EnglishMobster
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EnglishMobster

@EnglishMobster@kbin.social

Hello!

I work as a AAA game programmer. I previously worked on the Battlefield series.

Before I worked in the AAA space, I worked at Disneyland as a Jungle Cruise skipper!

As a hobby, I have an N-Scale (1:160) model train layout.

EnglishMobster,
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Maybe - and hear me out - it's the dogs that are the problem?

"Can't control their prey drive" is a bad excuse. You control your dog or you don't deserve to have one. End of story. A dog barking endlessly is the responsibility of the owner to control or get rid of their damn dog.

It isn't hard to teach your dog not to be a nuisance. I've done it before. Blaming the dog because you failed to teach/control it is not correct, and simply shows that you do not have what it takes to be a dog owner.

EnglishMobster,
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With Lemmygrad hot on their heels!

EnglishMobster,
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They've invested a lot of money in office real estate and hate that it's going to waste.

Also, CEOs tend to be extroverts who want to be around people. They're also sociopaths who think everyone is like them (or they don't care what others think).

Combine the two and you get this.

EnglishMobster,
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Let's not forget Android as well!

Google's been slowly killing the open-source part of Android for a while now...

EnglishMobster,
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Your phone doesn't listen to you, but it builds a fingerprint and uses that fingerprint to serve ads.

It also serves ads for things based on who you've been around recently. The example given was the guy's wife asked for a power drill for her birthday, and then the guy started seeing power drill ads.

This wasn't because of the conversation, but because his wife had looked up power drills and opened herself up to ads about them. Because the husband had been around the wife, the ad algorithms thought he might be into the same sort of things she is, and so they started serving him ads based on what they think his wife would like.

The article takes issue with this and considers it an invasion of privacy. It's the same sort of story we've seen dozens of times before; John Oliver did it better.

EnglishMobster,
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They had me until they started pushing their Web3 bullshit. Crypto bros co-opted the term and kept it away from "real" Web 3.0 tech like the fediverse.

EnglishMobster,
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Also over here on Kbin, can't join https://kbin.social/m/android@lemdro.id. They need to fix their federation settings.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
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tl;dr: It's Mastodon. You can use Mastodon from Kbin.

The Microblog tab shows posts from Kbin + Mastodon, just like how the Threads tab shows posts from Kbin + Lemmy. So if you have people you like on Mastodon, search for them using the little magnifying glass and then follow them from Kbin. Their posts will appear in the Microblog tab.

Additionally, if people on Mastodon use a for something, it'll automatically be sorted in magazines that care about that hashtag. This means if you follow someone and that person uses a hashtag, their post will be placed in the "Microblog" tab of whatever magazine relates to that hashtag. This allows other people to discover the person you're following through shared interests.

For example, the Internet Archive has a Mastodon account - @internetarchive. The Internet Archive used their Mastodon account to make a toot on Mastodon: https://mastodon.archive.org/@internetarchive/110611348840969515

Because people are following the @internetarchive account from Kbin (which you can do by going here or by searching Kbin for their username, @internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org), that post was federated here to Kbin. Once it showed up, it appeared in the "Microblog" tab and got automatically organized into Kbin's @Futurology magazine because it used the hashtag : https://kbin.social/m/Futurology/p/565801/Exciting-news-Introducing-ARCH-Archives-Research-Compute-Hub-a

Magazine moderators determine what hashtags they want included in their magazine - so @Futurology has said "We would like all posts with to show up in our microblog section". (You can go to @Futurology directly to see what hashtags the mod team thinks are relevant.)

If no hashtags are used on a post (or none of them match any magazines), then it goes to the magazine @random.

Wanna write a tweet/toot from right here on Kbin? Put it in a microblog. Use to organize it into a magazine, or use the dropdown on Kbin to pick a magazine manually.

People can follow your Kbin profile from Mastodon. They'll see microblogs as a Mastodon toot, and "boosts" as basically Mastodon's version of retweets. People on Lemmy don't see boosts, but will see microblogs as a "normal" Lemmy post (since Lemmy doesn't have a "microblog" tab).

For example. I made this post to the Microblog here on Kbin: https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland/p/510705

I made it from the main "microblogs" tab, but it used the hashtag . @Disneyland listens to that hashtag, so Kbin automatically put it there: https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland/p/510705/Went-to-Disneyland-over-the-weekend-and-went-on-RunawayRailway

If you go to Mastodon, you'll see it as a normal toot: https://sunny.garden/@EnglishMobster@kbin.social/110587107756032019

If you go to Lemmy, you'll see that microblog as a Reddit-like post: https://lemmy.world/post/418494?scrollToComments=true

(Note that it seems things which come from Mastodon don't get automatically sent to Lemmy - just microblogs from Kbin itself. That Internet Archive post I mentioned above doesn't seem to exist on Lemmy.world.)

This behavior is one of the main reasons why I chose Kbin over Lemmy; I love that I can post once and have my stuff federated everywhere else super cleanly and easily. Lemmy is a bit more messy when it comes to Lemmy -> Mastodon and the devs aren't interested in changing how it works (I asked before I came over here).

Ernest seems really invested in playing to the strengths of the fediverse, and the Kbin roadmap has him planning to integrate more fediverse services in the future. For example, Mobilizon support is planned, which is like a group calendar on the fediverse.

If @Starwars wanted to have a watch party for a new episode of The Mandalorian, they could (theoretically) schedule an event on Mobilizon and have it federate to their magazine as a normal thread. Then they could (theoretically) pin the Mobilizon thread and use the comment section of the event as a Kbin megathread when the episode airs. See https://demo.mobilizon.org/ and imagine it being part of Kbin, just as Lemmy and Mastodon are "part of Kbin."

Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sales and ad revenue.

most of the time you'll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they're gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate...

EnglishMobster,
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This is already happening.

Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called "user" responds "as an AI language program..."

EnglishMobster, (edited )
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Reddit was the same way.

You have /r/gaming. /r/games. /r/truegaming. /r/videogames. /r/videogame. Etc.

Each community was slightly different in subtle ways, but some people were subscribed to multiple (basically identical) communities. Others self-sorted into different communities based on moderation style and community vibes.

Not to mention that your idea of how federation should work kind of ignores moderation and community preferences. Communities hosted on Beehaw are tightly moderated. There may be other communities that want something less strict. How do these two reconcile with one another? What happens if a conversation is removed on one instance but kept around on another?

If local mods only have local power, they can get quickly overwhelmed as you effectively need a mod team on every single instance. Smaller instances wouldn't necessarily have the manpower to have their own dedicated mods for literally everything.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
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I'm a mod of /r/Disneyland, and we recreated our sub over here on Kbin ( @Disneyland, https://kbin.social/m/Disneyland).

The issue is that we had 500k subs on Reddit. That sounds like a lot, but in reality it equates to about a dozen posts a day, maybe less.

Over here on Kbin, we almost have 100 subs - and I'm really proud of that! - but 100 subs is basically nothing. A fraction of a percent of people are actually content contributors, and the whole community rests on them. Then combine that with the fact that we're a niche subject (not some general thing like "video games") and that impacts what can be contributed.

On top of that, the magazine is fairly empty. Not barren - we have a few posts - but it certainly looks and feels empty. And because it's empty, nobody wants to post, which means it stays empty.

Compare that to Reddit, which has a very dedicated community for us. Not a massive community, but certainly a passionate one. We care about our community; we've stewarded it for years. All of us mods started out as members of that community (the subreddit founder is long gone), and we're all unpaid volunteers that want to keep that community healthy.

Reddit threatened to take it from us and give it to another mod team for a related Disney subreddit that played along with the admins. The issue is that multiple Disney subreddits have, uh, issues with those mods (which has been the case for years to the point where explaining the history is part of onboarding for a lot of Disney mods).

So the issue was reframed - either we reopen our sub on our terms... or we stick to our guns, force Reddit to remove us, and get replaced by a different mod team. This other team is known to be harsh about banning users for any kind of dissent, they abuse their mod powers to spread anti-vax nonsense all over their "non-political" subreddit, they have multiple subreddit drama threads talking about their actions, they've been gunning for all of the Disney subs for years... and they'd immediately jump at the chance to reopen the subreddit we've worked hard on so they could run it their way.

When you look at it like that... there's only one real choice. I hate Reddit, but our community doesn't deserve that.

I realize saying "we choose to keep our powers for your own good" makes me sound like, oh, I dunno, "landed gentry"... but users don't see that side of moderation or Reddit drama, and frankly they shouldn't have to.

So we opened and are taking the abuse. Users are torn between "you caved, scabs" and "told you this was a useless gesture, how dare you take my sub away". Neither one is great.

But there's more to it than what appears on the surface, and frankly that's true across a lot of subs.

EnglishMobster,
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1k subs thus far have committed to staying dark indefinitely. Hopefully this news spurs more to join on.

According to Reddark, 6.6k subreddits (out of over 8k) are still dark. We'll have to see what the numbers look like in 16 hours or so once America wakes up and gets off work.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
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Lemmy very much tries to be "federated Reddit". It's Reddit as it was in 2010ish, and that's all it tries to be. And that's fine, but it limits the development of what the Fediverse is. You can use a Mastodon account to browse Lemmy, but you can't use a Lemmy account to browse Mastodon (and the devs aren't planning on adding it - I asked).

Kbin, however, looks at things from a different perspective. On Kbin, you have both threads and microblogs. This replicates modern Reddit's ability to post to your own profile, except instead of going to some user subreddit that nobody reads - it's treated like a post on Twitter or Tumblr and shared more widely. You can follow people on Mastodon from Kbin, and vice versa. There are plans in the future to support more things that make the Fediverse great - you can read the roadmap here.

Note Kbin as a project is less than a year old, and this "main" server only came online a month ago. Until very recently it was just ernest talking to himself... this amount of growth wasn't planned for!

Long-term, Kbin will be somewhere that connects the Fediverse platforms - you won't need a Mastodon account and a Pixelfed account and a PeerTube account. I really like that approach. Rather than trying to do one thing to the detriment of everything else, it goes beyond just a Reddit clone and is also its own thing. That's why I joined; it's a completely different approach to how the Fediverse should be interacted with.

EnglishMobster,
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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.

EnglishMobster, (edited )
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Up top, if you hit "Magazines" it gives you a list of magazines on Kbin, sorted by subscriber count. You can find recreations of common Reddit communities here. There's also a search function to look for a particular magazine. These are the ones you mentioned:

As for other suggestions, I'm a bit biased. I moderated /r/Disneyland on Reddit, and I've recreated it here on Kbin alongside some of the original mod team: @Disneyland (mobile link). I didn't moderate /r/modeltrains... but I saw there wasn't any model train communities on here, so I decided to create @modeltrains (mobile link).

As far as things I don't moderate, here's a bunch of cool communities I've found here on Kbin. Note that Kbin magazines are case-sensitive (something I'd wish they'd change):

If you see something in here you like but there's no content in it - content comes from users like you!

Be the change you wish to see. Contribute something - anything - to get the community going. If everyone pitches in soon enough communities will start thriving.

EnglishMobster,
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I closed my 500k member subreddit yesterday!

It feels sad, but it needs to happen. We've moved here to Kbin - @Disneyland - and I linked it in the "we're going private" message.

Hopefully we get people to come over. We have half the original mod team and I'm still trying to convince the other half to join up before Kbin closes registration (I'm not sure if you can mod across instances).

EnglishMobster,
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On Lemmy, they are "communities".

On Kbin, they are "magazines". I am told that "magazine" is a pun in Polish (Kbin's maintainer is Polish).

EnglishMobster, to kbinMeta
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@ernest - are you able to share the financials of how much it costs to run ?

A group of Reddit mods are considering moving their communities to a Lemmy/Kbin instance but we're wondering how much we'd need to invest to get it up to a reasonable scale.

We crunched the numbers based on Beehaw's transparency report and arrived at Lemmy costing about $0.05/user/month USD but AFAIK there's nowhere to check how much Kbin would cost per user.

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