It seems to me that there are several factors. Firstly, the instance was created recently, about 1-2 months ago. There wasn't even an official instance opening, you know, with cake and confetti ;) During this time, I've been observing people on the Fediverse. It's unlikely that any follows were given by chance. Later on, wonderful people who discovered kbin did the rest. That's how it is in the Fediverse. In the beginning, not everything is easy and obvious, but if you put enough heart and effort into it, it pays off in the future.
I saw kbin recommended by someone on Reddit (my apologies for not being able to give them credit - I didn't clock the username) and out of all the alternatives shared that I checked out, this one just felt right. If that makes sense. Thank you for creating such a wonderful space!
Is it possible to have separate nsfw tags for nudity Vs gore or is all gore supposed to be tagged nsfl instead. Because that was something I thought Reddit should have had different, if you turn off nsfw, you miss alot of things that are '18+' that aren't nudity. If that makes any sense.
Definitely, in the upcoming days, apart from staying in close contact with the maintainers, I would like a;so to build a moderation team. That is a priority. However, I first need to urgently address and take care of a few matters.
Several people here are saying that the bulk of it is coming from lemmynsfw. If so then it may well be best to defederate in the short term to buy time for a better solution (like marking everything from there NSFW automatically, either by a lemmy enhancement on their end or a kbin enhancement here)
Given that folks are saying the main source is an instance called lemmynsfw.com, perhaps it would be useful to have an option to set an entire instance as having that flag? I'm foreseeing a future where instances tend to be subject-specific so something like that seems like it'd be pretty handy.
Is there a way to block an entire instance? Because in my kbin.social settings I have "hide adult content" turned ON and yet I keep getting posts from lemmynsfw in my feed and my sidebar of random recent posts.
You can visit domain page, as you would magazine page, and there is a button to subscribe to it or block it. Here is the link to domain page of lemmynsfw.com, but be warned - you'll see the post from that instance and some of them might not be properly tagged, so consider it NSFW despite your settings https://kbin.social/d/lemmynsfw.com. That should block entire instance (and i think the magazines/communities you are subscried to are exempted from this block, so you still see those)
In my experience as a programmer the user interface always lags behind the features. I'm sure it will get easier to use these things soon given how much attention is being focused on it now.
For the all page or other curated pages that have suggested content and not handpicked content like subscribed I would recommend blocking those NSFW pages. Obviously people can view it if they want, but blasting it in a new users face could easily turn them away if they aren’t expecting it. Personally I would also go far enough to prevent anything not on kbin from showing on those pages at all. Ya, there’s tons of good content but searching isn’t completely obvious to new users yet so the people looking for federated content are not going to overlap with those only browsing all by very much.
Lol same here, I made a community and then realized it is so much effort to get it kick-started (posting a lot of content relevant content there continuously to attract people to join). So I kind of abandoned it and decided to post/comment a lot on existing communities instead.
Thank you @ernest for all you do and all you have done!
Absolutely do not want to see you run yourself into the ground over kbin matters, your family and your health come first.
I don't question your judgement, but I think the "step down" bit is a bit extreme, even if you fail to meet the deadline. Worst case, maybe let the community appoint a second-in-command temporarily to get some things moving along while you take a well deserved break?
Agreed, stepping down is a bit heavy handed. There are a lot of moving parts, it's okay to take time for your self and let others take up the reigns temporarily if you need to. I've seen quite a lot of merges on the core recently - so it's obvious things are moving in the right direction.
i'm certainly not asking for comments for the sake of comments, i am asking for less lurking and more generating. people usually have something to say, add, or discuss, it's effort-level is subjective. i just want those people to feel encouraged to speak out, its safer to do so here than it was on reddit, and it's also helpful
It can get a bit frustating at times, but people do speak when they want to, and when they do its usually thoughtful. It helps to respond back.
My take is to enjoy the silence for now. Once they warm up, we'll be wishing they'd stayed silent ;)
@HeartyBeast Yeah this makes sense, I sadly still see upvotes in posts people create asking questions. When the OC tried to ask a question it's helpful to have an answer but yes not everyone should have to comment as it might not be useful and could clog up the feed.
@euphoria Yeah I do feel like it might just come down to a few people having to possibly go around and put something relevant in someones comments to really get things going.
I like to read other comments on the material and offer my viewpoints to their comments. Like this. But without comments, I have no one to offer a different viewpoint to.
I like to think so, but a lot of intelligent people pick up on the meaning of words from context, and sometimes they get it wrong. I remember reading that Susan Sontag used the word “magma” as if it meant something like “foundation” or “basis”.
All I know about sontag is the "disease as metaphor" stuff. so I know she is interested in using material situations (hi5/tb). so is it totally unpredictable that she'd use geology as metaphor?
This, indeed, is the raw nature of jealousy — beneath the narrative, beyond the magma of feeling, it is a projection, a self-construction, a self-response that reveals more about our relationship to love itself, which springs from our relationship to ourselves, than about any object of desire.
And a few other similar hits... if you are saying that Sontag is wrong to use "magma" as "foundation"... I would have to say on what basis you claim that?
I can imagine a context in which that would make sense depending what was being discussed. Maybe the implication was that there is no real foundation. Would need more info to be sure she is really totally misunderstanding rather than being a bit weird.
@blightbow Thanks. I appreciate the work that the admins here do. Kbin-social is a nice landing pad for this reddit refugee. That said, I don't have an interest in posting to lemmy.ml because they seem to be a bunch of tankies, which is being generous. The question in my mind is why kbin-social hasn't returned the favor and banned them as well as their gulag archipelago instance?
I think you all conflate the admins with the userbase. Lemmy.ml has a lot of regular users & communities. In that sense you would have to blanket block all Lemmy instances in general.
A community and its direction is though largely depending on the Admins.
Just recently some tankie posted a "meme" on "meme" that just casually tried to claim the Rothschild Family was intertwined with western media and because of that western media bad, just the casual antisemitism. And the Admins did not care.
I can guarantee you that the majority of Lemmy.ml users have absolutely no clue about the political views of their admins. There's a reason why Lemmy.ml is so much larger than Lemmygrad.ml.
And I've seen stupid conspiracy shit on kbin and lemmy.world as well.
Pretty much this. It still gets a lot of flack for being operated by the developers of Lemmy, but there are a large number of users and communities that exist on lemmy.ml for no other reason than it being one of the larger original instances. Most operators of high-volume instances are unlikely to take action against lemmy.ml unless a situation develops that gives them no other choice.
I too tried to flee reddit for lemmy.ml, over a year ago now - and found it to be a far worse clusterfucked shitstorm than reddit ever was, and I mean that ideologically, philosophically, politically, and morally.
I just didn't go back until the current exodus, mainly because I was trying to see if the account still worked, and it had been lost/purged/banned whatever
fuck those guys and the horse they rode in on, then far as I'm concerned, they can ride it back out of here wet.
...then far as I'm concerned, they can ride it back out of here wet.
This was the most anachronistic American Southwestern burn I've yet seen on any internet comment thread to date. I can nearly hear the spitoon at the end.
I know it sounds like I'm making fun of it, but I genuinely am not. Marvelous
Return the favor and...not ban them? Because this thread is explaining that it was a bug and has been fixed, meaning no shadowban is occurring anymore....
I hoped that a few stray enthusiasts would find their way to kbin
They did. "A few" as a portion of the whole, where the whole is much larger than you ever expected it would be.
One thing I have learned in my own technical career is that you can't do everything. Even if there was enough time in a day for you to do everything, you can't know everything, at least not sufficiently enough to be most effective. You have to depend on other experts, and delegate to them what you are not qualified to do. This requires a pretty high level of trust, and makes it so that you need to develop people management skills.
Lots of technical people are short on people management skills. I don't know where you sit on that spectrum, but you may need to consider bringing on an "overseer," kind of like a project manager, to keep tabs on all of the technical resources involved - yourself included. This will help ensure that concerns are prioritized appropriately, and that communication and messaging about those priorities are consistent and clear.
I've been in that kind of position, and I take a bit of pride in my use of words. I'm happy to give any advice you like.
I sense an opportunity here: managed hosting of Fediverse services. I don't mean a managed host where you can install/run the services. I mean a top-to-bottom setup, management, backup, upgrades, monitoring, etc. so the only thing you need to do is administer the community. I'd love to set up several Fediverse services for my local community, and I know there is an audience that would also love that, but I also know I do not want to invest the time it takes to manage the technical side of that.
Having easier to set up instances would help in relieving the pressure from the more popular current instances. We're starting to see those hosting options come on line for some of the services, but not fast enough for my liking.
Something like this already exists for Mastodon (check out masto.host, and there are also a few others). But a service supporting all fediverse softwares would be cool.
Yeah, I've had no trouble finding hosts for Mastodon. Being the oldest (?) and most popular service (at least until now, not sure what the current stats are) has its advantages.
Love it. I'm sure there are some spam-evaluation services up or starting soon that use AI, but that will also soon be important as we become more of a target.
I've been thinking recently that machine learning models could be used as a first-line defense for moderation, e.g. identify obvious spam/violations, but also identify borderline cases that require human intervention. So you could reduce the burden on moderators, and perhaps even shield them from some of the more extreme things, although I think those tend to be more image/video which I imagine will be a lot harder to really effectively harness ML for.
Obviously that's a tried and tested model with email, but i'm not sure there's a great way to implement that on federated servers without keeping the model fine tuning pretty secret. Any spam detection AI model that's public can simply be used to train better spam.
My past experience with this sort of thing suggests it's probably better to focus on identifying some kind of humanness score. Since kbin instances are responsible for moderating their own user population (I believe) that means they could quite easily keep a good running score of how viable an account is. Some of that could be ML that picks up on both the information content and uniqueness of a post, but you can also infer a good amount by how much interaction it gets with other users who also have good scores.
There's also some interesting stuff in the upvote structure. If you draw a directed graph of who-upvotes-who then spammers and trolls tend to form much more distinct islands than regular users do.
Check out Grow Your Own Services. It doesn't have everything (e.g., kbin, Lemmy, Calckey) but it does offer what I think you're looking for with a number of the other more popular services.
Thanks! Hadn't come across that particular site yet. Unfortunately, still the same list of hosts. I'm really looking for Frendica/Mastodon and maybe Pixelfed and Writefreely. So, basically all the ones that aren't yet available in a turn-key solution.
Like I said, slower than I'd like. But I'm sure we'll get there.
@bourbonmakesitbetter We're a small independent "mom & pop" managed hosting provider focused on Mastodon and we're currently testing out kbin, send us an email at keith[@]thunderhost[.]com with the size of your community and we might be able to assist
Thanks. I need to talk to a few other people first, but my current hypothesis is that Frendica is a better fit. The target audience is "old" (i.e. my age) and really likes Facebook. Some (most?) of them don't even know what Reddit is. I'll need to demo kbin for a few people to see if we think the idea has legs.
I think @ernest was just being cheeky. Kbin hasn't changed much UI wise since the reddit explosion started. It's been mostly under the hood, trying to keep the ship upright in the rocky storm of users.
I'm just gonna come out and say it because I think people don't realize and it may be specific to US - if kbeans sticks we will be called "kbeaners" by trolls until the end of time, as it includes a racial slur aimed at hispanic/latino people
Honestly I bet a fair amount of people will even unintentionally use it without realizing. And if we have the ability to choose, I'd rather our nickname not be something that invites people to easily combine it with a slur
/u/gus is right - 'kbeaner' contains a loaded slur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaner one thats been around for a long time. It is not one I was aware of until recently.
Kinda like karma, it's the culmination of downvotes (reduces) and boosts. Much easier to get downvotes than boosts though. Idk why the upvotes (favorites) don't count. Maybe that will be a change soon
Definitely weird that upvotes don't get factored in, though. I would have expected them to count, rather than the boost (which I thought was a pay-to-promote system like Tumblr's blaze).
Yeah… I’ve taken to self boosting just to keep my reputation above zero even though I’m like 100 upvotes to 2 downvotes. Probably doesn’t matter but like… having negative rep really bugged me.
This account has been a less active account so less votes and less weird rep damage, but still… that should hopefully be fixed soon. Doesn’t make sense as is.
Right now the thing with boosts is unintended behavior, the only reason that it's not getting fixed yet is there are a lot more urgent things to be done, like preventing the servers from crashing and burning under the new load. Also please consider buying ernest a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
kbin has been used on a small instances until now. Many errors that are visible now were not apparent at a smaller scale. Notifications will be improved in the coming days, and the rest will follow suit.
Thank you. Something to bear in mind when you revisit notifications:
I'm concerned the Purge button has a race condition. I want the Purge button to delete all of the notifications that I currently see on my screen — not any newer notifications that I haven't yet seen.
In my opinion, those who complain are plain wrong anyways. Kbin started as a hobby project, so it's unrealistic to expect a site like this to be completely bug-free. Just two weeks ago, it didn't even have 1k users.
If it's not already in the works, I could see a lot of utility from adding a "favorited" or "saved" threads/comment option for users to better organize and access the content they want to as opposed to having to sift through what could end up being thousands upon thousands of upvotes.
/kbin meta
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