Pamasich

Pamasich, 5 months ago

So, I asked this to the three different conversation styles of Bing Chat.

The Precise style actually tried to solve it, came to the conclusion the question might be of philosophical nature, including some potential meanings, and asked for clarification.

The Balanced style told me basically the same as the other reply by admiralteal, that the question makes no sense and I should give more context if I actually want it answered.

The Creative style told me it didn't understand the first part, but then answered the second part (the turtles being blue) seriously.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Not sure, I'm not familiar with the test, just figured I'd tell the results from asking the AI.

I think based on what you said about it

AI will actually TRY to solve it.
Human nature would be to ask if the person asking the question is having a stroke or requires medical attention.

That the Balanced style didn't fail, because while it didn't ask about strokes or medical attention, it did point out I'm asking a nonsense question and refused to engage with it.

The Precise style did try to find an answer and the Creative style didn't realize I'm fucking with it, so I do think based on the criteria they'd fail the test.

Though, honestly, I'd fail the test too. When asked such a question, I'd think there has to be an answer and it's stupid of me not to see it and I'd look for it. I think the Precise style's answer is very much where I'd end up.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Check if any userstyle/userscript is hiding it maybe? It's definitely still there for me, and I'm sure @ernest would have said something if he was A/B testing removing it.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances.

The issue is, how does defederating not promote leaving for Threads or instances that federate with Threads?

I think it's a good argument against Threads federating at all, but a poor one for defederating from Threads.

If Threads produces 95% of content in the fediverse, and your instance defederates from them, then your instance just doesn't have access to those 95% of content. Threads and its friends will be a lot more attractive then because it has 19x the content of what you have access to on your instance.

I think this will still lead to people leaving for the threads fediverse.

---

Also, I get the argument for Mastodon, but does /kbin actually have anything at all to fear here? Sure, the user numbers and content would be way higher than the rest of the fediverse. But Threads is a Twitter contender, not Reddit like /kbin and Lemmy. We will only see their content in the microblog tab.

Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it? I honestly don't see it happen, I feel like this is an imported issue from microblogging platforms that's just repeated here despite being a non-issue for us.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Banners for magazines

You should be easily able to add a banner using the magazine CSS. Though that's not being federated currently, I hope magazine CSS federation gets added in the future at least between kbin/mbin instances.

This should give you a banner above the threads section:

main > header {
    /* Change both of these */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}

While this should give you one that also extends over the sidebar:

#middle:before {
    width: 100%;
    display: block;
    content: '';
    /* Change these two: */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}

Changing the #middle to #header would put it above the kbin header (with the logo, the threads/microblog buttons, etc).

Community Engagement

There is an Active People section in the sidebar.

I think the issue here is that kbin simply doesn't have a lot of users yet.

One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight.

This won't improve if you show people "0 people are viewing this thread" on every thread. Actually, it would worsen the impression that the site is dead.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

A while ago, kbin's development came to a standstill because ernest was gone for weeks and the project's contribution guidelines are very restrictive.

Many contributors, including major ones, decided to leave the project and work on their own fork which uses more open contribution guidelines based on consensus.

They adopt all the changes ernest makes to kbin, but have their own features on top of that. I believe fedia.io, for example, runs mbin now.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

That's weird. I was testing it out with a userstyle, which worked, so I assumed it would work with custom css too. But I guess there might be some restrictions in place? Seems very restrictive though if that's the case here. Not even the first one I gave works. I'll see if I can find anything out.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Okay, so I've created a magazine and tested some stuff out.

In the first code I posted, I used the child selector (>) to select <header> elements directly inside <main> elements. For some reason, custom CSS doesn't seem to support the child selector. No matter where I try to use it, the style isn't applied.

The following code worked for me on my magazine:

main header:has(h1[hidden]) {
    height: 300px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png);
    background-size: 100% auto;
    background-position-y: -150px;
}

I removed the child selector and instead used :has(hi1[hidden]) to make sure I only get the target element. Without it, it would also replace the background of the individual thread titles.

The image you're trying to use is a bit large, so I've included an example usage of background-size and background-position to change the size of the image and what part of it actually gets displayed.
With background-size, the first value is how wide the image should be, while the latter value is how high. Percentage values are relative to the element's size. So the width and height properties. You can also set absolute values, like I did with height in pixels in this example.

The big issue with this one though is that it'll only apply to the Threads and All Content views. Other views, including Microblog and individual threads, don't have the <header> element I'm looking for here.

I modified it to apply to more views:

h1[hidden] {
    height: 300px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png);
    background-size: 100% auto;
    background-position-y: -150px;
    display: block;
    color: transparent;
    user-select: none;
}

The last two lines are there because this actually displays the name of the magazine on the banner. Since that's kind of redundant, since it's already in the bar at the top, I'm hiding the text and making it not selectable.

This one does work in all the views I tested except for when looking at a thread and its comments.

Though, something worth considering in case you intend to just use this code as-is: I just used pixels for simplicity. But the result might look entirely different on other screen resolutions than mine. Here's a list of better units to use if you want it to look the same on all screens. You can use percentages, pixels, and these other units interchangeably anywhere.

---

About the second code I posted, for some reason :before, much like the child selector, doesn't seem to work. I can very much target the #middle and #header elements from custom magazine CSS, but :before doesn't do anything.

I'm not sure why this is. I see no security reason to block them, so I assume it's not intentional. It's a bit hard to debug :before specifically because I don't know any way to get its styles without making it visible. So I have no idea if something is overwriting the style or if the selector just doesn't work, like is the case with the child selector. I'll have to look into this a bit more over the weekend.

Pamasich, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I can see it. Maybe it's the point I mentioned here:

Though, something worth considering in case you intend to just use this code as-is: I just used pixels for simplicity. But the result might look entirely different on other screen resolutions than mine. Here's a list of better units to use if you want it to look the same on all screens. You can use percentages, pixels, and these other units interchangeably anywhere.

Maybe the values I gave are too small for you to see on your screen?

edit: wait, why does the image not work, I literally just uploaded it

edit 2: not sure if you can view this since it's blocked in some countries, but here's a catbox upload.

edit 3: right, I just noticed that, because I'm mixing percentages and absolute units here, the image actually moves around as I change the screen size. I'll refine the example with more reliability later today.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

I'm currently using this code on /m/pamasich:

h1[hidden] {
    height: 12vh;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/wbZa4eI.png);
    background-size: cover;
    background-position: center;
    display: block;
    color: transparent;
    user-select: none;
}

To me, this works both on pc and mobile.

Though, the one on /m/cars right now works for me too.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Say, do you see any custom CSS anywhere? I mean, I'm not even sure which magazines use it anyway, do you see something on /m/pamasich? Besides the test banner, I also made the magazine name in the sidebar red.

If you don't see anything changed there, do you maybe have custom CSS turned off? In your settings, there's an option Ignore magazines custom CSS under a text field that lets you enter personal custom css. Make sure that's not checked.

Pamasich, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

seeing "span" and other tags instead of the actual code block

If you're using Firefox or Kiwi, the Kbin Enhancement Suite userscript now has a fix for this. There's also a standalone version here.

Well, for the span tags, I haven't seen other tags being an issue. If you see a code block where the same issue occurs with other tags, tell me so I can update it.

If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone.

I don't know if ernest's views changed since the last exodus, but iirc people joining the platform wasn't really his intention, it just happened. Kbin hasn't even had a proper full release yet, it's still beta software, so I don't think people bouncing off is that big an issue yet.

With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site.

That's the case for now, but app development is still happening with other projects:

• ernest has mentioned intentions to revive his kbin app project
• Lemmy's Lunar (ios) app is adding kbin support
• @jwr1 introduced their Interstellar app prototype for Android recently.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

I understood OP to be talking about mobile specifically.

And that's why I said Firefox or Kiwi. Both of those are mobile browsers (the latter is chromium) that support extensions, so you can just install your favorite monkey and stylus and add userscripts/userstyles the exact same way as on desktop.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

I really don't see the issue. So more users is bad? I thought our issue is the lack of users currently.

I've seen people complain about ads and data harvesting here. But instances can already do that. Meta joining would change nothing about that. Actually, being a proper legal company, it might be easier to sue them over misusing your data than random instances.

"Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"? Let's stop between the last two steps then, not before the first one.

Kbin would be crippled by the amount of Threads content? I thought federation only happened if one kbin.social user is following a user on Threads? Should be as easily manageable then as Mastodon is currently. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?

To me, big sites federating looks like a clear advantage. I don't really get the big problem.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Antitrust is about powerful companies abusing their powerful positions. With powerful I mean control over a market.

The idea is that if society is functionally dependent on a product, it shouldn't be the case that the owning company abuses that position to force people into walled gardens.

While it's of course still bad if a smaller company does it, the amount of people impacted will be lesser, so it's not seen as critically important to take action against it. So that's why antitrust laws only target the big ones.

I do absolutely disagree with Apple not being big enough though. iOS has a 30% market share in the mobile OS market according to statcounter, that ought to be big enough imo.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

that blocks your bank or even some games if your phone is rooted

That's your bank and those games, not Google.

The games are obviously afraid of cheating/hacking. For the bank it's about your account's security. Root access gives a lot of power to potentially malicious actors, it's definitely not weird for them to not work if your phone is rooted.

Pamasich, 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I don't know any other social media site that allows you that level of freedom of customization.

Reddit used to have custom CSS, still does if you use the old design via the settings or the old.reddit.com address. Check out /r/steam for a subreddit with heavy custom styling.

Sadly in later redesigns they threw that feature out in favor of a more professional but boring looking uniform design.

Some stuff like spoilers started out on the platform using custom CSS. Spoilers used to be done by styling links pointing to a specific address. The worldnews subreddit uses it to hide paywalled articles.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

it looks like they decided to start forwarding x.com links to the twitter.com version now. That’s new.

That was always the behavior for me from the start. I click on an x.com link, it brings me to twitter.com. Never was any different.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

but maybe that was a short experiment

Could be, I don't click on Twitter/X links often so I could have easily missed that.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Modern Bing is a lot more useful for me than modern Google.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

It hasn’t happened, am I accidentally doing something awesome to evade their traps so far?

Probably A/B testing.

I'm using Adblock Plus on Edge and have the same experience like you. No reaction from Youtube yet to my adblocker.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

Go to the Magazines tab in the top bar and then there's a collections tab on the page that opens.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

I'm pretty sure they were using sarcasm.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

I don't care if it's animated in 2d or 3d, I just want it to look good. And cgi doesn't automatically make the anime look bad.

What usually makes an anime look bad is obvious cgi used in an otherwise 2d anime. Not always though, Fate/Zero's Berserker is an example of obvious cgi that looked good.

I don't really mind full cgi anime. I'm loving the current Kamierabi, for example. But they look off to me for the first half or full episode before I get used to it. Even Houseki no Kuni was like that. There are of course bad looking full cgi anime, but in general they don't look worse than 2d anime to me.

I also don't mind cgi backgrounds in 2d anime. Dekiru Neko looked amazing and the backgrounds definitely contributed to that, not the opposite.