Pamasich

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 (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 (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

If by "spoiler alert" you mean

::: spoiler spoiler
this
:::

then it's supported now (ernest added it some days ago).

Win+. is a Windows functionality, yeah.

Some differences not yet mentioned are

• boosts (mastodon's equivalent to twitter's retweets)
• bookmarks / saving stuff (supported on lemmy, not yet on kbin)
• votes on kbin are public, while they're hidden on lemmy
• magazine/community css (supported on kbin, I think not supported on lemmy)

Does Lemmy mark new comments in posts? Since kbin just added that recently.

Pamasich, 5 months ago

boosts

Boosts are originally Mastodon's version of Twitter's retweets. By boosting a post, you share it with your followers.

Behind the scenes, this is how they're implemented on kbin too right now. Though it seems incomplete, as there's not currently a way to view content boosted by your followed users without visiting their profiles manually.

kbin currently uses boosts to sort threads by top, rather than upvotes. Which might be what you were referring to there.

Writing this out now, I realize it might not actually be a difference worth mentioning while it doesn't add anything unique besides added complexity and Mastodon integration (which just goes back to microblogging being a thing on kbin which is already covered).

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a language to describe the visual design of websites.

An older version of Reddit (old.reddit.com) allowed subreddits to specify their own custom CSS code which would be used when users visited those subreddits. They could completely transform the design of the site using that feature. Or they could hack in features specific to their subreddit. Many subreddits both big and small made use of that feature and are still using it even today.
Spoilers for example were done using links and custom CSS long before Reddit added their official spoilers.

Kbin takes the same approach as old.reddit. Magazines can specify their own custom CSS code to change kbin's appearance while visiting the magazine. Though I have only seen one magazine make use of that so far, so it's not nearly as widespread as on Reddit yet.

new comments

On kbin, there's a setting in the sidebar (the gear icon) to mark new comments in threads you've seen before (since turning on the feature). I think it defaults to off.

When turned on and visiting a thread, new comments since your last visit are marked with a yellow bottom left corner. This is a very recent addition and seems to only be clear enough with the Tokyo Night theme currently. On other themes the colored corner is very hard to see for me.

Pamasich, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

We should probably have our posts self-upvoted by default anyway, like on reddit and lemmy.

Well, Lemmy doesn't either. It pretends to exactly so you don't (I assume that's the reasoning). It doesn't actually add an upvote in your name and so it's also not counted as upvoted by you by other platforms. I can only guess it's trying to prevent people from adding an upvote by making them think the platform already did it for them.

Just check Lemmy posts on kbin (considering voting is public). How many of them have the creator as one of the upvoters? New posts with 1 upvote on Lemmy have 0 on kbin.

Discovered this a few weeks ago while testing some federation stuff.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

This seems to already be implemented and probably coming once Ernest is able to finish the update. You might be able to find other instances that are already featuring this.

Like, I saw strings regarding this when contributing to translations yesterday. Some setting in the sidebar's gear menu to toggle the position.

Pamasich, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

kbin.social's admin (and kbin currently only supports one admin per instance) is also the main dev.

As I understand it, the sudden unexpected popularity of kbin caused infrastructure issues and made fixing bugs and limitations more important, while he still has to reach his feature goals to secure funding so he can actually continue working on kbin full-time. Additionally, real life had a lot of negative surprises in store he had to deal with.

All in all, he hasn't had much time at all to properly moderate the instance, And the past two weeks he's been gone entirely for real life reasons, leaving the instance unmoderated.

It's not an issue with the software itself, just with kbin.social (and of course other badly moderated instances) specifically.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

Have you blocked anyone? There's a bug that causes certain threads, including your own, to not be visible to you outside your profile. It's caused by you blocking anyone at all iirc. Or maybe it's about blocking domains, I forgot the specifics, but try removing any and all blocks and see if that solved it.

It's fixed in the latest code iirc, but there's not been a stable release yet that incorporates the change.

Additionally, and I have no idea if this is related, I cannot send direct messages to anyone outside of kbin.social

This is correct, direct messages only work on the same instance currently. If I remember the previous discussions about it correctly, this is intentional for some undisclosed (or lost to time?) reason currently. Like, the developer has specifically added code to cause this behavior, I assume because there were worse issues with it.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

lemmy.ml still sometimes showed in the feed

I think the issue there is probably that the block applies to what's in the (some.domain) next to threads. For non-link threads, it's hidden, but it's the instance the thread was created on. But for threads that link to an article, image, video, or anything else, it's the domain the link points to. So a thread linking to a youtube video will have youtube.com as its domain. And only blocking youtube.com will hide it, not blocking the instance the thread is from.

It think ideally both, the target of the link and the owning instance of the thread, should be accounted for by the block functionality. But I don't think that's currently the case.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

lemmy.ml still sometimes showed in the feed

In what way?

Even if lemmy.ml is blocked or even defederated, its communities should remain, just not threads and comments made by lemmy.ml users. But you might still see @lemmy.ml communities show up in your feed if someone from lemmy.world or kbin.social made a thread there.

Pamasich, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Ernest linked Patreon and Liberapay on a previous thread. I think both support Paypal.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

Worth noting you can also post it as a markdown link, like this.

[like this](https://matrix.to/#/#kbin-space:matrix.org)

Then it's clickable even on kbin.

Pamasich, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Oh, it seems to support PayPal only when the recipient uses PayPal as the payment processor. Is what the FAQ says. In which case PayPal is required, not just an option. TIL

Pamasich, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

It wasn't like that until a few years ago, and people disliked the change.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

It used to be possible on Reddit, and people didn't like the change to how it is now. Because of how it can be (and is being) abused.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

I've never been blocked, so I might be wrong there. But the last word problem was the main reason I've seen people hate the move to the current blocking system, so I assumed it didn't exist before.

Edit: Reddit's official announcement for the new system does explicitly mention they're changing it so you can't interact with users that blocked you anymore. Which implies you could before.

Pamasich, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Maybe there's been another change. In the original system I meant, blocking was one-sided only.

To quote Reddit themselves:

We will be evolving the blocking experience so that it not only removes a blocked user’s content from your experience, but also removes your content from their experience—i.e., a user you have blocked can’t see or interact with you.

Previously, if I blocked u/IAmABlockedUser, I would not see their content, but they would see mine. With the updated blocking experience, I won’t see u/IAmABlockedUser’s content and they won’t see mine either.

Like I've said in the other comment, not entirely sure on whether replying was possible since I've never been blocked myself.

To clarify, a few years ago, the blocked user could not see the message either.

But this is definitely false.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

What you're saying makes sense, but I think the big issue here is that blocking as it currently works on Reddit is harmful because it's too easy to abuse. If the only reason for the change is familiarity, then you'll just make the platform worse for actual users just to lessen the barrier of entry.

So, why does any platform even need this, besides familiarity? If you don't want to see a user, hiding them from you will achieve that perfectly.

I really can only think of malicious reasons. Shutting down an argument or badmouthing someone without giving them a means to respond or defend themselves.

Like, if it's to avoid stalkers, this would do literally nothing to achieve that. They can just log out and continue doing what they were doing.

I don't think kbin should be blindly adopting bad ideas even if everyone else does them. If it was actually beneficial, sure, have kbin go for it. But this doesn't seem to solve a problem, nor does it actually improve our quality of life. Rather, it does the opposite. It introduces a problem we could just do without by keeping what we have currently.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

Thanks for the writeup, it helped me see things from your perspective. I don't fully agree, but I get now why you're asking for this.

What I'm wondering now is, does the fediverse actually support the kind of block that's being asked for here? Like, is there precedent on this being implemented on other platforms like Mastodon or Lemmy? The issue here is that kbin isn't in control of who sees your posts, I wonder if it's actually possible to implement this in the first place.

This will do a lot to prevent stalkers, because even if the stalkers realize they need to log out to stalk the user, they now lose every "follow" function, every logged-in function, and have to stalk the user manually.

If you actually believe this, you're a bit shortsighted. This is the fediverse, people can just jump onto a different instance. And even on Reddit multiple accounts for the same person were allowed.

People can also run their own personal instance which doesn't honor those blocks.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

Is this issue being actively fixed right now?

I doubt it. They've had more important stuff to work on and probably forgot about that issue in the meanwhile. That said, best would be to just comment on it asking what's up with it. That'll bump it up in visibility.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

You're right, I only read the beginning of article, the Mozilla docs also mention the phrasing content later on the same page.

Guess it's really on kbin then to fix this.

Pamasich, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

So, slight correction to my previous post (which I now deleted) thanks to @troplin.

It seems that phrasing content like <span> elements are allowed inside <pre> elements according to the spec, so Lemmy is actually doing the right thing there. It's on kbin to fix this, not Lemmy.

I commented on one of the closed issues about this on the kbin code repository, asking for the issue to be reopened. Hopefully it will so this gets fixed, I'm not sure though how visibility works if the issue is already closed. I'll make a new one if it's neither reopened nor replied to until next week, if no one else does first.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

Does it have an issue on codeberg?

If not, I recommend bringing it up there. If you only bring it up here, you rely on ernest or another contributor writing it down and remembering it, which probably isn't too reliable. Better to put it on the issue tracker.

Pamasich, 7 months ago

You probably won't see this, but I've sent you a private message. Hopefully that one arrives.

I assume it's the blocking bug, which is getting fixed this update I think.

Pamasich, 6 months ago

So, I made a new thread asking about the status and ernest responded to it.

It seems there's been some unexpected irl issues that have prevented ernest from properly working on the update.

However, I'm almost ready to continue on this journey, so you can expect that in the near future, there will be a banner with information and the update date of the instance and release. After that, we will work on avoiding such longer development downtimes in case of my absence.

Pamasich, 9 months ago

ChatGPT is going to get you rejected for made up sources for sure.

Pamasich, 10 months ago

No need, gmail gives you virtually infinite emails. Just tested it out, kbin doesn't have countermeasures against it in place. You can use one gmail email to create as many accounts as you want.

Pamasich, 10 months ago

You can't ban gmail, but it shouldn't be too hard to add countermeasures against it.

Pamasich, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Posting this here for now since codeberg seems to be inaccessible. I'll move it over there (if there's not already an issue on this) once it's back.

With the new update came edit labels, but the relative edit time seems to be wrong. After editing a comment, it says "edited in 2 minutes" and counts down.

edit: this seems to be a general issue with timestamps on kbin for me since the update. The comment creation time too, it seems to be set to 2 minutes in the future.