Kbin and Lemmy don't seem to federate admin activity. I get a lot of spam from the various Kbin instances whereas Lemmy spam seems to be dealt with already.
I think fixing this requires dev work on both the Lemmy side and the Kbin side.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon supports long form and rich content perfectly fine. The problem is that Lemmy and Kbin extend ActivityPub in a way that nothing else does. While most of the Fediverse uses Note objects, Lemmy chose to use Page objects. Mastodon supports Pages but only renders a title and a link because it doesn’t really know what pages are.
Pages represent web pages, whereas notes represent “a short written work typically less than a single paragraph in length”. In my opinion, using Page was a mistake on Lemmy’s end. Just like Lemmy won’t support Place objects, I’m not sure if any other platform will ever support Page objects, because Pages are much bigger in scope than anything most Fediverse applications ever deal with.
There are also other problems. Lemmy expects the community to be CC’ed or Federation may break.
Something that’ll undoubtably confuse people is that Lemmy will send a Create to create a post (makes sense) followed by a boost (Announce) to populate it across servers. In Mastodon, this manifests as a long list of boosted posts. This is the only way Lemmy can spread comments to every other server, but it’ll flood any normal timeline with boosts.
Notation invented by other platforms (!community) isn’t going to make it into Mastodon, I don’t think. You can just paste a full URL (lemmy.world/c/linuxmemes) into Mastodon and get to the community, though, so I don’t really see the need. This is because of perfectly sensible design choices made by both the Lemmy devs (using group: in webfinger to indicate groups, even though that URL scheme is nonstandard, so username and community can overlap) and the Mastodon devs (accounts follow the standard Webfinger notation and usernames are expected to be unique).
Mastodon has stupidities of its own (think “you must @mention usernames” despite ActivityPub having a non-content field for that purpose that’ll work just fine). But in this case the problem is that different projects use the same standard for different purposes.
Interaction between Mastodon and Lemmy is possible, but it’s a massive pain, and even if Mastodon were to support Page objects to render Lemmy posts, it’ll always remain a pain. I don’t think asking Mastodon to change the way their software works to support use cases it was never designed to support (and perhaps doesn’t want to support) is very viable.
That said, you could try to check out the code over at Github and see if you can make Page objects render better in Mastodon. Probably best to ask the maintainers what approach they’d prefer, but I think rendering posts would be a rather small change that would greatly improve interoperability.
Article makes more sense for most federated long-form content, but I imagine there’s not a lot of difference between the two as far as Mastodon is concerned.
If WriteFreely and WordPress use Page, then I actually agree with the Mastodon implementation as-is: I don’t want entire articles in my timeline, but a link + image preview makes complete sense. The current system allows for comments (and comment threads) without having to stuff a long-form article into a tiny column.
Mastodon chose a microblog format, and people using Mastodon chose it for its microblogging format. I understand why you may not want to use Mastodon, but plenty of people are using Mastodon because you can’t type walls of text. Character limits impose restraints that can drive creativity and force users to think about what they wrote, and revise their thoughts.
There are open issues for Kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, MissKey, Firefish, and Pixelfed about OIDC. Some projects have implemented limited OpenID/OAuth2 services for logging in with Google/Facebook/Apple, but for most services this really depends on someone getting their hands dirty and implementing the OIDC properly.
All projects seem to have much bigger fish to fry in the mean time. I don’t think we’ll see this happen without an external (team of) volunteer(s) taking up the tasks and implementing the feature in some kind of unified way.
I don’t think this should be particularly hard for most services, except maybe Lemmy, because many projects already support external authentication. This just needs some implementation, testing, and perhaps a security review to make sure you cant authenticate yourself into other people’s accounts.
It’s unfortunate the federated part of OpenID died. There are plenty of OpenID clients for all kinds of languages that will Just Work if you just pass them the right four magic variables and something like Keycloak is surprisingly easy to maintain once you’ve got it set up right.
Is this a Cloudflare problem? Without any error messages this may as well just be a Fedia bug. Every other Kbin user seems to be posting comments just fine.
the client is javascript after all
How edgy! It’s written in Typescript, though.
Best advice I can give you is to open up the dev tools and look for the exact error message that Kbin is hiding from you for some reason. Also do the usual checks (disable adblockers/all addons, try another browser, etc) for browser related issues.
The same person who runs Fedia.io also runs infosec.pub, so you could try using neonmodem with that Lemmy server without handing your data over to a new person.
Is there a solution for spam from federated communities? (fedia.io)
Recently, there's been a pretty serious spam bot on a federated community: https://fedia.io/u/@ThuleanSneed@startrek.website...
Cannot reply… Snubbed by the machine. (Cloudflare problem?) (fedia.io)
I tried to comment in this thread:...