Oh this is nice. I will be watching your meteoric rise with great interest. This may very well be the start of the Kbin Enhancement Suite.
If you're open to suggestions, would it be possible to alter post colors for every other child? Just a way to separate posts, and make it easier to differentiate them at a glance.
Added with 0.0.7! You need to enable it in userstyle settings as it's off by default. Not sure if it's exactly what you asked for (and I am not the best with colors), so please give any suggestions to it and I'll add improvements.
Magazines are already customizable with custom CSS (but most didn't use it yet) and I don't think it would possible to do that since every magazine could have a different way of handling colors, right now child colors derive from your current theme you enabled in kbin theme settings. I will look into the other two though!
As a developer myself, thinking about the cost factor can also lead to some positive outcomes, too!
Trying to lower costs will incentivize minimalist design and implementation, leading to something more akin to old reddit. Not surprised that Kbin, Mastodon and Lemmy's interfaces are extremely simple compared to modern reddit and other social platforms.
All of the crazy tracking that people using Reddit alternatives don't like is also very 'heavy' from a web performance perspective. Cutting that out immediately improves load times and reduces data usage.
Relying on donations removes the main incentive to add pointless features to categorize and identify users for advertising.
I suspect a lot of Reddit's profitability issues are due to growth-imperative things that go beyond just running the site. In their attempt a blitzscaling, they are developing recommendation algorithms, SEO, and other ways to lure users. They have departments to do ad sales and develop user targeting systems for ads. There's also R&D the development of the site itself, including stupid features like RPAN and Chat to try to get the normies to join.
A kbin or lemmy instance, while not cheap to run by any means, doesn't need most of those functions. The R&D costs can mostly be solved by open-source software development, and frankly old.reddit.com-level tech was good enough anyway. There's no SEO, no algorithms, no ad sales, no profiling and targeting, etc. Most of the cost that's left is probably hosting, maintenance, and trust + safety and moderation.
I think hosting and bandwidth could be cheaper than people expect. I believe all of HackerNews was/is run off a single machine to serve 6M requests per day. If this stuff eventually takes the place of early reddit, the scale will be bigger than HN, but I believe probably maintainable via donations drives. You might have the big annoying banners like Wiki does, but I think it would be possible to cover the hosting. (Reddit also has extra-expensive hosting costs due to the use of AWS, which hopefully Kbin would be able to avoid.)
Trust and safety and moderation are probably the most likely to be the biggest time sinks. On the plus side, Reddit showed that people are willing to to subreddit-level moderation on a volunteer basis. Frankly, Reddit was getting a lot of free labor that way, but it proves people are willing to do it. A server that fails to adequately moderate itself can end up being de-federated and if illegal content is posted, shut down by law enforcement. And short of that, failures in moderation can result in a poor experience.
Thus, at the server-level, I think some kind of hierarchical governance structure will eventually be needed for the Kbin and others to avoid that. Say that every magazine can vote for its moderators. Then form a random group of 100 mags, and those mods can vote for a super-mod. And then every random group of 100 super-mods can vote for a super-super-mod. Add as many levels as needed to cover the site.
I'm not saying it will be easy, but I think a community-owned, non-profit reddit can be a thing. Yes, at a certain point, it will need staff and handle non-trivial amounts of money. Probably some kind of small non-profit corporation or cooperative can be set up at some point to manage it all. I think it will end up being the case that a few large instances will come to dominate, because that's kind of the nature of things, but I think Wikipedia has shown that this doesn't have to be such a bad thing. As long as there's at least a few big instances, no single one can go rogue.
This is outstanding. Is there something else I can do to fully right-align my sidebar to the edge of my screen and stretch the rest of the content over to the left like in old reddit
Yes, you can add (preferably to a new userstyle to not break updates, you can create them by clicking "Write style for: kbin.social/this URL" in the extension popup) ".kbin-container { max-width: none; }" to stretch everything.
I took a peak at the script, and realized that it added both the chevron (which doesn't hide children), and a "hide replies" button (which only hides children).
I modified it so that the chevron also hides children.
Not sure how to publish this properly, so just posting the change here. Replace the code under // Set a click event for the collapse/expand button with the following
@Habnab - tagging in case this is useful/something you want to make the main script do.
// Set a click event for the collapse/expand button
button.addEventListener('click', function() {
if (content.style.display === 'none') {
content.style.display = '';
footer.style.display = '';
figure.style.display = '';
commentBlock.style.height = '';
button.innerHTML = '<i class="fa-solid fa-chevron-up"></i>';
// Find all following comment blocks
var followingComments = commentBlock.nextElementSibling;
while (followingComments && followingComments.className.match(/comment-level--(\d)/)[1] > level) {
followingComments.style.display = '';
collapseChildrenLink.innerHTML = 'hide replies';
followingComments = followingComments.nextElementSibling;
}
} else {
content.style.display = 'none';
footer.style.display = 'none';
figure.style.display = 'none';
commentBlock.style.height = '40px';
commentBlock.style.paddingTop = '0.53rem';
button.innerHTML = '<i class="fa-solid fa-chevron-down"></i>';
// Find all following comment blocks
var followingComments = commentBlock.nextElementSibling;
while (followingComments && followingComments.className.match(/comment-level--(\d)/)[1] > level) {
followingComments.style.display = 'none';
collapseChildrenLink.innerHTML = 'show replies';
followingComments = followingComments.nextElementSibling;
}
}
});
@anthropomorphist Donate if you can. When I joined mastodon it took me a little to get my bearings, then I found the instance I wanted to stay on, liked the group running it, so I setup a monthly $2 patreon donation. It's not much, but if enough people do it, then it's more than enough to keep the server up and running.
Eventually as lemmy/kbin settle down and I find my home instance, I'll add another monthly donation to that to.
Fediverse
Hot