Cavalarrr

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

I may have missed the mark on my point in the main post to be fair; It's not about fearing defederation from beehaw.org, it's more about ensuring we don't get overran by people with ill-intentions before the dust has settled, and whilst the site doesn't have the manpower in place to keep things like that under control.
Currently there's nothing stopping someone from the communities beehaw has defederated with from signing up here and going on a fullblown hate campaign because they disagree with the ideals of the beehaw admins. Everywhere they go, those local instances are then looking at "ih8beehaw@kbin.social", and if nothing is done to prevent that, then it colours the rest of kbin.social users in a bad light. The more bad users you get, the more likely you are to experience widespread defederation, and lose out on a lot of what should make the concept of the fediverse great.

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

That's actually federated users. The official count of kbin.social users can be found here.

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

lemmy users want to stay on lemmy. they don't want to come to kbin (even to troll). and I think the few that might end up here will just be drowned out by good faith kbinauts.

Given the much higher number of Lemmy instances, you may well be 100% correct on that, that is, even trolls may just decide to 'stick with what they know' and continue to use a Lemmy based instance.

if someone has an issue with kbin being open to everyone, then they will naturally block us no matter what we do.

Also correct, however, I understand that if a post is local to kbin.social, and had comments from lemmy.world users, in addition to kbin.social users, and a beehaw.org use came to the post, they wouldn't see any of the comments from the defederated users. That is to say, so long as one instance doesn't federate with another, they will never see posts from that instance, regardless of where they are.

I'm not saying that won't still prevent people defederating with kbin.social purely because we're open / federate with another community they specifically defederated from, but there's less reason to if kbin.social maintains a quality userbase.

I think that spirit and culture is far more important than whether or not a few bad apples start getting other instances wanting to defederate.

If a large amount of "beehaw haters" start flooding kbin and changing the culture to be one of toxicity and vitriol, then I do think we'd start having a problem.

Another agreement from me here, however, the point of this post is to start a discussion around whether or not we can prevent being overwhelmed with bad apples too early on in the platforms lifespan (although I appreciate we've already addressed this above).

As has been said, at this point, it's entirely up to @ernest, but I think it's worth looking at potentially taking a couple more people on to assist with the moderation side of things.

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

Thanks for clarifying! Was the choice to defederate mainly down to a flood of content from other instances drowning out the fedia.io community, or the nature of content coming in, for example?

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

My thinking re: closing registrations for a time, is that if currently the only person that can action warranted sitewide bans (e.g. users actively using hate-speech in multiple posts in multiple magazines) is ernest, then there may be a point where there's simply too much to keep on top of, given everything else he has going on.
These concerns may well be completely unwarranted, and I'm well aware that even if kbin.social were to be defederated from a number of instances, that once "the situation" was under control, they could be re-federeated if agreed with the other instances. It would just be a shame to hamper our own community by being relatively powerless against a potential influx of bad faith users whilst ernest is busy being awesome and actively improving kbin as a whole.

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

To be fair, I think there's an issue with the obfuscation / blurring on a lot of the NSFW posts, i.e. people are tagging their post as adult only, but the thumbnail still shows "in all it's glory", I'll add an example below (don't worry, I'll still obfuscate):

Obfuscation not working properly (SFW)

I also feel like the blur isn't aggressive enough for some posts I've seen; I'd prefer something less... subtle... Sync for Reddit would just straight up show you a red box as the preview unless you went into the post.

Cavalarrr, 10 months ago

To be fair, and whilst I am poking fun at the article with the description, unfortunately there are bound to be at least a couple of crackpots that would try and incite violence, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of Reddit staff likely don't agree with what's been going on either.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

They've had years to make an official app that's anywhere near as good as the alternatives, and they've squandered that time. They bought Alien Blue back when it was one of the biggest 3P apps and basically threw the code in the bin. It's not just that the app is bad (read: worse than the soon to be defunct alternatives), it's that they're literally forcing 3P apps to go away with insane API pricing, whilst saying that's not what they're doing. They said they wouldn't do what Twitter did, and that "API pricing would be reasonable", and in the same breath told Apollo's developer he'd be paying $20 million in API fees in a months time. That's insane.

Meanwhile, navigating the fediverse might not be as "seamless" as the official reddit site / app may currently be, but these places are in their infancy. Apps are already being developed (I know one exists for Lemmy, but I haven't personally used it), that will likely overtake the official Reddit app in months, if that, in terms of not only useability, but functionality as well.

And this is really just scratching the surface about what all this means for the volunteer moderators of every single subreddit, that keep everything running smoothly on their own time.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

I'm with you on that. Most of the front page on kbin has been Reddit related since I've been here, but whether it's just because federation appears to have kicked in (guessing @ernest may have disabled Cloudflare, as I've not been challenged yet this evening?), or we're kicking other magazines into gear, my front page today is a lot more varied. I'm looking forward to seeing things flourish across every instance.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I think that unfortunately there's a massive enough user base that, as long as there's a steady flow of any content of some kind, coupled with the design changes to the site (and the design of the potentially soon to be mandatory for mobile viewing app), that enough people will stick around to keep it viable. Moderators may leave, but there will always be someone, especially for the big subs, that has been rubbing their hands together waiting for an opportunity like this to take over.

I don't believe they'll last another 18 years, that's for sure, but I don't think things will crash and burn as much or as quickly as people might like.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

Some running thoughts as I'm watching this, coming from someone that's only played Gen 1 and 2 so far. Any vets reading this, please let me know if I sound stupid.

Aerial movement looks interesting - I haven't had the chance to play Gen 4 or 5 yet, but footage I've seen doesn't seem to look like the first few seconds of this. The deliberate sideboosters, etc.
Liking the look of the speed of combat. Looks like it plays faster then what I've experienced so far, but slow enough that there is still some deliberation. Melee options that aren't just a sword swipe looks very cool.
Not sure if that miniboss encounter is beefed up MT or an enemy AC, but as before, I'm really liking the look of the speed of combat. There are clear telegraphs to a lot of the moves to enable some Souls-like learning of encounters / enemies. Combos to lock enemies down that aren't just 'repeatedly hit them with the biggest, fastest firing gun you have'.
Full blown boss fight cements these feels for me.

This is probably a day one purchase for me, looks really, really cool.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

It looks like it's get enough From design philosophy from the last decade that it will feel familiar to people that haven't played any Armored Cores, whilst hopefully still feeling like AC. I've only played Gen 1 and 2 myself, but seen a fair bit of footage from Gen's 4 & 5. It looks like it's sitting somewhere nicely between the early ACs and the later in terms of combat pace, feeling fast, but still deliberate, if that makes sense.
The fact that there's not only hints of the Souls-likes, but also Sekiro has me very excited.
I hope it doesn't stray too much from the classic AC formula that it no longer appeals to long time series veterans but I'm personally really, really, pumped for this one.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I dabbled prior to the Steam release, and bought it on launch. I've only clocked 31 hours on Steam so far, and I really need to get back into it, too many games, too little time!
I came in after binging on Rimworld, so I think I ended up burning myself out a little on the colony management genre, but I regularly kept up with the subreddit and various YouTubers (love Kruggsmash's series).

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

Whilst there are a million things that sell him for me, I really appreciate how he'll always have at least handful of dwarves he's following throughout any given series, watching them develop, and the mishaps they get into. I came into the game thinking "how am I going to remember who everyone is or what they've been doing, this is too much to keep track of".. But keeping an eye on that one dwarf that somehow took down 3 zombies solo, unarmed, in the fortress' first month when you only had 7 other dwarves, watching them rise to fame within the fortress, lose their lover, see their cat fall over the edge of a waterfall, then go off the deep end and become the fortress drunk... Fantastic.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

Yep, the site itself is displaying something very similar right now.
As far as I know, everyone listed on the site pledged to support it, so it's a shame that 350 odd haven't committed to the blackout.

I'd be half interested to see what an up-to-date All looks like right now, but I don't want to add even a single number to usage metrics.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I understand what you're saying, but at the time, would you have rather I replied to each of the comments with 'I disagree', 'I don't like this', etc? That's just opening things up for unnecessary arguments that end up taking over a whole thread, which is sort of what's happening now.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

well taking up the whole thread is not an issue or is it? I quite enjoy talking with you to be honnest.

If the thread is relevant to the topic at hand, then no, and I think this is relevant.

you could have just ignored them and do nothing.

I could have, but I chose to downvote a handful of comments that I didn't think were adding anything to the discussion, and I felt could have been seen on any top 100 reddit thread.

but I understand that we don't share the same value as what downvoting mean, and I'm ok with that.

I'm ok with that as well, and I appreciate that we can have a civil discussion about it. Like I've already said, it wasn't a personal attack or me saying "shut up". If I wanted to do that, I'd have commented that, and likely been deservedly downvoted into oblivion, because that's just not productive.

Edit; My first reply sounds a bit authoritarian, I think, and that's not what I want to convey- I'm not saying there can't be discussions that slowly veer off the topic of the post, but at the same time, if you're clicking into post comments, you don't want the first thing you see to be a 50 comment chain that winds up in a heated name calling argument, or two people just talking about PS1 emulators on your @knitting post, especially when there's no way to collapse comments currently (officially).

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

seems like im having a problem connecting my answer to the correct post...tried to click reply but after sending it the answer lands on a wrong place it seem.

@Braggston08

I think there's just a limit to how many comments it can visibly nest, at the minute. I've got a notification for a direct reply to my most recent comment in this thread, but like yours it's showing under the 'wrong' comment. Might see if this is already on the codeberg.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I'm with you, and whilst I've referred a lot to downvoting as a means of disagreement in my comments here, in my instance, they weren't downvoted specifically because I just didn't like what was in them, I didn't think they were conducive to the topic at hand and were promoting 'redditification' already. If I could have supplied that as a reason for downvote, I absolutely would have.

I believe another user has mentioned Tildes system of being able to flag comments, and whilst I'm not a Tildes user myself, I've lurked the odd post, and think it's a decent system. Whether Ernest agrees is another question, and also the beauty of federation. Someone can fork it and make it do that (even if it is local only, not sure how that would work across ActivityPub).

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I think the point is for the votes to be federated, the instance has to know who has actually voted. The issue being that information is then on the instance the post is hosting, and due to how posts propagate, there's nothing stopping another instance putting who voted on what front and center, and just pulling that data from the host instance.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

I'm far from an expert on this sort of thing, but I would wager that the only voting data available through Reddit's API is the current number of up and downvotes, the overall vote score, and whether the account requesting the information has up or down voted, for any given post / comment.
It can do that because the data is centralised, and every account exists in one place, whereas federation has to say "cavalarrr@kbin.social upvoted this comment, and so did username@beehaw.org", because there's nowhere to store that data centrally, other than the post itself.

Cavalarrr, 11 months ago

Aggressive pricing of Game Pass? It seems pretty reasonable to me.

I think £7.99 a month for the amount of games available, also including EA Play (which I think is like £4.99 on Steam on it's own), with day 1 releases, and the ability to play on both Xbox and PC is pretty aggressive. Especially when it's local installations and not streaming. I don't think it's necessarily as good a value proposition as it was nearer to launch now PSPlus has restructured, but I'd argue it's still good value.

if they were ever going to catch up, they'd have to have started like 7 years ago.

And true, but if they were in a position where they didn't have to catch up, we would still have the large third party developers / publishers doing what they're doing now, and not be causing console exclusivity to become an even bigger divide.