the whole domain.
wouldn't you have had to subscribe to one of their communities to see those posts? If that's true, your observation isn't evidence they are deferderated and you may still be seeing their users comments on other posts.
Since you can see their users' posts I think it means they aren't defederated yet, I think ernest is a bit overwhelmed at the moment to deal with stuff like this but it should be brought up, sooner better than later.
It's been brought up and is on his radar it seems. Until he can address it kbin does at least have the ability for users to individually block instances.
Thank you for linking that. I'd seen the original thread before he'd had a chance to reply. Even with help, I worry about his workload, but I'm always grateful to have such an open and dedicated admin
@hypelightfly
Yes, but to block an instance as a user doesn't offer the same level of protection that to defederate the instance. If a user blocks an instance, she/he doesn't see the posts coming from this instance in her/his thread. But the user cannot avoid being seen from the blocked instance and potentially being harassed. https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/375
They may be getting drowned out by the huge lemmy instances. I've only seen a bare handful of content from them, but the quality of every one made me refresh my memory on blocking instances. I really never thought I'd be advocating defederation so quickly, but we already have a 4chan and it's not kbin
When I was like 16 I thought this stuff was funny, but I also believed that it was all a big joke and that few if any people actually bought into it. Teenage me was an idiot, and for a lot more reasons than just this.
It’s a very fresh topic and still ongoing so of course it’s being talked about. Eventually it will die down then go away. The stuff we don’t need is posts like this.
Yep, having a bunch of front page posts complaining (not trying to put it harshly) about the content just makes it look like the problem is worse to outsiders and doesn't help perceptions. Let people talk about what they want, but vote accordingly and people will get tired of talking about reddit as less and less people engage with those posts. This post being here is causing more reddit-related engagement. Upvote the kind of content you want to see and it'll rise up higher, becoming more visible and creating a virtuous cycle of positive engagement.
Likewise, my only time spent on reddit is to upvote reddit drama discussion. Doing so will help push people who are "just tired of the drama and want to post" to find the fediverse a more enticing place to participate in.
Also, it's relevant to a lot of the userbase. Like, this is relevant to something that just personally impacted the majority of the userbase here -- it's gonna probably be of interest.
I do agree with the idea that it's good to get more content up, though. Go find a couple interesting things a day and submit them. I have!
There are also some people at the BotIt magazine on kbin.social working on setting up a bot to mirror Reddit subreddit submissions to kbin magazines, which might help ease disruption for some subreddits.
A much better method is to make a post explaining and encouraging how to contributing to the fediverse. That was what got me posting, someone said something to the effect of "if you really want to see the fediverse thrive, then start adding content to the fediverse!"
You are a human being. You have wishes, dreams, joys, anxieties, hopes, opinions, knowledge, and wisdom. You possess an inner child as well as a rich heart, an amazing mind, and everything in between that makes you, you.
There's a lot of points that he brings up that touch broader topics:
Landed Gentry
He's not wrong on the premise here. He's wrong with the solution and the why. A community should dictate their terms, if landed gentry is what the community wants, so be it. If the community wants democracy so be it. In the later, that democracy doesn't need a "company" to be the ultimate arbitrator of democracy, which is what he is pitching. That whole latter is just "corporate control with a democracy label slapped on it."
Profit
We all do need to remember that running something on the Internet is NOT cheap. Anything that gets popular becomes a quick target for "other nations" (US, Russia, China…) to start putting garbage into and eating bandwidth. Reddit has been running on the techbro funding which has recently ran dry. So this day was always coming. The free cash isn't there so the cracking of the whip begins.
This is going to happen with anything that isn't purely community ran. So all those other things like Bluesky that are being tossed, they'll have the same trouble eventually. Kbin and Lemmy are slightly different in that it is purely community ran. But we the community need to support our admins with cash to keep the server fans turning. Otherwise, even community ran projects can become coporate controlled.
3rd Party Apps
This is the biggest thing for me. We're either an open web or we're not. I was on the Internet back in the 1980s when it was very open. It is pros and cons for open vs closed. If Reddit doesn't want 3rd Party Apps, that makes them closed, that makes them less Democratic. There's nothing wrong with being closed, McDonald's likely doesn't want me eating my Taco Bell in their building. But the CEO keeps trying to say "Democracy" while actually just "trying to run a business". I don't go to the Costco to fill up on gas and think the other people there are my "community", they're folks from my community but the Costco doesn't make them my community. Reddit is a business where a community can go to, Reddit IS NOT the community itself.
perfectly willing to work with the folks who want to work with us
With all the leverage in Reddit's hands, which that's fine whatever, working with Reddit is going to be one of those sisyphean kinds of tasks. Pray they do not alter the terms futher.
the extent that they were profiting off of our API
And to me that's the tell. Every other word out of the guy's mouth is "profit". And that's fine, it is his site. But someone putting profit first is going to be hard pressed to focus on Democracy and community. And everyone should at least keep that in mind.
Ownership
And I think that's the ultimate thing for everyone else. In an open Internet, you the creator own your content. And everything Reddit is saying takes the ownership away from you. Running sites like Reddit, Kbin, Mastodon, and so on are non-zero costs. So I get the desire to make money "somewhere". And the CEO of Reddit honestly believes that "running ads" defers the costs that would have been otherwise passed on to the users and mods to pay in cash or work. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but a community should get to have say on it. A democracy also gets to vote on if this is their ship to wreck.
And that's the big underlying thing. The CEO tosses community/democracy and other words to make folks think "they're a part of this thing" but they are not. Or at least no more part of this thing in the same nature that someone walking into a local hospital is part of the medical community. And in all of those words, the CEO is indicating that he is taking all ownership from the users and presenting something that has the veneer of community and you having ownership of your content.
Live and let live
Some people want that which Reddit offers. So be it. I think I've had enough of it, but that's just me. But the Redditors that are staying ought to know the cart they've hitched their horse to. But ultimately, nothing but love for everyone. Reddit has stopped being a good fit for me and I've gone elsewhere, but everyone should just use what's a good fit/feel for them. Except Twitter. The people who enjoy Twitter are a breed of people that defies what I would consider "enjoyable company."
Pro-tip: don't make the same mistake that I did. Before deleting your account use one of those tools to mass-edit all of your comments (forgot what the tool were called tho), replace the text with either a dot or with something like "user has moved on to X social network", the less content reddit has the better. Why? Because fuck em, that's why.
I wish I thought about this before deleting my account
Before deleting your account check your favorite subs to see if there's a poll regarding going on an indefinite blackout. One sub I used to frequent has a poll going this week and I couldn't vote since I deleted my account
I'm mainly keeping an alt account for /r/SQL because for it's sort of a defacto professional repository (also the only place you can ask for and get a sciprt for a bespoke data cleaning on a large relational DB in about 60 minutes).
I do get deleting accounts (and I'm deleting my "main" just commenting account) but some of the accounts have literally irreplaceable info, not just in the tech space, but my god some of the guides for gaming in older games only exist on reddit (like getting a full 50 monuments in the original Guild Wars, or setting up a good build for Bioshock 2). So I'm keeping my "info" accounts for as long as I can, I know it adds value to reddit being assholes, but I feel it adds more value to a stressed out Admin over their head in a bad situation, or some frustrated retro gamer that doesn't want to know the glitch mode that everyone uses right now.
I feel the same. Cutting out Twitter a year and a half ago was rough, but Mastodon and Feedly took it's place nicely. I guess that prepared me for Reddit's shenanigans as Kbin has filled the gap without issue.
I may miss out on some things here and there, but I don't feel the need to be "in the know" as much.
I deleted my 3 Reddit accounts last night, one that had over 110k karma. I'm starting to get cosy with Lemmy now, hopefully some refinements and it will be great.
It felt good, right? I nuked mine today after a reddit user was an ass after I agreed with a sub mod on an extended blackout. This place is much cozier and you folks are a lot nicer.
This is the way. Tons of people will stay on Reddit, Reddit will be fine. Just look at Facebook, how long it has lasted and what it has done, etc. Reddit is the new Facebook (platform, not company) and tons of people will be fine sticking with it. That's okay.
The beauty is we have options, and we're working to improve those options.
That's very tempting, but there's no telling if reddit will raise API pricing going forward, or add more restrictions to 3rd party apps. Their community has gone to shit anyway. Better to just pull the plug entirely and start anew.
I really liked Reddit Sync and I've never used the official app before. The way I see it, if I'm going to be forced to make a change anyway, I might as well leave Reddit altogether for something new.
Huffman totally doesn't get that the conflict isn't about Reddit wanting to charge for API access. That in and of itself is fine.
It's how they're going about it, starting with "We're going to start charging you in a month, and just five months ago we said we weren't going to be charging anything for the foreseeable future," followed immediately by Huffman being a human-shaped turd very loudly at every chance.
I disagree. I keep seeing people saying this, but it is giving them far too much credit. It doesn't matter if the pricing was reasonable or if they had a good long time to prepare for it.
All of this talk about the pricing is completely irrelevant. What's relevant is the impetus behind it. This is just a weapon Reddit is using to kill 3rd party apps. That's it. That is what they want to do, that is what they are doing. Don't let that get confused in a bunch of talk about pricing and deadlines, it doesn't really have anything to do with what's happening here
it would have been SO easy for them to make their API changes the way that it's typically done - with ample warning time and semi-reasonable prices. the only obvious explanation is that they really don't want third party apps and this was their way to shut them down without saying it explicitly.
I remember reading a comment that said they half expected this to be a 'Door in the Face' technique (or a different one with a different name, can't recall) wherein Reddit was being a clever sales person by starting high and then going low, because the true goal was to just introduce a pricing plan to begin with. If they had just started with a pricing plan, there'd be pushback and they might have to rescind it, but if they started with something ridiculous and then walked it back/lowered it to something reasonable (their goal the entire time), they could save face and say "hey Reddit we heard you loud and clear and you're right!" and Reddit could go "We did it Reddit!" - I thought that seemed very plausible at the time.
Then I thought maybe it was just Hanlon's Razor. They were just being stupid. Turns out it was a little of both malice and stupidity.
I genuinely think that ending up with a lower price as an appeasement was part of the initial plan. I think at some point, maybe too many people pointed that out for it to feel like a good plan anymore, or maybe spez started taking it personally and decided to take it off the table.
I'm about 50/50 now on whether they're just sticking to be being stupid/spiteful or if they've maybe just decided to remarket reddit completely as an LLM training model. If it's just a training model, who cares if the community isn't happy, that doesn't matter so much in the short term. They can prop up abandoned communities and limp along, hell even the corporate marketing & propaganda accounts talking amongst themselves might have enough value to keep things going until they IPO. Spez just has to make a plan to cash out ASAP.
I doubt they have the talent to make an LLM. But just in case, instead of deleting your comments before deleting your user, replace them with some choice words about Huffman ruining the value of the site via poor leadership.
Perturb each comment with random one letter errors. This way any LLM will learn to tell everyone about Huffmans poor performance. Even better, it’ll be harder to bulk remove the comments with the errors in them. Especially if there are many rephrasings on top.
Even if they just came out and said "we don't want third party apps like Apollo anymore, we want one Reddit experience" it would have been at least honest. There would still be an uproar but not ugly like this.
Instead everything Steve has done has been duplicitous and in bad faith. Then he drops that memo and pokes the bear, does a couple rounds of interviews going "I'm so strong, mods are spoiled, I'm like daddy Elon, make me rich".
I genuinely don't know what he thinks he's going to get out of this. He should have just sat this out quietly and let subs go dark until they got bored and alternatives formed and the system fixed itself.
Side note: I've been disgusted watching redditors lick his boots and hate on the mods. In 13 years of using Reddit I only ever got banned from /r/conservative, so I don't get all these people complaining about power tripping mods. That got me to delete all my accounts.
And frankly, reddit shielded the_donald when they were openly breaking the rules about vote manipulation in such a huge way that they dominated /r/all.
They totally exist, but the community tends to build around them when it's bad.
Someone posted https://subredditstats.com/ and it became so clear how reddit had changed in the last 3 years. All my subs have expanded 3-5x in size, and over that same period the quality declined a lot.
Oh there are plenty of shitty mods on certain subreddits, but the biggest issue is that often the community doesn't realize it. Some person gets banned for some stupid reason, the community doesn't know. That's one of the biggest issues with community moderation especially on Reddit: it is entirely too easy for moderators to act invisibly and absolutely no one would be any the wiser because the only person that could point out the abuse of power can no longer post.
@soft_frog I was a mod on Reddit for a bit. As far as bans go, permabans were rare. There were a few people, however, that I or another mod banned that would play this "I was just joking" or "all I said was x and they banned me" game, but we would use a mod tag on these people so we quickly remember why we banned them. And it's like dude, you told the dev who's promoting their game to kill themselves.
There are some shitty people out there, and mods have to clean up their shit (hopefully before anyone else sees) so the users have a good experience in our community.
Yeah, there are some bad mods out there too, but it's the ones that care that are going to have to work double time without these third party tools, and the site is going to lose some of those with this change.
I'm still bitter about a great post I made, which had a great discussion going, being removed on r/fitness for some obscure BS, just inane illogical reason. The mods in that sub were notoriously terrible, and is why there were a bunch of spinoff subs.
The mods for r/guitar were (are?) pretty bad. The guys at r/guitarcirclejerk made a sport of seeing how stupid a post they could post on r/guitar without getting banned. Of course, actual noobs with stupid noob questions sometimes ended up getting banned for trolling, so they'd end up at r/guitars asking wtf.
It was kinda funny, kinda tragic. Dunno if it's still there.
The rise of circlejerk communities was the beginning of the end, their only purpose was to harass members of a community and create a gathering place for trolls.
The part of the memo where Steve talks about wearing Reddit swag out on town really hit. Like, we love Reddit, but hate you, not your employees. Why would users want to harm Reddit employees?
I mean, it's not unfathomable, but it wasn't imperative to mention it as it only serves to stoke fear among his employees and tries to frame this as an "us against them" thing.
but imho think we'd have to agree that the dangers of one corp entity controlling a whole social media platfor (with twitter first and now reddit) are pretty clear.
our communities will coalesce again somewhere but until then we should adopt the spirit of curiosity and just enjoy these new experiences ❤️
I agree with you that it was a good choice and that it's necessary to foster a friendly online culture.
I haven't seen any calls for defederation over, "minor disagreements," though. I have seen lots of people saying that we should defederate from places like exploding heads so that we dont allow them to get bigger and then those people being told that they shouldn't call for defederation over minor disagreements.
Sweet jeebers, I hope this is comedy. I laughed, but 99+% of the bots roaming Reddit are nothing but a drag, and I hope there's a way to block all bots here.
I would say that some bots were useful. Like the one that would convert the units from "freedom" oned to ones that actually make sense (or the other way around).
"Remindme" type bots are a band aid fix. Can you imagine if instead, the app/website/service provided that ? I shouldn't have to see what you save now should I.
For the second point, mostly because nobody made an app that combined the two well and/or was popular. The "simple calendar" app let's you create events AND tasks. I honestly don't even get what you're trying to get at with your second point.
Unlikely to occur. Beehaw's admins hate dissent and anyone questioning them. Well before the blackout, they literally had a "no sources" rule because users kept questioning the mods. Likewise their current "rule set" states what they say, goes, and that everything is up to them, not the rules. They say that with all cases (except obvious trolls), that they will always warn first. I have yet to ever see any kind of warning from any of their admins.
They were being questioned on sh.it and on lemmy.world, so they blocked both. You can check their modlog to see just how little spam they had to deal with.
You can also pop in to look at their discord to see how much they dislike the criticism.
Has there been a point in time before where an instance was defederated for similar? ie, admins acting out of line with what's generally considered "acceptable", but short of stuff like alt-right and/or lemmygrad type stuff?
Just curious, for those who've been around longer.
Yeah, the creators of lemmy were removing content critical of communist talking points, like pro-ccp and pro-stalin content. There was a whole mob about it and so the admins splintered off and created lemmy.grad and said they'd be more neutral, though occasionally there's some slip-ups in their supposed neutrality.
I personally got banned because I got into an argument with the admin there. They wrongly assumed that I was American and made a claim to counter my argument, I then pointed out their mistake that their claim doesn't apply to my country, and then -- Boom, banned.
I read the "essays" the beehive have to "join" and take part. In my view they wanted to make a space for their own community and choose a fediverse where they should have picked a closed off forum/discord/redditcopy.
We are well aware of what’s going on with kbin and the development team. That’s why we don’t defederate because we have hope that they will fix things soon.
I apologize for causing you trouble. I'm trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, but apart from the usual spammers, there have also been organized campaigns where, for an hour on Sunday mornings, our instance was flooded with spam from hundreds of accounts. This, of course, is causing federation issues. I've changed my priorities regarding the roadmap, and additional tools will be released soon. I will also ensure additional moderation. I will also get in touch with admins from other instances - my absence was due to personal issues I mentioned recently. Thanks for your understanding, and best regards.
Having dealt with spam waves ourselves we are certainly understanding of the situation! I read your status updates and what has been going on. That is also why we choose to close the problematic communities/magazines instead of defederating.
We really hope that you find the time and peace to resolve these things. There is no bad will here, we know that these things need time. If there is anything we can do to help feel free to reach out.
It's nice to see an older author on a more traditional platform have such a clear and informed opinion on something deeply steeped in internet culture.
I recognize this is agism on my part, but I was surprised when I saw his picture.
Why would that surprise you? It was people his age who created the Internet and the World Wide Web. (Of course they weren’t that age back then, but you get the idea. :-)
There are fewer Internet-savvy old people, for sure, but when you do find one, they are more likely to be pre-web or web 1.0 “information wants to be free“ types. Younger users may have grown up in a more corporate space with a very different philosophy towards the Internet.
yea what we can do is spam reddit chock full of rubbish posts. spam until it dies. sadly, they still control the trove of our valuable comments for the past decade. let's not make the same mistake. so spam everything. spam the whole world so that AI slowly dies? 4chan is the best.
The article understands. SPEZ NEEDS TO PAY US FOR OUR CONTRIBUTIONS. Like NOW. Every redditor needs basic income from reddit, paid for by OpenAI and scammers like them: Google, Fbook etc need to PAY US. Or else, we destroy them. NO MERCY.
There was a very strong libertarian "The Internet will set us free from the tyranny of nation-states" 90s techno-optimism for awhile, but it seems to have died out as any kind of mainstream philosophy
You know, I hadn’t thought about that in a long time. I remember unironically saying things like “I am a citizen of the Internet“. I probably even used the term “netizen “. It did seem like we would form a global community of tech-minded people that transcended borders, and that it would be the future!
Defiantly a pre-web here I recall running two BBS on a couple of Compaq 286's. Being here on the fediverse reminds me a lot of those fun times and certainly looking forward to the future here.
I’m probably a little younger than you, as I was on those BBSes throughout my childhood, but definitely not running them!
I did not get access to the Internet until I went to college. I guess I was right at the cusp of the changeover, as during my undergrad, I learned command line telnet, ftp, mail/elm, Usenet news/rn/ten, gopher, and all of the other early protocols. But then, right in the middle of my undergrad, the NCSA Mosaic beta was released, and I spent an entire night following an early HTML tutorial so I could make a webpage to host under my campus profile.
The Internet and web are very, very different from what I thought they would be back then. I hope the fediverse might be closer to our original plan for the Internet as a place for curious individuals to exchange ideas and learn from each other.
For sure. Like I said, it's totally my bias showing. Maybe it's seeing too many congressmen fundamentally misunderstand the tech. I've also run into a lot of older programmers that are highly technical, but still kind of out-of-touch when it comes to the Internet culture that sits on top of the technical layer.
100% with you. Watching any kind of congressional hearing that relates to technology is so incredibly frustrating. I was also really happy to see mainstream journalism specifically acknowledge that Reddit is really just a web-enabled version of old newsgroups or discussion boards, and that all the value is provided by users. If only everyone thought that way!
Thank you for your diligence, transparency, and for being proactive about this. I, for one, am glad to see that racism, bigotry, and homophobia are not welcome on lemmy.world, and that the admin team takes that seriously.
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