Maybe it's time for Kbin and Mbin to be a single project, in the end they are the same thing, just that Mbin has more people actively working on it, so they are faster with pull requests. There is no big philosophical problem, just a maintenance one.
Are you sure that's not just because mbin was syncing changes from kbin? https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin/pull/231 seems to be the only commit ernest has actually made to mbin directly
You are taking this massive “if” and building a whole policy of preemptive panic around it:
I don't see how it's a "massive 'if'." If it was just some fringe possibility, I wouldn't be so concerned, but the thing is that I don't see any realistic scenario where we don't become dependent on Meta for microblog activity. If 99% of microblogs come from Threads, that's exactly what's happening. To give an example that's more relevant to the thread aggregation side of Kbin, if Reddit were to federate and we didn't defederate, Reddit would make up 99% of the thread activity we see, we'd get used to that, and we'd be completely dependent on them to maintain that. With how desperate people seem to be for a quick boost in activity that they'll just take whatever Mark Zuckerberg offers as if there are no strings attached, I don't see how we just end up fine if Threads is to ever leave in the future. If Threads becomes most of what we see, we'll be dependent on them, and if Threads then leaves (which they have incentive to do), much of who we have right now on these platforms will join Threads after getting used to the activity, and getting new users will be much more difficult.
And if we don’t and we defederate, we’ve just cut off potentially interesting conversations with interesting people based on ideology.
That's definitely true. Again, What Meta is essentially offering is free activity on a silver platter. What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached. Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do. It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
What's completely nonsensical is to act like there aren't any strings attached when there are obviously strings attached.
Let's look at the strings
Meta is trying to maximize profit. Anyone who thinks that Zuckerberg suddenly cares about an open fediverse even though its values (people being on multiple instances, everything being transparent, no one person or group having too much control, etc.) go directly against his goal is either delusional or very misinformed about what these for-profit tech companies do.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
It strongly benefits him to take users from Mastodon, Firefish, Misskey, Kbin, etc., and allowing ourselves to depend on him for fediverse activity puts him in a prime position to do it.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
That's all true. But that's not really a string - it's just a fact of any for-profit organisation that sets up an instance
Correct, and it's a fact that's horrendously bad for an organization that's going to harbor a vast majority of the content on the fediverse.
But he can do that anyway. And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads. That needs to be factored in.
The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. The main issue I see is everyone getting used to the 50x boost in activity that Threads provides and then Meta removing that by defederating, pulling people to Threads when they wouldn't have gone there otherwise. Allowing ourselves to become dependent on Meta lets them get users they wouldn't have before and kill the growth prospects of platforms like Mastodon, both of which they have incentive to do.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
You are basing it on the idea that Threads federating is a temporary move designed to advertise Threads. It's a theory. But seems unlikely. If Threads goes away again, I suspect that the current Fediverse userbase will, by and large still be here.
You say: The people who are at currently at this point have already gone to Threads. Then you say that if traffic from Threads is subsequently withdrawn, all the people who haven't already gone to Threads will... go to Threads.
Let me clarify. When I say, "The people who are currently at this point…," I mean the people who right now feel that they need to interact Threads. If they do, they're probably there. My issue is that if people are dependent on Threads for the vast majority of microblog activity, more people will feel that they need to keep that interaction with Threads. I'm not seeing how this is some far fetched theory more than it is straight up inevitable. If activity increases by 50x because 98% of the content is now coming from Threads and most of whom people are following are on Threads, more people will feel the need to stay connected. I don't see how it could be otherwise. This means that if an instance wanted to defederate from Threads for any reason or if Threads defederated themselves (which they have tons of incentive to do later down the line), tons of people would leave.
To give you an example, imagine if kbin.social was to defederating from lemmy.world and lemmy.ml due to unhappiness with their moderation. Obviously, defederating from any instance is going to lose you some users, but those two instances harbor a massive portion — probably a large majority — of the content on the threadiverse. Tons of people would leave kbin.social for the simple reason that most all of the activity that they were used to would be gone otherwise.
Now, with Threads, there is some resistance in the fact that Meta is a massive for-profit corporation. Many people won't move to Threads on principle. However, this is countered by the extremely strong pull factor of the sheer percentage of activity Threads would harbor. If people get used to all of that activity based on Threads and are following mostly Threads accounts, tons of those people will leave an instance should that instance defederate later on or jump ship from the fediverse to Threads should Meta cease federation. And among those who don't leave, there will likely be a lot less motivation to post after such a drop in activity and interaction.
I don't see how dependency on Meta for the vast majority microblog content could possibly be a good idea. If Kbin were to implement a silencing feature like what Mastodon apparently has, where Threads content would be invisible outside of Threads users that you've followed, I think that'd be fine. That way, people could intearct with a few Threads accounts they're especially interested in as opposed to the public microblog feeds being 99% Threads and us being dependent on Threads to maintain the activity of those feeds. But just letting them flood our microblogs seems like an extremely dangerous idea that's wholly unnecessary, and I haven't been convinced otherwise.
And in fact people who who want to interact with the 140million ish Threads users currently have one option - join Threads. With federation I can communicate with Threads users without joining Threads.
What if the defederation happens in the other direction? Defederating an instance is a lot like banning a user, and I'm not sure if there are any mainstream social media sites that I haven't heard abuse their ban system. If other instances start becoming more popular because people want to use them to talk to Threads, that gives Threads a lot of power over which of those instances are allowed to thrive. In the worst case scenario, it could easily kill an instance if too many of their users were there for Threads and Threads decides to cut them off.
A fediverse that is popular because it can talk to a centralized app doesn't sound like a particularly healthy fediverse to me.
While I agree the web app is not the perfect solution, I think it actually works fairly well all things considered. It will never be as smooth as an actual app, but I think time will eventually fix that.
Hi, this feature is still available and working in KES under Threads > Permanently Hide Posts. The hide link appears next to the more button, not inside of the more menu. Give it a try.
You've done an awesome job. And anyone complaining needs to remember that Kbin/ Fediverse is still in its infancy stages: It's going to cry, teethe, piss and shit itself when you least expect it. But with the right care (and time), one day it'll be a lot easier to manage.
Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven't kept up with most of mbin's specifics.
Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information...
Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.
You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text -- but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the "@ user @ instance" syntax -- e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties -- e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called "kbinMeta" and this magazine as search results -- but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you're copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance's local version of a thread and that isn't the original source it probably won't find it. (I've had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)
@piotrsikora@ernest -- FYI searching for this thread by the exact title "Multiple questions regarding Kbin" does not find it currently but searching text like "as a new Kbin/Mbin user" will find it. Is that a bug?
@piotrsikora@ernest -- Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.
Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).
You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.
To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?
It's fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/fedia@fedia.io maybe? Sorry if that doesn't link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )
On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?
DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.
You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user's profile and clicking "Send Message" on the right side.
Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn't work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error -- is this a bug?)
Hope that helps!
@piotrsikora@ernest -- this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn't see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io's side or on kbin.social's side)?
@piotrsikora -- FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.
Thanks for taking the time for your long message. I tried searching for this topic on my lemmy alt. This topic did not show up on either my fedia account, nor the kbin magazine at first, but does now. One more oddity I noticed is that the mbin UI did not hotlink your mentions, but the lemmy UI did so correctly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
I can answer this, go to your own profile, choose add new post (not thread) and then from the "select a magazine" dropdown choose random. Then just use your @ tag like normal if you want to @ someone in the fediverse.
I'll be more actively handling spam as well, but it's clear that we need additional people for global instance moderation. I'll prioritize this. I'd like to delegate instance administration as much as possible and fully focus on code
Said before (forgive me if you planned on replying to it), but is spam filtering (and similar issues related to moderation/federation) something you're planning or?
The current spam is rudimentary so I don't think false positives are a reason for no filtering at all, particularly if existing users are not scanned the same way. If mods can un-delete false positive threads/comments made by new accounts surely it'd be less work than manually removing spambot stuff (even if it were per-user). Especially if manual spam removal means that people still see the spam.
EDIT: Also clicking on one of the new spam accounts, 13 minutes old with 6 threads (and that was posted almost immediately with the rest posted within the span of 3 minutes).
One day is annoying, but bearable. much longer and I won't have a choice but switch. I like kbin, but the mbin team says some things that I find concerning about kbin - I wish the two could patch up their differences.
The project definitely accepts contributions, the mbin devs have contributed to kbin before and a few weeks ago a minor code change was committed and merged by someone other than ernest.
As I understand it, the issue is that people with merge permissions other than ernest are only allowed to merge their own pull requests, not those of third parties, which require a review from ernest.
(At least that's what I've seen explained before, though I haven't seen any proof of it so I don't fully know if it's real.)
This means a majority of contributors can't get their pull requests merged when ernest is gone. Which is why they went and made mbin when he was gone for months last time.
kbinMeta
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.