Same. I've been on Reddit for almost 12 years and for so long now, every time I post or comment I go through a several-minute-long phase of "Ugh no one needs to hear from my stupid arse on this topic" and "Jesus Christ what a stupid ass comment..." Twitter I've been on years also but I barely use because it was going down the shitter long before Space Karen got his hands on it.
Been here in the Fediverse on Mastodon and Kbin for a few weeks now and it's like going from gas station sushi that may be fresh that day to a high end sushi shop with a great omakase. Reddit still has some subs that, in my own realm of interests, haven't picked up yet here in the Fediverse, but even just over the last 3 weeks the changes and increase in content has been very noticeable.
What I look forward to the most is when different interest groups start federating their own instances, like startrek.website is doing already. It takes time for these communities to grow, but I'm sure that in time decentralization is going to do wonders for them. :)
I've been commenting on (fediverse twitter equivalent) mastodon posts on kbin, with my kbin account, because mastodon is also federated with kbin.
Sure, the fediverse is fragmented, but it's also far more connected.
TIL there's someone working on federating wordpress with mastodon. That means we'll soon be able to 'boost'(retweet) a wordpress article on The Rules of Acquisition on mastodon with a kbin account and have lemmy users comment on it with a Quark gif they found on pixelfed(instagram equivalent) or a video from peertube (youtube equivalent).
Honestly, it feels a bit like we've been robbed all these years, commenting on screenshots of tweets you can't easily copy paste or snapchat videos that barely load in the janky reddit videoplayer. That and switching between 5 different messenger apps, because these greedy cunts refuse to allow you to send a message from insta to whatsapp, because it might mean you spend 5 seconds less looking at ragebait content surrounded by ads.
Totally agree, especially with your last paragraph. It feels like we're going back to when the internet was full of possibilities and felt open. I'm excited about that!
Appreciate all your work and I am enjoying kbin but please make sure you are not burning yourself out. I have seen it too many times, especially in open source projects that become super popular all of a sudden. Take care of your mental health and work at a pace that you still enjoy. You don't ow us anything.
There's quite a few of us now helping out with tickets. Great to see lots of people coming together to make the site better. Good to get lots of bugs squashed :)
Love it! But that is or can be part of the "problem". Suddenly it's not "I am working on the software I like" anymore but "managing merge requests all day". Not saying that's what's happening here tho. It can be a problem.
I think it's important to not have a single person having to deal with those. But admittedly it's hard to get to that point. I've only significantly done established, commercial software dev, where you can just trust your coworkers. Random people on the internet are harder to trust. Anyone can play nice for a couple of days for a chance to slip in something malicious.
The project is not only rather new (so any contributors are gonna be new), but it's also hosted on an unfamiliar site (which is to say, it's not GitHub), so most people don't have an account with history either.
@Mnmalst Yeah, I am well aware of what you're talking about, and I am trying to maintain a balance. I knew that it could look like this at a certain stage, but I didn't expect it to happen so quickly ;) I assumed I would have a bit more time to prepare and acquire knowledge. Now I have to improvise. I make mistakes, but I try to fix them and always keep an eye on the big picture. That's all I can do. Working with pull requests is great, I enjoy learning new things from others, and it's also fun to discover bugs together. At least for now. ;-) But I always emphasize that my priorities are my milestones, which keep me afloat, so I care about organizing our collaboration as quickly and effectively as possible. However, we also need to get to know each other a little better.
There have been fixes submitted by volunteers, but I don't think they've been reviewed and approved. And I don't think there have been any new releases.
Hopefully things pick up speed now that Ernest has a server admin to look after things here
You can have a look here to see a test instance with some of the things that are coming, Ernest (the admin) has been merging in a range of tickets including bug fixes, UI improvements and other bits.
There seems to be an ever growing backlog of feature requests and bug fixes in the issues list but a fair bit is getting sorted out behind the scenes.
There's several of us now with kbin installed locally and a decent dev chat channel that's pretty busy. I think so the end it's still him physically marking PRs as approved and merging it in / deploying, but at least there's a few contributors now :)
Yeah there are a bunch of us in the dev chat now. Some of us have set up our additional kbin instances such as myself. I’m still looking through the code and getting up to speed but hope to contribute to the main code base soon. (Right now I’m experimenting with some features I wrote on my instance)
So yes, it’s mainly been Ernest up until this point but he is starting to get additional support from the community :)
Thank you! I’m excited to see the site grow as well. We seem to be building a nice place to hangout and have good discussions unlike the site that shall not be named.
Yes, there is a very strong team there now, and I will gradually delegate responsibility in certain areas. I need to focus on my own milestones. However, I want to do it slowly because there are many pitfalls here that are a consequence of kbin being a side project. But the organization on Matrix was amazing, and I didn't even lift a finger for it.
I'm very much enjoying your side project, and we all appreciate all the effort you've put in as we've stressed it to (and no doubt beyond!) It's design limits.
I also appreciate the way you pop up and contribute to random threads!
Your level of engagement with the community is absolutely spectacular. I'm glad to have found myself a cozy little Internet space and wish you the best of luck with this one hell of a side project!
@ernest I can't imagine how stressful it is for you. I've run a few larger projects (ShowEQ back in the day, being one of the bigger ones), but nothing that blew up so quickly like Kbin has and I don't envy your position. I really appreciate the work you've put into KBin and I want to see it succeed!
SOOOOOO after finally setting up my kbin dev environment I went ahead and wrote some code to add support for EXACTLY this on the official kbin codebase!
Now just need @ernest 's approval and once it's merged you'll be able to do this on kbin without any modifications!!!
edit: clicking on a comment now also hides its content (other than the username), making it even more clear which threads are collapsed! (similar to apollo) – updated the demo gif
I hope your PR gets approved, I was looking for this feature as I like the classic/tree view but it gets difficult to track new top-level comments as you scroll down the page.
Speaking of, pages are another thing I'd like the option to remove. I'd rather just have all the comments laid out in one page instead of having a pagination system, it makes Ctrl + F a lot handier in the future once places like these get even more critical mass.
Nice! Would it be possible to use a little +/- icon somewhere on each comment instead of having it be clicking anywhere on the comment? I could see myself very regularly accidentally collapsing stuff when I don't mean to.
I love the huge touch target for mobile friendliness, and I've done some work to make sure accidental collapses don't happen (if you mean to select text it won't collapse, if you click on a link or a button it won't collapse either!)
is there a common situation where you'd accidentally collapse stuff when you dont mean to?
Like @psyspoop said, touchpads can be prone to accidental collapses. Maybe setting the touch target to be on the "header" of the comment (the whitespace between the username and the upvote/downvote buttons) could be a good compromise?
TBH that's not too hard to do, but it goes back to the whole mobile friendliness :(
IMO i think the upside of mobile friendliness outweigh the times people accidentally tap on touchpad, and i personally think just having the header being a touch target is a little too small for mobile users.. so i prefer the whole comment being a target
obviously if folks disagree heavily i could probably adjust but i'm curious what @ernest thinks
What if there was an option somewhere to switch between the two? Mobile users could keep the full comment collapsing, and web users could switch to header-only collapsing.
I like how RIF (Reddit Is Fun) does it. If you click on a comment (or post on your front page), it reformats the comment box so that it opens up additional options. One of them happens to be collapse among other basic commands like reply, report, next parent comment, previous parent comment and stuff like that. It makes the comment and front page sections a little bit more compact and easy to read quickly without options cluttering the interface. The voting options are the only options that stick out without clicking on a comment so you can easily upvote/downvote and move on.
interesting, sounds closer to a complete redesign on how we see and interact with the comment – i mostly use apollo so i kinda took the design language there but def see what you're saying!
limiting my change to specifically comment thread collapsing since that sounds like a bigger overhaul!
Really just accidentally clicking while hovering over the comment, which is especially more likely when using a touchpad on a laptop. It may not be that big of an issue if you've handled stuff like links and highlighting, but I guess in my head I like having one clear spot to click to trigger a functionality, but I do see the reasoning now that you mention mobile, and I agree that having a tiny little icon would be way more annoying on mobile than the occasional misclick on desktop.
Ideally there'd also be a collapse button for desktop imo, so that I can keep my mouse somewhere where accidental clicks don't do anything which is personally what I prefer
Nevertheless, we are still running on a budget VPS.
As things are currently developing, it is almost a certainty that all reddit alternatives on the fediverse will get absolutely hammered on the 12th.
I know you are working on an infrastructure update. I just sent you a few bucks via buymeacoffee to support that. However, it could well be possible that the new infrastructure will also become overwhelmed during the days following the 12th, requiring another update in short notice.
At some point, things might become really expensive.
What I'm trying to say is: Don't be hesitant to ask for donations. I think many of the users here right now are acutely aware of how important the next few days are going to be for the post-reddit fediverse ecosystem. Growth needs servers, servers need money and I'm sure many users would be willing to to chip in.
Not right now, but you can "install" the web app so that it functions similarly. Just search for something like "install progressive web app on <platform>".
I don't believe that there is a mobile app for kbin nor do I think you should expect one anytime soon unless you make it yourself. Kbin is still extremely early in active development.
However, if you run Chrome or Firefox on your phone, they both have an option to "install" a page as a webapp, which works remarkably well. It's what I've been using and frankly I don't have much in the way of complaints that might be fixed by a dedicated app. It feels like it is one.
@zombiepiratefromspace Thank you, I really appreciate it! I will try to keep kbin.social alive for as long as I can. However, not at any cost. What is more important to me is the future decentralization, which is beautiful in the fediverse. That's why there is an emphasis on providing instructions for creating your own instance, even though kbin is still far from a stable release. I believe people will manage with a little support from me on Matrix... :)
Can you link me to a brief explanation on how the fediverse/instances work?
It is something I am still not fully grasping. For example can there but duplicate magazine names on different instances or is kbin.videos link to all the same threads regardless of instance?
Each instance is it's own independent website, but with the ability to also export content to other websites using the same communication protocol (ActivityPub). So, if you create a community on kbin.social, let's say, to use your example, videos@kbin.social, then that is a singular community that lives here on this website, kbin.social.
Someone on another website, let's say lemmy.ml, can create their own videos community, which would be videos@lemmy.ml. They're as independent from each other as r/videos on Reddit and a Facebook group also called "Videos" would be. Only, here on kbin.social, you can choose to subscribe to the videos group on lemmy.ml, and see what people are talking about there. In doing so, you're requesting that lemmy.ml forward all future content posted to videos@lemmy.ml to kbin.social, and you're requesting that kbin.social populate your personal timeline with that content that it receives.
Similarly, if someone on lemmy.ml wants to see what people are talking about in your videos@kbin.social group, they can ask lemmy.ml to do the same.
Importantly, these websites will also pass along local posts and replies intended for remote communities back to the hosting server, so that things stay in sync.
But they remain totally separate websites. They're just separate websites that pass content back and forth between each other, at the behest of their users.
A lot of people have voiced some consternation about this in the last couple of days, as I guess they feel some angst around missing out on discussions on topics they care about, because they might be taking place in communities they're not following. But I don't see this as an issue. Not only, as many people keep pointing out, are there multiple groups covering the same topics on Reddit, just with different names, that people don't object to, but in large subreddits a majority of posts never even get seen by subscribers, because they just don't gain traction in the short amount of time necessary to reach 'Hot' before something else does. In this distributed model, there is the potential for average people to actually get their posts engaged with, and for a single space to be dominated by a handful of power users. Now, each instance can have its own set of power users on a topic.
It's also trivially easy to share posts between groups, as lemmy -- though, as far as I've found, not kbin -- has a cross-post button, just like Reddit. So, anything from small groups that will interest big ones can be pushed up and anything from big groups that people may want to discuss in a quieter space can be passed down with relative ease.
After all, what's the real value in being commenter # 72,641 on a post that's reached the top of r/videos? No one's going to even see your comment, let alone respond to it. And the OP definitely won't notice it. But if you're commenter # 72 in a group of 200, then there's meaningful engagement to be had.
Is it possible for communities to be combined? Say I want to get the best of both worlds and see content from videos@kbin.social, and also video@lemmy.ml (other than just browsing to both)
I think it will be crucial for both kbin & lemmy to interprete each !videos from each fediverse instance as one like we do with comments, with the ability for each instance admin to filter out other instances.
I appreciate the link but that really doesn't explain much to me.
I understand different instances allow for decentralization. But how are they connected or are they connected? Do I see other instances on kbin.social?
My understanding is that it's like email addresses. You can write to someone with a hotmail account from your gmail account.
Just like with email, being filbert@kbin.social is not the same, e.g., being filbert@lemmy.ml. They are two separate addresses.
When it comes to instances, creating a magazines (which is sort of like a subreddit and is exactly like a lemmy community) on one instance, will create a new one: coolshit@kbin.social is not the same magazine/community as cooshilt@lemmy.ml.
However, while you're in kbin.social, you can subscribe and interact with either of those magazines/community. And, if you go to search for magazines in kbin.social, you will see both of them listed.
Ultimately, if I've understood this all, it's just that as some point any particular instance's version of a community will gain the most traction and be the de facto version. coolshit@kbin.social takes off more than cooshilt@lemmy.ml and so everyone from across the fediverse ends up following coolshit@kbin.social more than the other one.
I think what makes more sense is for lemmy/kbin instances to show all instances under the same !community as one from many sources, with the ability for the instance admin to filter out the source instances that are deemed innapropriate.
You could have gaming@kbin.social & gaming@lemmy.ml collectively treated as one !gaming in the instance, with different sources just like the way comments already work. Then when another community gaming@evil.rude spins up, it should be automatically interpreted as !gaming until the admin filters them from their instance.
I thought this explanation by /u/buried_treasure does a great job explaining this in an easy to understand way.
You will naturally be aware that there are many different systems on the internet, run by different companies. And these systems are generally incompatible with one another.
For example, you can't use GMail to compose and send a post to Twitter. You can't log on to Facebook and read content from Reddit (unless somebody has copied it there). You can't watch Youtube videos via Flickr. And so on.
All of this seems obvious - they're completely different systems. Why on earth SHOULD you be able to interact with them from elsewhere?
A few years ago some people decided that even though this was obvious, it wasn't the way the internet HAD to be. They developed a protocol (which is just a set of instructions for computer programs to talk to each other over the internet) which they called ActivityPub, and then basically said to software developers "here it is. We think this could be a cool way of getting different systems to interact with each other. See what you can do".
In the 5 or 6 years since then, lots of software developers HAVE tried to see what they can do with ActivityPub. One well-known example of a system that uses it is Mastodon. It's a system that is similar to Twitter.
Another couple of ActivityPub systems that are becoming popular right now are Lemmy and KBin. They are Messageboard systems, roughly similar in concept to Reddit.
There are many other ActivityPub systems, for example Pixelfed (which is a bit like Flickr, so for hosting photos), Peertube (yep you guessed it, videos), Friendica (like Facebook) and far too many others to list. Collectively, these systems and any others that use ActivityPub call themselves "the Fediverse".
OK - so what? These are just wannabe competitors to the big boys: Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, right?
Not right! The magic of ActivityPub and the Fediverse is that they can all interact with each other.
So you can log on to Mastodon and subscribe to Lemmy groups. That would be like logging on to Twitter and subbing to your favourite subreddit. And then being able to read the posts from that subreddit right there in Twitter.
You can log on to KBin and follow users on Peertube. Imagine being able to follow and view content from your favourite Youtube streams from right here in Reddit.
That's the real beauty of the Fediverse - every system knows how to talk to every other one. The other clever bit about it is that because ActivityPub is a publicly-defined protocol, no one company can own it and take it over. It's almost impossible for a billionaire like Elon Musk to take over Mastodon, or for Lemmy admins to decide to shut out third-party APIs. Because the system has been built from the very beginning to be open, and shared, and communal.
Well said, the dream really is for people to start hosting their own instances instead of everyone just coming here.
Also, as the number of federated instances increases isn't it going to cause exponentially more overall traffic since every instance will have to start pinging others in order to populate the landing page, it's gonna be quite a web with many requests instead of just one as it'd be on reddit or other centralized sites?
Thanks, once I deal with the formalities that need to be taken care of first, I feel like next week will bring a downpour of improvements in the release, thanks to the contributors.
Hey ernest, quick question about federation. I setup /m/genart, and I set the tags to follow (eg. GenerativeArt). On my mastodon account I can see many more posts tagged with GenerativeArt than what shows up in the microblog. Is this expected? and how can I improve it? I'm currently working through following the same accounts as my old masto account.
re: feature requests -> #1 thing I'd love to see is the ability to migrate accounts, so I can port my followers from my old masto account to my new kbin account :))
Anyway, I know you're busy af, so I'm not expecting a response. No pressure. Love the site and thanks for all your hard work!
@aebrer Hey, in order for tagged content to appear on the microblog, either you or someone else on the instance needs to follow the author of the post. kbin is designed to create a network of mutual friends. We recently experienced stability issues, and some messages may not have reached the instances. Please try following those accounts again. Some instances may still temporarily block us due to Cloudflare protection. If that doesn't help, send me a private message, and I'll verify what's going on.
I also hope that migrations in various directions will be established soon.
Starting today, I can afford to answer a few new questions and a few from my backlog. That's what I can handle at the moment. Hopefully, I'll be able to be here more frequently soon :)
Awesome thank you so much for the detailed response! I will keep making progress refollowing my network then :))
One thing to possibly note: it seems there's something weird about the federation with mastodon.art; no one shows up from that server when you search for them
I have -2 even though I have plenty of upvotes. I am aware now that downvotes give you negative rep but upvotes don't give you positive. I have no idea if that's being worked on or not but the system is definitely a little confusing, especially for those of us who came from Reddit.
So until... Friday, I think? Thursday? There was a difference between Kbin and Lemmy. Kbin used "boosts" for upvotes and "reduces" for downvotes, but Lemmy used "Favorites" for upvotes instead.
Kbin literally flipped the switch right before Reddit started coming over here en masse to follow Lemmy's lead and have it be favorites/reduces instead.
The issue is that the reputation code doesn't seem to have been updated (probably because... y'know, the website exploded). So the reputation displayed on your profile counts "boosts" as upvotes still. IIRC sorting algorithms like "Hot" still use boosts instead of favorites too.
So I'm giving you a boost right now - which should give a +1 to your reputation.
This is just a visual bug for now, though, so it'll probably be fixed when things die down. This site has only been live for a month or so, so there's still bugs here and there.
Coming from Mastodon - a boost is important- it basically retweets the content to all your followers. A favourite is just a message to the poster that you think their content is cool - they get a notification you favourited it - but that’s alll.
In kbin where people tend to follow topics more than people, I’m not entirely sure what the full ramification of a boost are outside of telling your followers.
On that last part - I believe an intent for kbin is to be a bridge to the fediverse in general, including Mastodon. So both topics AND people would potentially be followed, and used for that reason.
Yes, although I'm guessing upvotes here (or "favourites" at the moment) will do the same eventually. They're brand new and don't seem 100% implemented yet.
Take a moment to really drink in that last sentence.
Some dude named Ernest is just tooling around with a social media platform, trying things out, getting the hang of things, just posting into the nothingness for less than a month to test code. Meanwhile, the CEO of a social media conglomerate who doesn't even know who you are opens the lid on Schrodinger's "ideas box" (don't know if it's a good idea or bad idea until you look inside!) and out of nowhere, your little tiny corner of the internet goes from having like 50 people to 250k in a week.
If I'm not mistaken the polish language instances have been up and running longer, kbin.social is just the first internationally oriented one. But still, it's early development, and it's crazy that the only real problem seems to have been server capacity. Hats off.
All hail Ernest! He's probably scared stupid right now (I'm so sorry Ernest. I have a name irl that gets made fun of also). But yeah jokes aside buy that man a coffee, donate, help him out. He's living in the game changer world right now
For the benefit of anybody who doesn't get this reference, Ernest is the name of a character from a series of American commercials, a children's TV show and then a number of films. One of those films is called Ernest Scared Stupid, which is the joke here.
The entire Ernest franchise is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon; they're not particularly well-known outside of North America. I doubt kbin's Ernest is compared or contrasted with TV's Ernest often at all in Poland.
Does kbin really have 250k users? Do you have a source? I'm curious, but that'd be great if true.
I'm guessing this is more like 250k unique IPs over a day that viewed, and not 250k registered users which I'm guessing is more like 15k or something. Either way, that'd be more than I expected which is good.
kbin had about 165k "visits" yesterday. From here. I'm not quite clear what that means but I'm guessing it's either a site load, or some group of accesses from the same IP (i.e. if someone accessed the site for a few minutes, then went quite for an hour, then accessed again, that's a couple "visits"). But I'm 100% guessing.
kbin has about 25k users of its own at the moment. From here
The fediverse has about 130k users total. I'm not sure if that includes Mastodon, but I think it might.
Edit2: Oh my am I wrong about Mastodon being included. They've added more than 130k users just in the last WEEK. There's over 12m accounts at the moment (according to this) which is fantastic.
I'm not sure I particularly like that but I guess that's how it functions so far. Strangely, I still have my reddit account and checking it; I had new "followers" which I never got before. I'm certain they are bots trying to prop it up during this time. It's all very weird.
This is a helpful explanation. Thank you!
I remember you could follow users on Reddit as well, but I never really knew of any reason to do it. It seems like "boosting" might actually give some agency to that, and maybe I should just start boosting stuff I find particularly interesting.
It's mainly a feature of other ActivityPub platforms (it's the equivalent of a retweet on mastodon) so I'm sure it's partially there for cross-compatability between them.
Of note is that kbin is also connected to the microblogging (think Twitter, Tumblr) side of the fediverse where the "repost content you like to your page" paradigm is more intuitive.
Yeah, It's true. Since Sunday, I've been noting errors that I'm still working on resolving. It doesn't make it easier that it's the post-holiday period, and due to travels and security measures, it's not the easiest task. I'm working to get everything back to normal as soon as possible.
I'm curious, 2hen you say "on-site work", do you mean you need to travel onsite to do some work for kbin? At a host somewhere? Otherwise, when you say "security measures" for travel, how is that related? Maybe you just mean you are travelling and it is taking up your time...?
Thanks for putting in all this work, especially over a period that's traditionally vacation time. Make sure you're striking a good work/life balance, if you can get the site basically functional (as it appears to be now) don't sweat the small stuff. :)
Not just me eh, sorry to hear! I had a Jellyfin upgrade go sideways (my fault) once during the holidays and that was bad enough - and all my users live with me! Sorry that you are pulling your hair out, and personally I'm more than content to wait it out until after your vacation.
I imagine transferring ownership is a manual process, but on the off chance it's automated, I've requested ownership and intend to delete it right after.
Has showed up at the top of my screen among the random mags disproportionately over the past several months too. It's what keeps me off kbin when I'm in the office around people.
@daredevil hey how did you get rid of it altogether?
I just noticed we had a "frenworld" (copy of a subreddit that was notoriously racist, antisemitic etc) and requested ownership thinking I could delete it but now it's listed as a magazine I mod and I can't seem to either delete it or detatch myself from it. I don't want it listed under mags I mod! Help!
@PugJesus you mean the Delete button? I hit that but all it did was change it to a "Restore" button.
I think this means people get "Empty" when they visit @frenworld. But the racist magazine is still listed on my profile as a magazine I moderate, which is the last thing I want.
Yes, I'm aware of this. The magazine is not publicly listed as a magazine you moderate -- I do not see it listed in your profile. I noticed this problem a little over a week ago. While cleaning up abandoned magazines, I noticed in my profile it still says I have about 70 magazines that I moderate. An issue has already been raised.
This is great. I dont want to request moderation on too many so I just picked a few that I think I could handle and communities I'd like to see developed. (Specifically the manga and bitwig magazine.)
Just a friendly reminder--claiming ownership/moderation privileges could just be a temporary thing. Implementing this system allows us the freedom to share and pass on the responsibility as our situations change. :) Best of luck with @manga and @bitwig.
I have lost access to my original account (firebreathingbunny) due to an email activation problem. This means I can't moderate my magazine. I have emailed you and messaged you and haven't heard back for the past two months. Please get back to me.
Most replies here are correct. To clarify and summarize:
The source of truth for a magazine/community is the server name that appears after the magazine name.
e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social <--- the source of truth is kbin.social.
2. ActivityPub and the Fediverse is a "Push" model. What does this mean?
Imagine subscribing to a real-world newspaper or magazine with home delivery(few these days will actually remember this, but try to imagine at least). You will get all new issues delivered to you from the moment you became a subscriber, but you don't get copies of all the newspapers or magazines they have ever printed delivered to you. You only get things moving forward. That's the same with the Fediverse. After you subscribe or follow something, you will get all the new content moving forward, but not what has been created so far.
To extend #2, it's a "push once" model. What does that mean? It means that if I create content from my instance (which is not kbin.social) to the magazine kbinMeta@kbin.social, my content will get pushed to kbin.social. Kbin.social, however, will not "re-push" that content to everyone that kbin.social knows is subscribed to the magazine.
So how does my new content that I created in kbinMeta@kbin.social show up on other instances that are not kbin.social? I thought you said your content only gets pushed once?
Correct. However, it's not quite as simple as my instance pushing just to kbin.social. Strictly speaking, (and this is based on experience with other platforms, not specifically how kbin works since I haven't verified this for kbin 100%) when I create the content, my instance will push to kbin.social and all other instances (not users) that my instance knows are also subscribed to specifically kbinMeta@kbin.social. So my instance actually knows a subset of the instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social and will push the new content to each of those other instances. My instance, however, won't necessarily know all the other instances that are subscribed to kbinMeta@kbin.social. As a result, some instances won't see my new content because it wasn't pushed to them.
As a result, to let users know about this potential gap, not only does it mean that older content doesn't automatically show up, it also means that not necessarily all new content will show up either.
Note on #3: I haven't fully verified this. This statement is based on how other, non-kbin instances handle federation. This is how "likes" work across platforms like Mastodon, Calckey, etc. I see no evidence (yet) that this is any different for kbin.
Thanks for the clarifications. Regarding 3, why does some new content from e.g. kbinMeta@kbin.social gets pushed to an instance like lemmy.world, but not all new content? I mean, if some content gets pushed it seems to be aware of that instance. Or is it random which content gets pushed? Does this mean that the other instance will never get all new content? This seems like quite the issue?
Edit: ok, I think I get it. So if someone from a random instance posts to e.g., technology@beehaw.org, and that instance doesn't know about kbin.social, it won't get pushed to this instances representation of the technology@beehaw.org magazine?
Edit: ok, I think I get it. So if someone from a random instance posts to e.g., technology@beehaw.org, and that instance doesn't know about kbin.social, it won't get pushed to this instances representation of the technology@beehaw.org magazine?
Correct. It's only "pushed once" by the instance that the creator's account is on. Of course it will push to the source of truth, but it will only push to other instances it knows are also following that magazine since it doesn't necessarily know all of the instances that follow that magazine. In your example, yes, if the creator of the content (which in this example is an account not on beehaw.org) posts to technology@beehaw.org, their instance will push to beehaw.org and others, but if it doesn't know that kbin.social has any followers of the magazine/community, it won't push to kbin.social.
One other possibility is that the 3rd-party instance does know about kbin.social (for example), but has blocked (defederated with) kbin.social OR kbins.social has blocked that 3rd-party instance, my expectation would be that such content won't show up on kbin.social's "copy" of the community.
Yes, it is working as intended. The idea is that each instance is responsible for pushing content once, then it's the responsibility of the receiving instance to process and display the content to the relevant users/accounts.
As a side note, if everything was "re-pushed" out, the load becomes even more on the "source of truth" for larger communities with wide federation and a lot of new content generated locally and remotely. I could see this being leveraged to take down servers by simply spamming really large communities (with large federation) with small content forcing the "source of truth" to now "re-push" the content to every server that is knows about for every single new comment, or reply, or post.
Eh, it's not much of a downside in an active community. The model is push once at time of publication, there are other systems in place that republish content and help it propagate through the network.
On kbin, there's a "boost"... well, it's not really stylized as a button, but there's a "boost" feature, which acts to republish posts or comments and allows them to reach newer subscribers. I'm not sure how it works on Lemmy, as there's no explicit boost, but there are mechanisms there to renew active back content.
It all just means we, as users and members of communities, need to take on a little bit of responsibility for ensuring that interesting or valuable content propagates.
If i understand it correctly, the system is built to spread info and decrease load but at the same time to get the best and most up to date info everyone needs to be on one instance?
Weird, must be a mistake in my understanding of the fediverse
I see that ActivityPub makes it hard to do it and if it can’t be done then it should be visible (so people can know and act accordingly)
The only “alternative” approach I can see would be to have a per instance account that is given the activity (say upvote/downvote)
So… let’s say I’m on kbin.social and upvote this comment.
Kbin.social knowing me (since it’s my account) logs the upvote but does so as if single_instance_system_account@kbin.social did the upvote.
That is then what is replicated across the fediverse.
I assume that breaks the “intent” of the protocol and could be an issue but does let other instances decide to filter out that activity (if they decide to do so) by having some attribute or flag that denotes that this “account” is the fediverse instance account (e.g. not a user).
Boosts, however, should be shared since it’s like a retweet/shout out and are meant to be shared.
Of course that means I can no longer see my own upvote/downvote activity.
If that was also wanted then you could add a table that basically logs that but isn’t federated. E.g. a local instance reference that can be used for that instance to show the activity.
This way there’s less chance of an issue of somebody knowing a users account seeing activity like this:
A man, say in Iran, upvoted something about the prophet that somebody else found disrespectful
A christian teen upvoted something about atheism.
A woman reading about how to leave a domestic abuse situation.
Somebody curious about transgender reassignment
Either there needs to be a way to minimize the risks of such activity being seen/shared across the fediverse or it needs to be very very clear that even if you don’t see it that what you do is shouted across the fediverse and that others can and will be able to see it.
So what happens with 300 people downvote a post and 500 upvote it? For that to work you'd need an 'account' per post/vote/user combination. Now your instance has 1000's of bot accounts that are now indistinguishable from bad vote manipulation.
ActivityPub broadcasts all these activity types. It's how it works. You can't federate these things without, well, federating them.
Yeah. Because each instance would have a record of that but there’s nothing to stop a bad actor from doing that on one instance and federating that out.
Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.
Edit: The more I think about it @VerifiablyMrWonka the only way to do it would be to have some kind of activitypub transaction that is flagged as an instances reputation.
E.g. it’s the same as using the per instance account but it allows you to say “here’s how kbin.social” calculated the reputation/weight of this item.
And then each instance can opt to include that or not as they see fit. Maybe they federate with all instances but only show the weight/reputation “favorites”/“reduce” from those that they trust to maintain that info. Lemmy.world, sure, but the new instances such as haxor.1488.de.feder.at yeah… that’s probably a no so by default all of those don’t show/include in that instances feed.
Of course a bad actor can set up their own instance and just create thousands of fake bot accounts and do the same.
A competent admin would then just defederate from them. Easy. But now throw in that all kbin instances look like bot fests and what do you do? Maybe what lemmy.ml have done and just block kbin useragents at the firewall.
Having an aggregate account that just sends totals could work, but then vote brigading just became even easier. What's that aggregate bot? Did you just send a vote ratio of 300:1.9k for this comment? Lovely.
It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm not sure it's doable. The only thing keeping ActivityPub together is the fact that it's so transparent and bad actors are easily spotted and blocked. As soon as you muddy the waters the primary benefactor is the bad person.
This is bug. It's fixed in dev. Shortly before the great migration started a change was made to bring kbin in line with lemmy but the bit that calculated the "karma" was missed and so it still uses boosts.
I think the Lemmy instances that disable downvotes are also the instances that have more heavy-handed policies and moderation. They're essentially centralizing moderation to the admins and mods rather than relying on community self-policing through downvotes.
@trynn One could argue with that. But Beehaw arguments that even without downvotes a self regulating community in form of upvotes is still in place. Because upvoted comments are on top. So the effect with or without downvotes is basically the same, from regulation point of view. But with downvotes it has an additional strong psychological effect.
But you are also right that such communities without a downvote mechanism do actually try to enforce through explicit moderation.
I know from my Reddit days that people try to mute people by downvoting an opinion they don't like. And once people have downvotes, many sheeps follow. And that in turn could lead to discussions that are popular only. That's why I am actually not hating this concept.
Often, the option to downvote is the only thing stopping me from getting sucked into some stupid argument with an idiot. It is a massive productivity booster. Downvote and move on.
I wish kbin would hide posts with lots of downvotes...
I've had some time to think about it and I think I actually like the current setup. "Boost" provides more visibility to a post, while "upvote" and "downvote" is synonymous with agree/disagree.
In a way, I can disagree with someone AND boost it. Disagreeing with someone doesn't have to be hostile. I think it would be healthy if a community could disagree with each other in a civil manner.
I also like that if someone disagrees, that person cannot influence if the post gets less visibility.
Except downvoting does reduce content's visibility, and people are downvoting content that they don't really have anything to do with because it shows up in their All feed. Certain niche magazines and magazines for vulnerable communities are at risk of vote bullying in the current system.
I actually disagree with this being an example of why seeing downvotes is bad. I also think it's good we can see which mod is doing the banning; I've noticed the standard lemmy moderation log doesn't show that. This kind of transparency allows for poor behaviour to be discovered more quickly and remedied with less speculation about who did what.
Edit: For example, I can also see this person has gone through your entire comment history and downvoted every comment. I didn't see any troll-like comments from you though. I hope this person is doing OK mentally, but this isn't OK community leader behaviour on their part.
Edit 2: I can also see that OP has downvoted every single one of the other person's comments too. On the same day as the other person did to OP. Uh... I don't know what conversation spawned this entire exchange, but I dont think that downvoting all someone's comments outside of their contexts is productive.
Edit 3: And for the couple of other accounts who are going through the post histories of the people involved and downvoting because of this thread? Also not helpful behaviour. Be better.
This is exactly why transparency is great. These people are ridiculous and lose credibility. Keeping everything visible is the best defense against manipulation
Agreed, if somebody is spam downvoting comments (Which is honestly quite the pathetic act), then people should be able to see that, and block/report them
Unfortunately, blocking doesn’t actually do anything aside from stopping up from seeing their comments. Someone I blocked is still able to see, reply to, and downvote my posts. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
On the other hand, if one of the actual spammers were to just block downvoters and their downvotes, this would allow them to more easily evade detection as bad faith content creators. It's hard to say how that should be remedied beyond more moderation, which would require more unpaid mod labour and time. And relies on moderators always making fair and sensible decisions.
People and communities are tricky. Why do we all got to be so damn tricky?
The whole moderation process is still getting a revamp. There's a fair few black holes where the system needs to be tightened up. Being an open source project it just all takes time. Be great to get it to a polished level where blocking / banning feels refined :)
Yeah, and being able to see who downvotes you will hopefully lead to people being encouraged to actually leave a comment if they disagree instead of just downvoting everything they disagree with they see. People still are not aware that downvoting is public, so still fall into old habits of using downvote as a I disagree or I don't like you option.
All of the downvotes/upvotes are public via the ActivityPub protocol. That's part of the system. Hiding it on the front-end for kbin only obscures the mechanism.
That's just the limitation of the current technology.
I feel the downvote is equally as important as the upvote, sometimes bad posts and comments just need negative reaction
I avoided some of the finer details because the downvoting isn't the point - the bans are. Especially from so many magazines.
But - to give the full story:
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I downvoted something of his - I don't even remember what, exactly. I made some comments and noticed when checking replies later that I had been downvoted on a bunch of them.
Curious, I checked to see where the downvotes were coming from - all of them were this guy. I checked their profile and saw that I had already downvoted one of their posts, hence my guess as to why he was mad.
Usually I'd let these things pass, but I found it a bit childish and I was feeling petty, so I did it back to them. You can judge me if you like; I'm not exactly proud of stooping to that level but I was already in a sour mood that day.
I haven't been on Kbin for a couple days, but I checked back this afternoon and saw 18 messages, all of which said "you have been banned." Evidently they got angry and decided they weren't going to let me participate in any of their communities.
I got pissed at this and banned him back - which is, again, perhaps childish on my part. At the same time, I've been a mod for a long time across multiple platforms, and I have a low tolerance for BS at this point. I've seen folks like this start spamming communities in retaliation to perceived slights - something like that happened on the first forum I ever ran, way back before Reddit even existed - and frankly this guy has already proven to be acting in bad faith.
One reason why I didn't delve into details is because this is going to devolve into petty he said/she said arguments, which frankly isn't the point.
The point is that this guy got pissed off at something I did and decided I wasn't able to participate in any of their communities anymore. Like I said, I was only subscribed to one of these communities anyway - so it didn't really affect me - but I worry what would happen if these weren't small communities. What happens if a powermod that runs multiple big magazines decides to ban people for perceived slights?
I know this was a issue on Reddit (awkwardtheturtle), and I'd hate for it to be an issue here, too.
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I do want to call out some concerns here. I'm not excusing op's behavior, but indiscriminate downvotes is the kind of thing I'd say we don't want here and I'd say you're both in the wrong even if one of you is farther down the path.
It actually seems to be central to the point. If I take your account as the truth, it appears that by using the dislike functionality to leverage your personal UI extension side effects, you have actually had the effect of delegitimising this person's contribution. Because downvotes on kbin also affect everyone's content sorting.
This person may have felt harassed by those actions, even if it wasn't your intent. While you have asked for us to excuse your actions as childish retaliation and an attempt to defend your communities from bad actors, you have also cast the exact same actions from the other person as being "troll powermod".
That seems problematic. If i were in your position, I would look at modifying the tampermonkey extension to provide a hide function which only affects your client. And also retracting downvotes which it created, as a show of goodwill. I hope you can both get past whatever it is that happened here.
Downvotes not having reasons attached allows for a lot of room for misinterpretation and uniformed assumptions. Instead of hiding the downvotes, perhaps we could all just be more mindful of how we use them.
I hope you all have a better time from here on out.
The script is causing poor behaviour by subverting the purpose of the up/down vote system.
The downvote button should be used to indicate a post doesn't add to the conversation. It isn't a dislike/disagree button, your supposed to comment in those situations.
I try to put effort into my comments, when they get randomly downvoted for no reason it can be upsetting.
Obviously you upset the mod and they overreacted, but your behaviour triggered the event.
/kbin meta
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