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.
Exactly this. There’s no way to know what’s going on when kbin goes down. It would be nice if there was a kbin Mastodon account or something people could check for information when the site is down.
I think a lot of us have had the same thoughts looking around kbin.
We all appreciate the work Ernest has done, but we really need someone to dedicate some time to picking out a team to help him, but it seems like that's not happening for whatever reason. I know there's a few other people in the codeberg, but I believe there was a falling out there. What we really need in addition to that though is just generic admins.
Ernest said in a previous post with some Mbin drama that he's very, very slow to trust people, and that's why he's been slow to give anyone else admin access to the project.
That may have been okay when only a few hundred people were using Kbin, but the project far outgrew what a single person can manage, especially since he's not only the main developer of the backend and frontend of Kbin, but also the only admin, moderator of multiple communities, AND decided to tackle making a Mobile Kbin app since that other one became vaporware. That is WAY too much for a single person to handle and still have any sort of existence offline.
This has been brought to his attention, but as you mentioned, nothing changes, and he continues the cycle of putting incredible load on himself, and then burning out. It's not sustainable, and unfortunately his lack of trust in others, and an unhealthy level of self-reliance, will ultimately keep Kbin from thriving.
If end of September is a self imposed deadline why not just extend it a little? I don't feel like you've got anything to prove here and you certainly shouldn't in my book
I'm always telling people in my team health/family etc comes first (from learning the hard way myself)...
Obviously if that's not possible for reasons we don't know that's different. But I honestly enjoy using Kbin in its current state pretty much daily and I think most people here would agree you've done a cracking job on it.
Very well said and you have captured many of my exact fears.
Personally, if the decentralized fediverse was more developed and mature, I would not be as concerned about federating with Threads. But, Meta is entering at a time when everything is really just starting to develop.
They’ll be the big instance and they’ll have a lot of influence over the others as a result.
Just to give an example, What would happen if Lemmy.world decided to cut off kbin? Kbin would lose a ton of content and access to most of the large communities. Threads, thanks to Meta’s resources and huge Instagram user base, will likely gain more active users and communities than lemmy in no time and they could do the same. The difference is I believe Meta may be more likely to down the line because an open fediverse doesn’t fit super nicely into their business model.
I understand many people disagree and that is fine; nobody knows the future. If we decide to federate with Threads then so be it, and if it turns out I am totally wrong then I will eat my words. All I am trying to articulate is that I think there is reason to be skeptical of Meta.
100%. Additionally, there's a difference in magnitude between lemmy.world and Threads. While it's obviously not great that so many of the large communities are on lemmy.world, Threads would have a vast majority of the fediverse's microblog content. If Meta leaves the fediverse later on, people outside of Threads will suddenly lose almost all of the activity their used to and will likely move over to Threads. And Meta, being a profit-driven company, has all the incentive in the world to do this given that it would pull tons of users from competing platforms like Mastodon.
These corporations have shown time and time again that profit is their priority, and that profit explicitly goes against our own interests. You're not going to see Zuckerberg asking people to keep things balanced by joining other instances. He'd love to pull users from Mastodon, Firefish, and Kbin over to Threads, and it's easily doable if he's welcomed with open arms like big instances across the fediverse are doing right now.
I think corporate instances should be allowed only as hosts for accounts of their own employees. Letting large companies dominate the fediverse kind of diminishes the idea of putting control of social media back into hands of the people. If the companies really wanted to help the fediverse out they should be donating to fediverse projects rather than trying to monopolize it.
Blocking someone means, "I want nothing to do with this person," so it makes sense that you'll be unable to see what they do. This should include direct messages, threads, comments, etc. @PugJesus's idea of a setting to hide votes from blocked users is a great idea, as you should be able to fully ignore someone you've blocked.
It also makes sense that someone you've blocked wouldn't be able to do any 1-on-1 interaction with you. If you've blocked somebody because they're spamming or harassing you, it wouldn't be great for them to be able to DM you.
However, preventing them from voting on your posts is something different entirely, as votes don't just concern the creator of the post and the person doing the voting; they also concern everyone who sees the post. Upvoting a comment is a message not just to the creator but also to everyone else that you like that comment, and the same goes for downvoting. Blocking voting is much more farther reaching than blocking DMs, and with votes being visible on the fediverse, it's a great way for trolls to hide people's views on their posts.
But if a troll blocks everyone that down votes them, eventually no one will be left to see their stuff. It is a self solving problem. On the other hand, a troll that you block can interfere with your stuff being shown to others depending on the sorting algorithm.
But if a troll blocks everyone that down votes them, eventually no one will be left to see their stuff.
By letting people prevent others from downvoting bad content, you make more people see it. This problem is only "self-solving" ifː
everyone who sees heavily downvoted posts blocks the user. This probably isn't ideal behavior given how many people treat downvotes as an "I disagree" button.
if the person's posts aren't being exposed to new people. It doesn't matter if everyone who's already seen the user has blocked them if more people are getting exposed to them. And by preventing downvotes, you're making it more likely that people will see these posts.
On the other hand, a troll that you block can interfere with your stuff being shown to others depending on the sorting algorithm.
The number of trolls going around downvoting everything you do is minimal, and you can often deal with them by calling them out as was discussed in a previous thread about downvotes. Additionally, you have to consider the other side of the coin, which is content that should be getting downvoted getting more attention than they should.
Counterpoint: it makes it even more apparent when bigoted alt right trolls like AnotherAttorney post and we can see they're the ones upvoting and boosting their own terrible posts, and ridicule them til they quit or switch sock puppets
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!
I understand the desire to keep kbin a solo project in order to maintain control over it, but if this is going to see any success in the long term, then there needs to be a team. I like kbin over lemmy for the interface and mocroblog integration, but the spam and lack of updates are taking its toll. At the very least, there needs to be another admin or two to look after things whenever Ernest isn't around.
@billothekid2 this exchange raises another point. You and @snooggums downvoting each other here seem to be engaging in "downvote-to-disagree" with each other.
I don't see nearly as much of this on kbin as I do on, say, lemmy.world and I'm sure it's because of our more transparent voting system.
I'm personally not a fan because I think it's vaguely hostile and discourages open discussion.
Same, generally speaking when I'm writing a comment in order to disagree with someone I want that other person's comment to be more visible to other readers. That way they can read it, see my response, and realize how wrong the original comment was and how right I am. :) I save my downvotes for comments that are so wrong they're not worth a response.
I'll even sometimes downvote a comment, ponder for a moment, and then remove my downvote and write a response instead.
The way I see it, downvotes = "I wish this comment didn't exist" and doing it to punish someone for having a discussion with us is weird, since social media is all about discussions, and exchanging disagreeing points of view is interesting.
Fair enough. I tend to think downvotes are warranted when it's not adding anything to the conversation and/or are somewhat hostile. Not that it's worth anything at this point, but the downvote was because I literally just explained myself on the very post they were responding to. People are just putting words in my mouth at this point just because they want to disagree, and at some point it's easier to downvote that to repeat myself.
I am downvoting because complaining about downvotes while saying they don't matter is hypocritical and not a discussion made in good faith. Just wanted to see if they voted in response, showing their hypocrisy.
You see? That's literally not what I said. I seem to have struck a nerve with you here and I'm not sure why. But go ahead. Give me my downvote that I apparently care so much about.
canis_majoris said to stop caring and you replied with
I don't. That's why I called them imaginary internet points. Lol. My point was about the fact that you can see who downvotes you.
Yet, you noticed someone downvoting a bunch of your posts and took the time to contact them and ask for reason. Then you didn't like their response and made this post. Then when I downvoted it you downvoted my post. The only reason for you to do any of this is because you care about being downvoted. You react to it, yet say you don't care. That is what you said and did, and what I am responding to.
I hate being accused of lying, so I responded to you implying that I'm lying by claiming something other than what you said.
FWIW, I usually downvote if the person is a dick. Often I also disagree with them, but not always. If you are dragging the conversation down (in some way other than having an unpopular opinion) you get a downvote.
I don't think it's as simple as that. Downvotes do have some kind of meaning — when you give a downvote, you're doing it for some reason that you want to convey — and people are going to interpret downvotes accordingly. If downvotes didn't mean anything, then there'd be no point to them existing at all. What exactly a downvote means depends on the person giving it, but it's ideally (imo) used to express that a post is spam, hateful, or otherwise a bad contribution to the discussion. Obviously, people shouldn't take downvotes personally, but a post being downvoted does and should mean something.
Thus, what OP mentions in his post is a legitimate concern. Public votes allow people to more easily downvote spam someone who downvoted them, which is unequivocally a bad thing that we'd prefer not to have. However, whether we should make votes private is a matter of whether the downsides outweigh the upsides, and they don't.
This is an obvious downside. I’ve experienced a similar thing but being a lemmy user I don’t know who I pissed off. Which is for the best. It was a one off. Ignore it and chances are this one will be too.
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