Have you been successful in obtaining ownership or moderation to any abandoned mags? I've requested to a couple that I occasionally participate in just in case they get targeted for spam, but I haven't heard yea or nay either way.
Using this approach, I am seeing none of those posts on /science. I updated the filters a bit today. The top post is a legitimate article from 2024-04-13 and is by HeartyBeast.
Now, I understand that this is seen as an unnecessary step (too fancy) for some. People want zero ads out of the box without anything extra. So I'm thinking about the next approach here.
Framing the problem:
Filtering should be automatic
End-user wants zero additional setup
There is no active upstream development
It's not possible to inherit moderation of a magazine due to some queue of moderator application requests that is not being approved
The third point and fourth points are important here, since that's currently intractable. You can't reconcile zero additional setup with that.
But let's suppose becoming moderator of a defunct magazine (point 4) were possible while point 3 remained unresolved. In other words, at least moderators can try to pick up the pieces. Something being underestimated here is how annoying it would be for the moderator to manually cull posts every single day. I think you would have instant turnover after a couple of weeks once the tedium sets in. Manual solution is not good. Clearly, automation is needed on the moderation side.
So assuming you could actually inherit a magazine, but with no guarantee of upstream development, what about restructuring the tool above so that it's for moderators, instead of end-users? That's pretty easy, and I could make it something the moderator clicks once and it's done, auto-banning the posts. This is a pretty good method.
But you can't inherit moderation right now, so that's back to square one.
Realistically, that leaves these options at the moment:
Wait (a long time) and see
Use the tool above and make magazines readable, albeit at some sacrifice of convenience (?)
Migrate to another instance
Third approach is the path of least resistance and is best for most casual users. Second is for diehards who cannot move instances due to some personal or technical reason. First approach is the most annoying and eventually leads to the third approach after frustration sets in.
Pick your poison, I guess. I can't think of any other prophylactic approach at the moment, maybe this comment triggers some idea.
Real posts (from kbin.social magazines) are becoming quite rare. I find myself coming to this site now to do the following circuit:
sort by new and report SPAM and block users
scroll through headlines and read (the few) recent comments/posts to mags I'm interested in
come to kbinMeta and see if anyone else is seeing what I'm seeing and feeling the same way
see if the radio silence has yet been broken by the dev
It's a fascinating case study in the rise and fall of an internet community and digital communication platform. And it highlights one important fact about human community management and technology development: COMMUNICATION IS KEY.
"Magazine" is the general name for communities or subgroups on kbin. Whether you meant to or not, your post is in /m/kbinMeta which is for posts about kbin itself.
Character assassinations aren't relevant here. You'll probably find more like-minds in a politics sub... and a few who'll tear posts like this apart even when it is in the right place.
Maybe read some of the other threads here. kbin has a few issues at the moment - some would say a lot - and the lead dev has a few issues of his own that are keeping him from working on them. To be fair they're probably keeping him from a lot more than kbin.
I'm going to guess the downvote is because of the trollface picture but it could be because you're asking something that has been asked before.
Most of the content being federated to my instance from kbin appears to be mostly adverts for websites selling pharmaceuticals - usually advertising controlled substances.
After a couple from the same magazine(? kbin’s term?) I just block the community. But it’s pretty non-stop. I guess it’s not yet considered to be worth defederating, but yowsa.
Unforcunately the admin\creator of kbin has personal issues and is missing. We need to leave, but that means migrating manually which is annoying. Too bad, there are some good idas here.
If your main goal is exporting your magazine subscriptions between accounts across instances, may I suggest trying EXIT tool. If you are looking for more complex export settings (friends/favorites?), unfortunately, only subscriptions are supported at this time.
Kbin got the same rexodus boost as lemmy but since then has many more atrophied communities and far fewer moderaters to do anything about it, hence spamalot.
I've only seen 1 or 2 pieces of spam in my feed and that was months back - interesting that you seem to be seeing more of it on a federated server. I only started blocking those magazines when I noticed the spam on desktop sidebars.
It’s weird. And it’s all pharma. Buy oxy! Buy Valium! I haven’t seen much other spam lately; a couple of months ago, it was thinly veiled product line stuff: “such-and-such company provides high-quality tools for Y industry” stuff, but back then I wasn’t noticing it was specifically coming from kbin. That’s all gone away, and now it’ll be a run of a half-dozen “Canadian” pharma adverts in the unfiltered World feed.
It’ll be interesting to see what solution some enterprising person comes up with. It’ll involve an LLM, no doubt.
I just saw another one in random(@kbin.social), so I jumped in and scrolled back; there were only a couple in the past two days, but three days ago there was a series of several posts in a row (6? 8? Something like that).
I an not subscribed to any kbin magazines, so I don’t see them in my curated feed; they mostly show up in the uncurated “World.”
FWIW; you expressed curiosity, so I followed up with an example.
A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:
Using KES, enable General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.
Next, enable General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.
/kbin meta
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