As soon as the site came back up I was looking for any of the changes, so I'm glad you posted. Stinks to have an unplanned outage but I'm looking forward to the planned one! I hope it goes well!
dunno, i kinda got into running an instance after reading about all the hard work you put into it. it would be hard for me to separate the ernest from the kbin ... so, dont do that?
take your time, take care of yours. this shit will be here
Kbin FTW! Thank you Ernest, and the rest of the team. As a reddifugee, I feel I've landed in the right instance. And on the 'end user' side I'm committed to fostering the good growth of the magazines (m/SantaFe, m/Photobiomodulation) I've started. All of us together, we're building a better fediverse. I feel very hopeful.
For desktop browsers, I like it better than regular lemmy. Admittedly, I'd like to use a client with it so I look forward to an API for mobile clients, but I'm pretty happy as a desktop user.
A few suggestions that may or may not be satisfactory for you:
Using KES, enable General > Hide sidebar elements > Random threads, Random mags, Random posts. The randomly populated sidebar is fundamentally flawed; I suggest disabling its content altogether.
Next, enable General > Filter advertisements. This second feature is by no means foolproof, but will reduce a lot of noise, and is periodically updated on a rolling basis.
The guy that manages Kbin has been having personal issues and stepped away from the fediverse so yeah Kbin is kind of in limbo at the moment and indeed not well moderated. There’s mods but there’s just so much they can do. The software doesn’t federate the deletions so even if they’re gone on Kbin, they remain everywhere else.
One of the main problems is that Ernest is the owner and only mod on those magazines getting all the spam. I guess I missed the memo (figuratively speaking) about deletions not being federated though. That seems like a problem even if there were alternative moderators.
There's at least one person on the mod-request queue for most of the spam-ridden magazines. That "at least one" is me, which is how I know. I'm not here all the time and wouldn't be great at it, but at this stage even a part-time mod would be better than none at all. Hopefully, as and when Ernest comes back he can assign some roles. Twice as hopefully, someone else who would be better at it gets it instead.
I hope it goes on. And being open source, it definitely will! (e.g. Mbin)
Ernest likewise will be remembered, fondly or otherwise, for his contributions in starting it.
That said, I’m close to personally blocking it due to all the spam hitting other servers from it, and the FBI may come knocking soon as well if people decide to hit it with illegal stuff like CP.
It would be nice if the report feature had a way to indicate if the problem is spam, content or whatever other issues people might have. You could have a threshold for spam reports to put the account in review and prevent of hide it's posts.
I have to type 4 letters for every spam I see. I'd prefer to check a box (on my phone where typing is annoying this is even more useful) I do this dozens of times per day - it gets annoying fast.
A short pull-down list would work well: Spam, Harassment, Site ToS Violation, Thread/Group Rules Violation, etc.
This way you can automate rules like: if an article get's N spam or harassment reports it's put into the review queue and hidden until a Moderator can review it.
@Kierunkowy74
Yes, moderators can access the reports tab within the magazine panel. Every report must include some reason, hence moderators see them. Regarding bans: without giving a proper reason, no ban can come into effect.
You can also check the modlogs on kbin and lemmy instances for bans (does not apply to mbin). @bayaz@jayrhacker
Most forums have dedicated categories for common stuff like this. Written reports are fine if an explanation is needed, not for the newly created samename37 spambot account illicitly selling drugs (or something that is probably phishing, like the delta airlines refund ticket type stuff) without really doing much to hide it.
It's the same communities and overwhelming at times to the point it doesn't even feel productive or even needed to report it. This is the lowest of low-hanging fruit.
Starting to feel like there's more SPAM than posts on Kbin, at this point.
I sort by new and comb through reporting "SPAM" and blocking users, but it's a never-ending cycle it seems and users reported for SPAM are still posting (hence why I block them in addition to reporting the individual posts).
I once again ask why there is no form of filtering, especially for new users who rapid post. Also spammers using the same names with a higher number after they get banned.
I registered the next-in-sequence for one of them. Haven't seen that username since. I like to think I broke a script somewhere, but it could just as easily have broken a spammer's tiny little brain. The disappointing but more likely explanation is that they shrugged and moved on to a different set of usernames.
Blocking is a personal thing, there’s no heuristic that determines if a specific user is blocked by x people to automatically block them for users. That would be quite appealing though, but the abuse potential is quite significant, if you have a bot army…
Reporting will notify the moderator(s) of the community, so if and how fast they react really depends on them.
I mean, he’s developing and administrating what’s essentially a Reddit clone all on his own.
And doing a damn fine job.
The question was if you saw similarity in the pressure to add maintainers to the project with the social engineering that lead to xz getting backdoored.
I’m not going to pick through his last year’s posts and make a diagnosis, but if you’ve seen no evidence of that, I think you’re wilfully ignoring the signs.
I’m not going to pick through his last year’s posts and make a diagnosis, but if you’ve seen no evidence of that, I think you’re wilfully ignoring the signs.
Ok, I'll continue "ignoring" evidence you can't even describe ("He talked somewhere about..."), much less cite.
For all we know his frequent absence is down to a great work-life balance on his part.
Irrespective this thread is not about who is or is not burnt out, it's about how posts like your are what enabled the xz backdoor to happen.
Irrespective this thread is not about who is or is not burnt out, it's about how posts like your are what enabled the xz backdoor to happen.
I thin you need to chill a bit. Open source has a long illustrious history of people cooperating to build software and submit patches and enhancements which are then scrutinized by project leads. Yes, occasionally bad actors use this model to try and slip through exploits, but you don't throw out one of the strengths of open source because of that. You make sure mechanisms are in palce to allow robust scrutiny.
And no, I'm absolutely not going go through someone's post history and quote bits that show someone is frazzled. I expect you to have enough empathy
I used it as a support to my argument, so, it’s relevant. No evidence, you say… I don’t want to talk too much about someone’s health issue. Just believe what you believe. I don’t think you can change your view through online discussion.
No, he's not. Kbin was recently down for a week. Then voting and comment counts broke. Before all that I had to get into the habit of reloading the page I was on every time I wanted to vote on something. It's a terrible user experience.
That's not to say I don't like him or he's not a good dev or whatever. Just that people have limits and it sure seems like he's bumping against his.
I didn't say anything about burning out. A job can be too big or difficult for a person without them burning out.
Ultimately, it's just a question of results. If kbin.social is working poorly but other alternatives are doing good, I move on. That works well in the Fediverse especially, as evidenced that I am commenting from fedia.io.
Likewise I also moved on from Kbin. Obviously we have no power over that project, that belongs solely to the person who created it, but we do control our own actions. e.g. I used to sing the praises of the Fediverse and go out of my way to not equate it with Lemmy - always saying like Lemmy/Kbin. Now I still do the former but I actively tell people that Kbin might not be a good match for them. Ernest has kept it as alpha version software - which is fine, there is a need for such things, and it will become great, someday… hopefully. But today is not that day, and that is super good for people to know, e.g. that they don’t have to leave the Fediverse entirely to get a more functional experience, just Kbin.social.
fedia.io is running mbin, which is a fork of kbin. It seems to be doing well, so you could switch to Lemmy/mbin if you don't want to include kbin any more but still want to show alternate clients are possible.
Thank you for the suggestion. So far I’ve just taken to saying “Fediverse”, perhaps I’m holding out hope for still more clients in the future:-)? Also it’s shorter than Lemmy/Kbin/Mbin:-).
Exactly! More and more products can be added - like now we are hearing about Fedi-wikis (from the original Lemmy developer iirc), and ofc there will be Threads (whether we dread it or not!), so the Fediverse (iirc, defined basically as anything that uses the ActivityPub protocol?) is growing up, spurred onwards by the ongoing demise of Reddit even if started long before. :-)
Kbin/Mbin is still the only platform(s) to try to bridge the two.
Moreover it seems to have better discoverability than mastodon Mastodon. I can type a word or phrase in the search bar on kbin and find "Mastodon" posts whereas I'm stuck viewing whatever is timeline trending on Mastodon proper unless I follow someone or can figure out whatever hashtag person might have affixed to their post.
Even with kbin being down a good 1/5 of the time it remains the best ActivityPub viewing experience (in my).
He is doing an excellent job, and I do not mean to denigrate his work when I say the task is beyond any one person, no matter how talented and dedicated. Look at the issues that went on recently while Ernest was indisposed, and we had months of federation issues that led to communities migrating away and Kbin.social getting defederated by other instances.
This project is getting too large for any one person, and it’s far too important to have one point of failure. And even someone as great as Ernest needs an understudy.
The existence of one bad actor doesn’t make the principle any less true.
Kbin has long since surpassed what Ernest is capable of handling by himself. Either he’s going to have to learn to delegate, or it’s going to collapse under its own weight.
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