PSA: Upvote is not an upvote like you are used to (like Reddit) - "Boost" is the Reddit Upvote
Like the title says, if you want to upvote something on KBin, you should use the Boost link, not the upvote button (Why? Don't know...)
The upvote button doesn't seem to do much, but Boost accomplishes what Reddit's upvote did. So if you're looking to encourage a post, use the Boost link.
If I understand correctly, when a Kbin user boosts a Lemmy post, it will work like an upvote, bringing it up. But it wouldn't affect anything for Lemmy users. But when a Lemmy user upvotes a post from a Kbin user, it will just be shown as an upvote but not effect reputation or anything, but will upvote it for lemmy users.
Every time you boost a lemmy post, an angel gets its wings! And a demon gets its pitchfork. And a trans person gets their gender validated. And a nazi gets punched in the face!
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!
My understanding is your "subscribed" feed shows stuff from people you follow as well as the magazines you're subscribed to. Mastodon users' posts typically end up in the microblog section which can be found here. whereas kbin/lemmy users often posts threads which can be found here. It's mixed in with the magazines you subscribe to. I don't think there's a way to just get the followed users without the magazines you're subscribed to.
Although the name "boost" is a little odd. kbin is more than than just a link aggregator. kbin is also a semi-blogging platform (View the microblog feed rather than threads) that interacts with Mastodon. If you boost something, it is the same as reblogging (re-tweeting) a post and generates a reblog post on Mastodon. The developer is going to change it to where the up and downvote impacts reputation rather than the current boost and downvote button. A technical oversight but they acknowledge this and plan on changing it in the future however internet points is not really a priority so no one knows when the change will roll out.
As I understand it, it’s a feature that is inherited from the underlying ActivityPub protocol which is designed to support all kinds of social network architectures.
If you use Mastodon, their usage makes a lot sense. A ‘favourite’ (upvote on Kbin) is a private thumbs-up to the poster - a pat on the back that has no algorithmic importance.
A Boost is more like a Retweet. Boosting something makes it show up in your followers’ timeline. I guess if you follow a person on kbin, Boosts will do that too and boosted stuff will show on your subscribed home page.
Importantly, boosts republish posts and comments. This is meaningful because groups work by basically boosting anything that mentions it, or which is in reply to something that mentions it. And posts silently mention the group.
Why is this important? Well, if you're the first person on your instance to follow someone on another one, you don't see anything published by that person earlier than that. But if that person regularly boosts older posts, you'll get to see them.
So boosting posts and comments triggers the group to re-boost it, sending it out to servers that started following after the original publish time.
Basically, boosting is how we make sure new users on remote sites see older content.
This is a result of the original design. Kbin, up until just before the peak traffic hit, was using boosts as upvotes and favorites/likes were just below the post/thread (where boost sits now). Lemmy does it the way it is now (likes = upvotes) so Ernest changed it to match Lemmy behavior. But just as he changed it, he hadn’t changed the calculation for reputation to match when the server nearly melted down and he has to spend all his time just trying to keep the site alive by himself.
I see you’re on a different Kbin instance. Was this intended to be a threaded reply, out of curiosity? Because it shows up as a top-level comment on the post for me.
Yes, but my bigger point is that it’s not threaded as a reply to one of that user’s comments.
Edit: Oops, nevermind. I saw their comments elsewhere down here but didn’t realize they were OP. Just one of the interface things on Kbin that needs improvement.
Edit 2: I need to figure out how to do strikethrough text on here
As a desktop kbin user, there's no strikethrough. Unsure as to why, if kbin is markdown. Strikethrough is considered advanced markdown formatting so I'm guessing kbin didn't include it. Now I'm curious to see how much common markdown is visible on kbin's desktop platform.
Guide for those unfamiliar with markdown, so you can see what I'm doing. ✔ means I can see it on desktop kbin, ❌ means it remains unformatted (formatting characters remain).
So sometime in the future an upvote will be used to score the post and get it on the "frontpage", and a Boost is just like a save feature to save posts to my microblog?
i wouldnt call boost a save feature per say, but since we arent on mastodon it pretty much looks like one so i guess you can call it that lol. yes, eventually the reputation will be fixed and upvotes will affect it as it should, its just not a priority for now
I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but just in case, that's the point of a boost. You're boosting its noticeability. It's not supposed to be private
Boost as a “shout out” being public is alright. I guess for us Reddit folks it’s like a cross post to our own u/sub that followers could see.
Upvote/downvote, though, should be private. Not sure if that’s ever truly possible though because by the nature of the fediverse it has to be replicated across to other instances and so everything is “open” as I understand it.
It may not be easily visible in the UI but it’s there in the data.
So I try to think of everything here like it’s a postcard not a letter.
Any mail carrier who sees it (and makes a copy) can see it all.
for me, the main selling point of kbin over lemmy was the transparency in user interactions on here. the last straw on the camel's back over at lemmy for me was seeing blatant vote manipulation hiding behind the end-user anonymity; kept an eye on some accounts that would instantly always get the same number of upvotes, dependent on the specific account, less than 3-5 seconds after posting. it was always some single-digit amount (I assume to not get flagged by the system), but that's all it takes to signal others to feel safer upvoting it.
the same can be done likewise to bury others' content that they can view as competition to what they want seen, multiple early downvotes can act as a subconscious deterrent to others
I believe you are correct about upvotes. To my knowledge, downvotes don’t federate at all (ActivityPub may not support them, for all I know), so what they do here is merely affect reputation points.
Oh interesting, so are downvote counts only reflective of what my individual server has received? I assumed they at least federated between kbin and Lemmy even if the rest of fedi didn't have a way to understand them.
And if everyone just reads and listens to OP they'll all be doing it wrong when it gets fixed, all because you aren't happy that your "reputation" score isn't changing. The software is scarcely a month old folks, and until a week ago was the work of one guy. People need to relax a bit.
No it does not.
Boost behaves like a retweet and upvotes like upvotes.
The reputation calculation just haven't been updated yet, that doesn't mean an upvote isn't an upvote.
Upvotes are what shows as upvotes because that's what they are.
Reputation is just something on your profile page that's currently wrong.
Your post is spreading a misunderstanding, there's already been other confused people posting.
Do upvotes/boosts and downvotes pass from one instance to another? I assume not. So if I upvote a post from lemmy.world that's hosted on kbin.social...what happens? It only affects lemmy.world?
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