@BiggestBulb
using kbin mostly on mobile devices, i am time and again surprised that kbin works kinda fine > e.g. kbin deals better with bad internet connections than any other fedi software i have come to know so far > given that kbin is still early beta, this is impressive
i think that we should be patient, and keep reporting bugs :)
I second all the suggestions except the currently reading/online one: in my experience, seeing "currently reading" statistics just makes dead places feel more dead. It's also not a useful statistic: it doesn't tell you how good a post is, or provide any information about the poster, or even show how popular it is (because you can't really extrapolate about the average engagement from only one datapoint). You can't do anything with the number.
… why? They just seem like a Lemmy instance for sports. Who are these people you have issue with? What are they posting that's so bad? Why do these few people justify what's essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation?
Some ideas for anti-spam measures that might help:
block users who post flood -- e.g. if an account makes 10 posts a minute, it's a spammer
block accounts that end up massively in the negative shortly after they start posting -- e.g. an account at -50 within 15 minutes of making its first post is probably a spammer (exact thresholds may need some tuning). Note that this is different from blocking new accounts that go into the negative since people can register accounts in advance of an attack and wait until later to cause disruption.
block users who post repetitive comments/links excessively -- e.g. if the same link is in 10 comments/posts from the last hour or they've submitted the exact same comment a dozen times, the account is probably a spammer (again, thresholds may need tuning); that won't catch all the bots (one of them added a bunch of random words) but will catch some of them. More clever filtering could catch the other bots.
block new posters who are reported many times by established accounts in good standing -- at least until an admin can check what is going on
I'm not entirely sure any of that would be effective in controlling visibility of spam accounts from other instances. I'm quite sure that up/down voting does not always federate perfectly. Those steps would all be effective in handling malicious accounts on the same instance they're registered with, as long as their malicious posts and comments are also on that same instance; the effectiveness would certainly fall off sharply for content posted at other instances.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
We don't need to depend on federated downvotes to judge what does or does not belong on kbin. In fact, I think it's probably better if we don't. People are downvoting the bots here. I have yet to see an account with negative rep. on kbin that wasn't a spammer.
Regardless, rate-limiting incoming posts will limit the damage and annoyance to us.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
I'm not sure that would help with this particular issue -- and there's already a fair amount of bad relations between instances so I don't think a wider fediverse board is likely to succeed even if it could help somehow... I guess instance admins that do agree on general moderation principles could help co-admin each other's instances to cover better for when they're offline (maybe some of them already do?), but we shouldn't have to depend on remote admins being responsive to deal with an issue affecting our instance.
I see. Is this issue being actively fixed right now? Don’t mean to be pushy. Just want to know how soon it would be fixed. I really want to use kbin lol. Other alternatives for my use case involve having parallel mastodon and lemmy clients (which would be really weird), or Friendica (which unfortunately does not seem to work that well with lemmy).
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.
I wonder how difficult it would be to have a "read only" version of kbin that replaces the full version when things go wrong or maintenance is being done. I'm sure there are other technical solutions, just one thought.
Interestingly, because of federation, this sort of happens anyway. If you'd hopped onto another kbin instance, or even Lemmy much of the content from magazines here was still accessable.
Afraid not, each instance is independent in that sense so you need to go through the whole account creation again (although you can use the same username again, assuming it's free).
That said, as with this instance, you can browse without needing to be logged in.
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
Dude, you're being quite hard on yourself. You're not the only one who can write code, you're not the only one who can review it. It would be fine for you to step back and take a decision making role until everything else has been handled in your life.
Don't burn out in a few months. Protect your sanity so that you can be there for the long run.
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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