Arotrios

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Saw your post and I got curious, as it's clear your new threads aren't appearing on the instances you're posting to.

Test run shows that posting to lemmy.world is working for my account: https://lemmy.world/post/6641504 .

There's a couple things that could be happening, but I'm gonna go with my gut and ask do you have any domains blocked? There's been repeated issues with domain blocking affecting your ability to post (in fact, I had to clear all my domain blocking to properly post to kbin). This is the first thing I'd check.

The next thing would be to see if those instances or communities banned you. This seems unlikely, as it's affecting you on both lemmy.world and lemmy.blahaj.zone. The last thing could be that these communities have defederated or blocked kbin users due to past spam issues (@Technology is still blocked on lemmy.world due to this), but I haven't seen it implemented in this way before.

But I'd start with the domain blocking - 90% of the time when people have problems posting on kbin, that's the cause.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Bummer - looks like your post did show on lemmy.blahaj.zone, and I see that you got one up on @gothindustrial. Leads me to think it might be a community ban on @spookymemes for why your toy post didn't show up there. blahaj.zone was probably just slow.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

If someone continues to harass you after you've blocked them, it's because they're lonely and want your attention. I've found that offering comforting and condescending words while reverse spamming them with Eleanor Rigby seems to end the harassment quickly... especially when they realize that they can't block you properly either.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

@inkican - Agreed - Kbin will live or die based on its content. One thing that should be mentioned to those on the fence about contributing is how powerful Kbin is as a publishing platform in comparison to either Mastodon or Lemmy - this is one of the few places where you can post and get your content on both style of instances.

There are a couple of factors degrading contribution that could be alleviated by more stringent moderation - particularly the bot networks and downvote spammers. I've seen a couple of instances where folks have gotten bullied out of trying to run a forum, and Kbin's flaws in blocking (a blocked user can still downvote your posts and message you), make ongoing harassment an issue for contributors. No one wants to submit something to have it shat upon.

The other factor is that a number of users set up magazines, grabbing popular names from Reddit, then did nothing to maintain them. I think removing or reassigning these ghost magazines to interested moderators would go a long way in improving the content quality here now that the dust has settled from the Reddit collapse.

From a moderator standpoint, if you're looking to expand the reach of your magazine and get new subscribers (and thus, hopefully, more contributors), one thing I've found that helps expand the audience is using a Lemmy account to crosspost, as the cross-posting functionality is built into that architecture and provides a link back to the original. This both expands the range of the content, and draws subscribers from Lemmy that normally wouldn't see you on Kbin to subscribe to your magazine. Mastodon is similar - a single supportive account there boosting magazine content expands your reach dramatically.

Side note: I run @13thFloor and wanted to say if you or your users ever feel like cross-posting our scifi content from there, or cross-posting your content to our magazine, feel free to do so - we fucking love scifi over here.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

For those having issues with the aforementioned downvote trolls, @some_guy and @YourContentSucks kindly showed up to illustrate the problem. These two accounts are accompanied by a third, @cre0 -all the same user. If you're pre-emptively looking to protect your users from downvote spam, keep these accounts out of your magazines - he likes to try to dox folks. This is his theme song.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Posted this on the other thread - but excellent work! Thank you!

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Depends on the instance in my experience - mastodon.social usually posts within seconds. Note that due to spam issues, kbin.social has been dealing with a recent wave of defederation, so if you're not seeing your posts appear, that might be the cause.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

If you've got domains blocked, that might be causing the error. Domain blocking seems to gum up posting and comment visibility. Removing my domain blocks cleared up the issues I was having about a month ago.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Dammit - you're one of the best posters here.

Odd that comments are working for you. During my previous issues I did note that there were posting differences when I used the "Add Link", "Comment" and "Post" functionality (which worked) versus the "Add Thread" and "Add Picture" options (which didn't, or worked partially after throwing an initial 500 error). Given that you can still comment, you may have some posting access with the other options.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Ahh gotcha. The add Pics function never worked very well for me, so I haven't used it in a bit (mainly rely on Links and Threads). I've also noticed that kbin pictures only occasionally make it through Federation (seems to happen on other kbin instances as well) - seems really random whether or not they appear on the federating instance.

Arotrios, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

@readbeanicecream Hashtags are really hit or miss in general across instances.

I found that most Mastodon instances only collect posts from other Mastodon instances under hashtags (definitely the case with mastodon.social). I suspect this is because they are sharing the same posting format.

The long form posting format that Lemmy and Kbin use for Threads has a 25k character limit, too big for most Mastodon instances. This long form post is truncated into the posting limits of the Mastodon instance, but the conversion protocol is not sophisticated enough to read the JSON file to flag the enclosed hashtags as data fields defining the post.

The user-facing presentation layer then adds hyperlinks to what it can determine as hashtags (as it does to anything with a # preceding it), but the federating instance itself thinks the entire post is just post content.

Related notes - I found that when posting to Kbin from Mastodon, the order of the hashtags determines which Microblog the post appears under. Also, Lemmy strips hashtags placed in the "Tags" section of a Thread or Link when content makes its way there.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Just wanna say I agree - it can be a frustrating process to figure it all out.

In some cases, trying to follow a user takes me to an error page, and repeated attempts prove unsuccessful.

This confused the fuck out of me until I realized that Mastodon instances have the option for users to allow or deny follow requests. Basically, if you click on someone's follow and nothing happens (or you get an error page), what's happened is that you've sent them a follow request that they have to approve. Kbin's interface fails here (hopefully will improve with update) and does nothing. If they do chose to let you follow them, you'll see their account update.

In some cases, I can't even find particular instances that users post from via kbin.

Go to the poster's account, and follow them. If Kbin hasn't actively federated the site yet, it usually does so pretty quickly after a follow. This usually also lets you link to the community they posted to.

more content will #federate to the #magazines I moderate.

Check your magazine's Microblog section - you may be getting more content than you realize. Your magazine tags will determine what additional content (aside from #yourmagazinetitle) your Microblogs pick up. Everything from Mastodon users shows up there on Kbin.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Not sure what's going on with the kbin.social/d/ view of urusai.social, but I was able to find posts (not threads) here:

https://kbin.social/search?q=urusai.social

This led me to @neatchee, who is the instance owner. You might try following them, but I agree, that's an odd bug.

Oddly enough, even users I have already followed do not have their content federated to these magazines at times, even though I have checked their history and seen them use the tags I've assigned to the magazines. I could simply be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is.

Yeah, posting to Kbin from Mastodon instances is a challenge. Kbin filters and tries to assign incoming hashtags to existing magazine hashtags.

If a post contains a hashtag that is taken by another magazine, that magazine usually gets the content instead of yours. Your magazine's hashtag has to appear first in the text. Your Japanese forum is probably catching all of the #japanese posts before they get to LearnJapanese.

Second, it's random which of your magazine hashtags will pull content and from who. The order of the hashtags doesn't appear to affect this.

The only way to ensure a post gets from Mastdon to Kbin or Lemmy is to put @yourmagazine@kbin.social in the post tag. This will make sure it shows up on Lemmy, and will get your post to the Kbin Microblog of the magazine 90% of the time. If you want to be extra sure, do it like this:

@yourmagazinename@kbin.social #yourmagazinename (then any following hashtags)

Hopefully the update will clean this up a bit.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

@neatchee @daredevil I think perhaps someone has to post a link hosted on your instance for it to appear. For instance this works:

https://kbin.social/d/mastodon.social

but smaller instances like this:

https://kbin.social/d/pagan.plus

...don't seem to, generating a 404 because no one has created a link or thread back to a pagan.plus post (although their users post over to kbin often). Possibly posting link (in the url field of Add a Link on Kbin) to an urusai.social hosted post will do the trick.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

@daredevil @neatchee - Looks like the linked post is what did the trick. I posted here to the Fediverse community to let them know about your instance (it's pointed at your pinned intro post).

As such, this link is now working for daredevil:

https://kbin.social/d/urusai.social

And will allow subscriptions.

Arotrios, 7 months ago

Only that it knows about to start, but I think that once it gets subscriptions to the domain, it starts pulling more automatically. I could be wrong, however - I'm not sure which activities aside from posting are federated.

EDIT: I was wrong - the domain only grabs Threads, so Mastodon posts will likely not show up this way. They may get indexed if they're sent to a kbin magazine using the @magazinename@kbin.social format

Arotrios, 8 months ago

Don't sweat it @ernest.

@downpunxx is trolling - he just reposted the same question here. I'm guessing it's the operator of one of the spam networks you shut the door on.

Arotrios, 8 months ago

The only person who could really answer that is @ernest.

While we wait for him to respond on the topic (which may be awhile, as I'm sure he's got his hands full right now given the lemmy CSAM issues), I'd suggest that if you're looking to become mod of a dead magazine, give it life again. Post and fill it up and become a contributing member so that Ernest has something to go on when reassigning permissions. Otherwise he'll have no indication as to your commitment towards the community in question.

Arotrios, 9 months ago

Having the same issue here - looks like only one tag gets included, and it only partially includes incoming Microblog hashtags. You'll note that if you have multiple tags and click them in your magazine description panel, you get a much wider selection than what's included in the Microblog. Pretty sure it's a bug.

Arotrios, 9 months ago

@ernest - just a heads up that I'm experiencing the same bug - notifications from blocked accounts. Wouldn't normally be an issue, but we've got a couple of trolls that like to go back to old threads and keep replying to try and bait a response.

Arotrios, 9 months ago

Nope, just don't wanna deal with fucktards after I've blocked them. Shouldn't have to deal with them 2-3 weeks later popping up on my notifications - not a big ask. Dunno how you got offended seeing as I have no idea who you are.

Arotrios, 9 months ago

Damn, they really don't like you. Have an upvote as fucktard insurance.

Arotrios, 9 months ago

I've got a couple like that, especially after I ended up kicking the hornet's nest that's noagendasocial.com. In my defense, they deserved it as they've got literal FSB agents posting there, and I was under the mistaken impression that Adam Curry still had a soul.

On the plus side, Adam Curry labeled me an official disappointment of his, so I guess every troll has its silver whining.

Arotrios, 10 months ago

Dammit, that's awesome, didn't even see the block button - you got me bonus hunting now... :)

Bonus #2 - Turns out the /d/ parameter works for ANY domains with content posted on Kbin or in your feed.

For instance, let's say you wanna see (or block) everything posted from Facebook:

https://kbin.social/d/facebook.com

or Twitter:

https://kbin.social/d/twitter.com

I gotta hand it to Ernest - this platform has got some kickass code under the hood.