Prouvaire

@Prouvaire@kbin.social

Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

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

Prouvaire,

That's good to know, thanks.

I should have had a look at codeberg before making my post. As well as the entry you identified, there's also this, a suggestion to rate limit accounts: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/948

Prouvaire,

Agree, but it's not a question of him appointing moderators. It's a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn't been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn't enough interest in the userbase at the moment.

However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don't appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.

Prouvaire,

Magazine moderators have the ability to delete posts in their community (also pin/unpin them) and ban users from their community. I don't think it would take a huge amount of time as a rule - it's just a matter of checking in regularly (I suppose ideally several times a day) to see if there are any moderator actions that need to be taken.

Beyond that, moderators typically play a role in curating content and setting/monitoring community guidelines. But we've been talking about people being appointed solely to carry out the more technical/administrative functions in certain magazines to prevent the recent flood of spam. Ie, people have said they'd be happy to ban spam accounts without necessarily taking on the curation of the magazine in question.

Prouvaire,

Ernest hasn't posted since last week, so hopefully he's okay. He's alluded to having a fever and having to figure out kbin's finances (and a bit before that, mentioned that he had to take on another job to cover the bills), so I'm guessing life has gotten in the way of kbin. It's worth bearing in mind that all the threadiverse projects are basically someone's hobby at the moment.

Some of us _aspire _ to dwelling in a basement!

Prouvaire,

The "sort by hot" algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the "sort by hot" view. For larger communities, where the threshold for "new" and "hot" may be set higher, so it doesn't matter so much. (I don't know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like 'hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community'.)

Prouvaire,

It may have something to do with the bug mentioned here:

The improved collapsible comments add-on, part of the original KES collection in version 1.0.0, has some conflicts with kbin's own implementation of collapsible comments. I am cleaning this up, but it may take some time

Improved Channel Select Menu 0.2.0 — Makes your subscribed magazines and liked channels more accessible (greasyfork.org)

One of my most wanted features as of late has been for the channel select menu to have my subscribed magazines and liked collections. Right now, it just contains some general feeds, but I thought it'd be super useful to also have your mags and collections there for easy access! However, given that Kbin development priorities are...

Prouvaire,

Thanks very much for this. I've been hoping that raltsm4k updates Floating Subs List to incorporate collections, but they haven't been active since mid-last year.

Given your code is partly based on this script, I wonder if you might consider modifyingraltsm4k's Floating Subs List script so that collections appear as part of the sidebar. As a fallback, maybe modify your script so that collections appear before magazines rather than after. This would make it easier to use both scripts, one to access magazines in the sidebar, and the other to more easily access liked collections.

Prouvaire,

It so happens that I had a discussion with someone about this very issue on the kbin codeberg some months ago, starting with this comment here:

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/455#issuecomment-977168

But while I've also gone back and forth on the question, I've basically settled on the view that public downvoting encourages _responsible _downvoting, and the risks associated with downvotes being public are exaggerated given how much else of one's activity is public anyway.

Prouvaire,

This is one of the biggest issues and barriers to discoverability with the Fediverse in my opinion.

As I understand it, unless an instance has already subscribed to a community (magazine in kbin parlance), then in order to make that community (magazine) appear in your own instance, you need to:

  • First search for the community (including the community's home instance) name in the magazine search function.
  • The search will come up blank, but the act of searching for it will trigger a backend request for your instance to start federating content from that community. However there's no message to tell you that it's doing that. It just looks like that community doesn't exist.
  • Further, it may take up to several days (in my experience) for federation to start, ie, you have to repeat the search for the community and only then can you subscribe to (follow) that community
  • And when it does start, it only starts grabbing new content. So first it looks like the community doesn't exist, then it takes a long time for content to appear, and then it looks like the community is sparsely populated unless you go back to the community's home instance, rather than staying in your own instance, to catch up on old content.
  • Further pinned posts aren't federated (at least between lemmy and kbin I believe), so you can't even rely on a "here's what you need to know" introductory post to orient new members.

Contrast this to reddit, where (because it's a centralised system) searching for a subreddit produces immediate results, you can join a subreddit immediately, and you can immediately see all current and past content for that subreddit. Much more intuitive and useful to users.

Unfortunately the activitypub protocol that underlies lemmy and kbin doesn't appear to have been designed for reddit-like communities in mind. Ie communities that tend to feature long-form content, posted relatively sporadically, and where having access to the community's archive is very useful to members. It works somewhat better for twitter-like communities where it's easier to jump in "mid-stream" and - because posts tend to be only a few words long - you're more likely to start seeing new content after only a short delay.

I wish that this is something that's addressed at the Fediverse level.

What are your thoughts on Microblogs vs threads? (kbin.social)

When I first joined Kbin I posted threads due to being a reddit refugee but have started posting microblogs as time went on. I have also noticed some magazines have more threads while others have more microblog posts. For example kbinmeta has more threads while the most active magazine I moderate has mostly microblogs.

Prouvaire,

Agree with all of the above.

Another thing I wish kbin would do, is that while kbin picks up mastodon posts (ie microblogs) - albeit not as seamlessly as would be ideal, as Mr Murdoch points out, it doesn't go the other way. When I post a thread to kbin I always attach relevant hashtags, but my Mastodon account does not pick these up. Mastodon does have the ability to follow kbin users, but not pick up kbin threads based on the thread's hashtags.

Prouvaire,

they might be inclined to do a subsequent search by combining any number of the tags you/I have mentioned

I use hashtags to see if an article/story has already been submitted, but how do you search on multiple hashtags? eg #broadway AND #sondheim

Prouvaire,

That doesn't work for me though. Entering

https://kbin.social/tag/sondheim broadway

produces zero results. What am I doing wrong?

Prouvaire,

Thanks Daredevil. Hmm. While the following search:

https://kbin.social/search?q=broadway+sondheim

does produce my post, the search query seems to act as a logical OR rather than a logical AND. Ie, it returns posts with tag #broadway OR #sondheim. Is there a way of constructing a search with a logical AND?

Further, this search:

https://kbin.social/search?q=broadway+lesmis

should produce any number of posts, but returns nil results.

Eg, this post is tagged with both #broadway AND #lesmis, but does not appear:

https://kbin.social/m/Musicals/t/553845/Have-There-Ever-Been-Two-Productions-of-the-Same-Show

And there are a number of posts tagged with #lesmis: https://kbin.social/tag/lesmis which, one would assume, should also appear in the search results.

So searching for single tag queries seems to work well, but searching for text queries is inconsistent.

Unless... using the search bar ONLY searches the body of the post, rather than also the associated tags? Whereas searching for tags ONLY searches for tags attached to a post, but not the text of the post itself? If so, then it would be great if kbin had the ability to do logical AND searches on tags to help narrow down results.

Prouvaire,

Thanks DD - will raise a Codeberg issue in the next day or so (just in the middle of work right now).

Prouvaire,

It's something that's been requested:

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/352
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/551

I imagine it's a matter of getting around to adding this feature.

Request: Remove ability to 'boost' your own comments and threads (kbin.social)

The ability to 'boost' your own comments/threads has been used by a very small number of users in a way that seriously degrades conversation on the platform. These users constantly move their own contributions to the top of the conversation without regard to their value. If allowed to continue it will likely become standard for...

Prouvaire,

In addition to what PugJesus said, it seems to me that a single boost moving a post/comment to the top of the conversation is also a symptom of a bigger issue - which is that a lot of Fediverse communities are still very small. As a community grows in size (from dozens/hundreds of people to thousands/tens of thousands or more) a single boost should have less and less of an impact.

Prouvaire,

@ernest might it be an idea to set up a "kbin social status" web page or mastodon account - divorced from the kbin.social server infrastructure - which people could follow and be informed of any site issues which might not be publishable when the kbin.social site itself is down?

Prouvaire,

Ernest has previously said that this will be an upgrade to address several issues, such as those related to federation, spam and lack of moderation tools.

Prouvaire,

I don't recall Ernest explicitly saying so, but the API is live on the artemis.camp instance, so hopefully it's in a state where it can be implemented as part of the core kbin code base. Perhaps the kbin codeberg can shed further light on this question.

edit: see tjhart85's answer.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • meta
  • Macbeth
  • All magazines
    •