@FaceDeer@kbin.social
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

FaceDeer

@FaceDeer@kbin.social

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

That's not working right now. I recommend saving up your strong opinions to shotgun out at once once again it is.

But I want to be angry now! :(

FaceDeer,
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It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.

No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.

FaceDeer, (edited )
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Here's one from yesterday.

FaceDeer,
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I just set up an account at fedia.io, which is an mbin instance. When I ran the script posted over here to copy my subscriptions I had 111 subscriptions succeed and 49 fail. I've been checking the ones that failed and they've all been ones that haven't had anyone post in them for 5 months or more, so I'm guessing those are "dead" anyway. Seems not too bad, I'll see how it goes I guess.

I posted this same response from both of my accounts, I'm going to watch to see how well it federates back and forth.

FaceDeer,
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Weird. Your initial comment federated, since I was able to see it from both instances. All these responses to it did not, though.

FaceDeer,
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I just gave this a try and I think there's a potentially worrisome problem, it silently failed on a lot of community subscriptions. The ones that returned HTTP 500 errors were listed in the "fail" list that the importer script generated, but a whole bunch of others returned 404 errors and weren't listed in either the success or fail lists.

So I advise those running this to pay attention to the error log to avoid losing track of those communities rather than trusting the "fail" list.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

I haven't tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:

I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn't really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.

I assume that this means these communities haven't had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn't know they exist? I've always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.

And yeah, I'm using "community" to refer to "magazine".

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

By this argument nothing should ever interoperate with anything else because clearly that's the first step toward destruction.

I'm writing this on Firefox, which interoperates with Chrome and Edge. Oh no! We need to get these browsers operating on incompatible protocols stat, before they all extend and extinguish each other.

In reality, "embrace extend extinguish" is not a law of nature. XMPP is not ActivityPub. They are separate things with separate circumstances. Did you know that XMPP is actually still functional and open and you can download clients and servers that use it to this day? The stories about how Google "destroyed" it have become wildly distorted folklore at this point.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can choose that even if Threads federates. You pick what you engage with, which communities and instances you subscribe to and which you block.

FaceDeer,
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Why can't you do that? Use one of the many non-Threads servers to do it. Like Kbin, the one you're already using. Nothing about it changes if Threads federates.

FaceDeer,
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I don't mean to alarm you, but Meta can see this post even if Threads doesn't federate.

FaceDeer,
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Why not? It's no different as far as Meta is concerned, it only inconveniences us.

FaceDeer,
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What does any of this have to do with kbin? Kbin is not Lemmy. Completely different codebase.

FaceDeer,
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Thanks for putting in all this work, especially over a period that's traditionally vacation time. Make sure you're striking a good work/life balance, if you can get the site basically functional (as it appears to be now) don't sweat the small stuff. :)

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Oh, interesting. My bad then, it's common for people to be unaware that kbin is a different thing from Lemmy and so I made an incorrect assumption.

I suppose this reveals some room for improvement in kbin, then. Other servers' problems shouldn't be impacting kbin as badly as this, likely indicating that kbin needs to add some robustness when it comes to dealing with stuff like this.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Looks like he logged back in again after you deleted his account, which as we all know automatically un-deletes his account. I'll delete his account again now, but he should probably stop logging in if he wants it to stay deleted.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Sorry, I should have added an /s. I don't have the ability to delete accounts, I was just hoping that OP would accept it and stop logging back in. It'd make things easier for everyone.

FaceDeer, (edited )
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

So seven minutes after Zima posted about a mystery stalker dogging his every comment, you jumped in on the thread with a complaint about something he posted two weeks ago, which when you subsequently linked to it was clearly not saying what you're accusing him of saying and makes you sound like some sort of vindictive crazy person?

What a coincidence!

Let's see if a Fuckyoufacedeer account appears now.

Edit: Oh, another amazing coincidence: nine minutes after Fuckyouzima downvoted Zima's two-week-old comment, you also downvoted his two-week-old comment. And then two minutes later you made your first comment in this thread. We can see who downvotes what and when, you know.

FaceDeer, (edited )
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Yeah, I commented once earlier today and then just now popped back in to see if anything significant had been added, and wow, FfaeriOxide just cannot let go of this. It's just so totally obvious who Zima's "stalker" is at this point it's hilarious.

FaceDeer,
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And even now he feels the need to throw in some shots at Zima, as if that's what this thread has ever been about.

FaceDeer,
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I'm devastated.

A case for preemptively defederating with Threads (kbin.social)

With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

I came to the Threadiverse because Reddit was closing its APIs and building the walls higher around its garden.

I will be supremely disappointed if the Threadiverse collectively turns around and does the same thing.

Instances should be defederated when they do something harmful. Preemptively defederating is counterproductive, it gives Meta no incentive to do things right.

FaceDeer,
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Nothing makes it special. My point is not that I think Facebook will do no wrong, my point is that it's counterproductive to defederate from them before they've done something wrong.

FaceDeer,
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Uh... huh. Okay, I'm going to count that as a Godwin and leave it at that.

I'm starting to see some serious downsides to being able to see who downvotes you. (kbin.social)

A few days ago I downvoted someone's comment, and the next day I happened to notice every single comment I've ever made had at least one downvote. All from the person I dared to downvote the ONE time. I straight up asked why they did it, and they seem to think I'm an "obvious" troll account that "apparently just exist to...

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Didn't you just see the upside too, though? You can see who's downvoting all your comments and call them out on it. Someone could downvote stalk you on Reddit (quite sure that has happened to me before) and it would be invisible and unprovable.

FaceDeer, (edited )
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Assuming you're being sarcastic and mean the opposite, this hasn't been my experience, actually. Just like with @livus, above, I called out a downvote-stalker once who'd been following me around and when I described how I was seeing his downvote pattern he instantly vanished. In my experience the "downvote warriors" are a cowardly bunch, they love being able to throw punches without being seen to throw punches. Once you make it clear to them that everyone can see what they're doing they crumple under scrutiny.

The trolls you're talking about are the kind that love to get into an argument with you. That's quite different.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

A "fun" experience from Reddit that I'm glad is impossible here on kbin is when I'm in an argument with someone and they would insta-downvote every response I made to them, then vociferously deny that they were doing it even when it was basically impossible for it to be otherwise (for example if we were in a days-old thread nobody else was paying attention to and the downvote was happening within a minute or two of me posting - too fast to even have read the comment).

On a related note, I'm pleased that blocking someone doesn't prevent them from responding to your comments here. The "get the 'last word' in and then block me so I couldn't answer" pattern was even more annoying, since karma was meaningless anyway but the block disrupted the flow of informative debate if other people were following it too. In such situations I'd edit the last comment I'd made to mention what had happened, at least. Hope that shamed a few folks at least a little bit.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

I don't see how that ratio thing could be enforced on a protocol like ActivityPub, it would be an instance-by-instance thing and people from instances that weren't enforcing it would be able to downvote however they liked.

There are instances that blocked downvoting entirely (beehaw.org, for example) but when I saw threads from there here on kbin.social there was plenty of downvoting on them from non-beehaw users. Only on beehaw.org would the threads be seen downvote-free and would users be prevented from downvoting on them.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Could be, I have no clue what their name was. I feel the worst fate for such people is to be irrelevant so I try to forget about them. :)

Yeah, the ability to spot vote manipulation is a nice one. The current interface for kbin makes it laborious to click through so many comments and posts to check, but once the API is settled it should be possible to write some nice tools for that kind of thing.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

I see that @AmidFuror was not a fan of this comment. :)

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

No problem. And I can imagine that there might be some out there who would indeed be gleeful about being called out for downvoting because they're just that deep into the "raging asshole" state that any negative attention is giving them the dopamine hit they crave. But I suspect that kind of troll is going to be blatant enough that he'll get blocked or banned by most places worth hanging out in anyway.

I probably shouldn't admit it, but one of my favourite ways of dealing with a raging asshole on Reddit was to be impeccably polite to them until they blew their stack badly enough while trying to provoke me that I could report them. :) I'd only do that if they were clearly already unredeemable, though.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Same, generally speaking when I'm writing a comment in order to disagree with someone I want that other person's comment to be more visible to other readers. That way they can read it, see my response, and realize how wrong the original comment was and how right I am. :) I save my downvotes for comments that are so wrong they're not worth a response.

I'll even sometimes downvote a comment, ponder for a moment, and then remove my downvote and write a response instead.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Indeed, this is one of the areas where Star Trek has consistently fallen short of its "Utopian future" ideal. I understand that it's often done for storytelling purposes, but Orville shows how that's an unnecessary shortcut - it's still possible to write compelling stories and have the hero be a hero even if his superior officers are actually competent and in his corner.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Well, one big difference is that the show isn't literally named after him. Another is that it's an ensemble cast where he's not playing one of the most central characters.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

@downpunxx, you asked "What could possibly be the difference here?" in the title of your post (which I should note violates the "no editing/editorializing of linked headlines" rule for this community) and now you're downvoting everyone who tries to answer that question. I'm on kbin, I can see the identity of who's downvoting. Not a good look.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

And also bear in mind that if someone writes a crappy enough kbin article now and it gets deleted, that's going to make it harder to get a kbin article started again in the future. I know that's not how it's supposed to work in principle but unfortunately it's how it works in practice.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Definitely. The public nature of voting means that it should be possible for anyone to write a bot that spots these patterns automatically.

Whether instance admins do anything about it is a separate matter, but at least everyone will know whether they're doing something about it.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

This all seems needlessly complicated, and worse, it is custom-tweaked to just one specific scenario. I would much rather simply have the details of who voted for whom remain public and then allow each instance to handle that however they wish.

Spotting karma whores who operate like this, with a group of mutually-upvoting and downvoting bots, will be a trivial pattern for automatic detection. Rather than simply trying to give them an ever-more-complicated "game" to play, just identify them and block them and be done with it. Admins won't want their instances to become known as havens for such behaviour so they'll likely wipe users like that.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

Why thank you. :) It was a name I picked kind of randomly years ago when I decided to respond to a Reddit comment and needed to register an account, and I just happened to have seen the Endless Forest right beforehand. I never actually played it, though. It's since become my default online handle despite none of my interests being specifically oriented towards deer.

Then when I saw that Kbin/Lemmy allowed profile images I created a couple of potential avatars using Stable Diffusion and then cropped down my favourite.

FaceDeer,
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She could have retired at any time, including right after Obama was elected. The Republicans couldn't have held the spot open for years. It would have become a major election issue.

FaceDeer,
@FaceDeer@kbin.social avatar

He couldn't have copyrighted E=mc^2, he'd have had to patent it. But laws of nature are excluded from patent eligibiligy in the US, and presumably most other jurisdictions.

Software code is an interesting edge case in the middle. The code itself is a creative expression, and so copyright applies. This brings benefits as well as restrictions; software code is also speech as far as many free-speech rights are concerned. The algorithms expressed by the code are subject to software patents, which is a more controversial grey area.

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