I'd gotten a 50x error page when trying to submit this post, too - but it went through anyway? This post doesn't show up in my threads page, though.
I read back your earlier comments before I tried posting - I know you have other pressing matters on your plate. As you can see, I just created this user at artemis.camp, so that I can get those notifications ... maybe?
I'm able to see that post, do you see it in private browsing / when logged out? If so, you might be blocking domains on kbin.social and removing them would make it appear again. That's been fixed in latest which hopefully kbin.social users should get soon, but wasn't affecting other instances I had checked so you should be fine to do so on artemis
I can see the post when I go directly to it (with either the kbin.social or artemis.camp account), but it does not appear in my threads area under my kbin.social account (the one that posted it).
This a known bug, which has been fixed, but the fix hasn't been implemented on kbin.social.
The temporary work around is that you can't have and domains blocked. The link on e659668's post gives more details.
This will be fixed in the update planned for the end of September.
I've been struggling with #kbin/#mastodon#federation for awhile now, it's been disheartening. I've been trying to be more active about following various users and domains in hopes that more content will #federate to the #magazines I moderate. However, it hasn't really proven to be helpful. In some cases, I can't even find particular instances that users post from via kbin. I can find the instance by going to the page itself, but I suppose it may just take more time than I thought? In some cases, trying to follow a user takes me to an error page, and repeated attempts prove unsuccessful. Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but it's rather confusing when I can see posts from a given instance, yet can't search for the instance itself to federate more content. I've tried asking about it, and no one seems to know or be able to help. Searching the fediverse for information is also difficult due to the noise I have to sift through.
With that said, I know there's other stuff to consider: Ernest is planning a big update for kbin, some instances have restricted federation with kbin due to moderation not properly federating to other communities, and kbin being a younger platform than #lemmy/mastodon. I'll try to be patient, there's just some features that I really hope mature soon as there are features I'd like to use, but can't yet. Also, before this gets misconstrued again like it has in the past, I am still enjoying my time on kbin and support Ernest's efforts in regard to this platform. I wouldn't still be posting here if I weren't enjoying my time here.
Just wanna say I agree - it can be a frustrating process to figure it all out.
In some cases, trying to follow a user takes me to an error page, and repeated attempts prove unsuccessful.
This confused the fuck out of me until I realized that Mastodon instances have the option for users to allow or deny follow requests. Basically, if you click on someone's follow and nothing happens (or you get an error page), what's happened is that you've sent them a follow request that they have to approve. Kbin's interface fails here (hopefully will improve with update) and does nothing. If they do chose to let you follow them, you'll see their account update.
In some cases, I can't even find particular instances that users post from via kbin.
Go to the poster's account, and follow them. If Kbin hasn't actively federated the site yet, it usually does so pretty quickly after a follow. This usually also lets you link to the community they posted to.
Check your magazine's Microblog section - you may be getting more content than you realize. Your magazine tags will determine what additional content (aside from #yourmagazinetitle) your Microblogs pick up. Everything from Mastodon users shows up there on Kbin.
Basically, if you click on someone's follow and nothing happens (or you get an error page), what's happened is that you've sent them a follow request that they have to approve.
This makes sense, and reflects what I've just seen regarding a user I was trying to follow earlier.
If Kbin hasn't actively federated the site yet, it usually does so pretty quickly after a follow.
My follow has updated, however, I'm still unable to access https://kbin.social/d/urusai.social. This isn't a huge deal, just something I wanted to draw attention to, I suppose. Perhaps it'll federate some time down the line. To future readers, I'll try to remember to edit this comment with an update if and when it happens.
Check your magazine's Microblog section - you may be getting more content than you realize. Your magazine tags will determine what additional content (aside from #yourmagazinetitle) your Microblogs pick up. Everything from Mastodon users shows up there on Kbin.
I actually check this daily and have reset my tags on a few occasions to see if it would help on top of what I mentioned previously. I've also changed the sort options (e.g. new, hot, top, etc) just in case, to check whether or not things have been federating. What has been confusing to me is, the content federation seems to work when I search the tag outside of my magazine. For instance, I see #japanese microblogs federated to @japanese yet I do not see the same in @learnjapanese. This has also been an issue with @residentevil as well. Oddly enough, even users I have already followed do not have their content federated to these magazines at times, even though I have checked their history and seen them use the tags I've assigned to the magazines. I could simply be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is.
Edit: Now that I think about it, there have even been very occasional instances where I have seen content federated to @residentevil in the past. I remember following them and then have seen them post with the tags on a future occasion, but those subsequent posts were not federated to the magazine. Pretty odd, but I'll just attribute it to kbin's growing pains. I hope this isn't coming off as too negative, I've just been really trying to nurture these little communities and better understand this system.
This led me to @neatchee, who is the instance owner. You might try following them, but I agree, that's an odd bug.
Oddly enough, even users I have already followed do not have their content federated to these magazines at times, even though I have checked their history and seen them use the tags I've assigned to the magazines. I could simply be doing something wrong, but I'm not sure what it is.
Yeah, posting to Kbin from Mastodon instances is a challenge. Kbin filters and tries to assign incoming hashtags to existing magazine hashtags.
If a post contains a hashtag that is taken by another magazine, that magazine usually gets the content instead of yours. Your magazine's hashtag has to appear first in the text. Your Japanese forum is probably catching all of the #japanese posts before they get to LearnJapanese.
Second, it's random which of your magazine hashtags will pull content and from who. The order of the hashtags doesn't appear to affect this.
The only way to ensure a post gets from Mastdon to Kbin or Lemmy is to put @yourmagazine@kbin.social in the post tag. This will make sure it shows up on Lemmy, and will get your post to the Kbin Microblog of the magazine 90% of the time. If you want to be extra sure, do it like this:
@yourmagazinename@kbin.social #yourmagazinename (then any following hashtags)
@Arotrios@readbeanicecream@daredevil fwiw I can confirm that URUSAI! does not have any restrictions on kbin.social. And I'm able to load your kbin profiles from our Mastodon instance without issue.
I'd need to look into how the /d/ implementation in kbin works to know more.
But if you toss me the URL of a mastodon instance that DOES show up there without issue I might be able to learn something :)
...don't seem to, generating a 404 because no one has created a link or thread back to a pagan.plus post (although their users post over to kbin often). Possibly posting link (in the url field of Add a Link on Kbin) to an urusai.social hosted post will do the trick.
@Arotrios@readbeanicecream@daredevil this sounds very plausible. Unexpected, but it would make sense that kbin's /d/ path is showing you the directory of content from your server's local cache and not querying the target server.
Which kinda makes sense, honestly: since that feature is trying to list everything kbin knows about from the target server, populating it for the first time would definitely cause a significant load on that instance
@Arotrios@readbeanicecream@daredevil now I'm really curious how it works when you subscribe to a server. Is it pulling in that server's public and local feeds? Or is it only showing you posts from users on that server that your instance already knows about
Only that it knows about to start, but I think that once it gets subscriptions to the domain, it starts pulling more automatically. I could be wrong, however - I'm not sure which activities aside from posting are federated.
EDIT: I was wrong - the domain only grabs Threads, so Mastodon posts will likely not show up this way. They may get indexed if they're sent to a kbin magazine using the @magazinename@kbin.social format
@daredevil@neatchee - Looks like the linked post is what did the trick. I posted here to the Fediverse community to let them know about your instance (it's pointed at your pinned intro post).
This led me to @neatchee, who is the instance owner. You might try following them, but I agree, that's an odd bug.
Thanks, it's worth a shot.
If a post contains a hashtag that is taken by another magazine, that magazine usually gets the content instead of yours. Your magazine's hashtag has to appear first in the text. Your Japanese forum is probably catching all of the #japanese posts before they get to LearnJapanese.
So it seems as if @japanese gets priority of the #japanese hashtag due to it being the name of their magazine? Or possibly that they had the hashtag first? I hope multiple magazines are able to federate the same hashtag eventually. @Acala, the admin of @japanese has been inactive for the past few weeks. That's rather unfortunate, as the magazine has no published threads in addition to an inactive moderator.
Second, it's random which of your magazine hashtags will pull content and from who.
That's unfortunate, but helps to clear things up.
The only way to ensure a post gets from Mastdon to Kbin or Lemmy is to put @yourmagazine@kbin.social in the post tag. This will make sure it shows up on Lemmy, and will get your post to the Kbin Microblog of the magazine 90% of the time. If you want to be extra sure, do it like this: @yourmagazinename@kbin.social #yourmagazinename (then any following hashtags)
This has been very informative, thank you. I'm probably not gonna bug #mastodon users to add this to their posts, but if I ever decide to use mastodon myself I'll keep this in mind.
Hopefully the update will clean this up a bit.
Agreed, kbin as a platform is the most interesting for me, and I hope to see things turn out well.
This confused the fuck out of me until I realized that Mastodon instances have the option for users to allow or deny follow requests. Basically, if you click on someone's follow and nothing happens (or you get an error page), what's happened is that you've sent them a follow request that they have to approve. Kbin's interface fails here (hopefully will improve with update) and does nothing. If they do chose to let you follow them, you'll see their account update.
God this explains so much. I tried hitting the Follow button multiple times in a row and now I probably look like a crazy person spamming someone with follow requests. ;_;
Depends on the instance in my experience - mastodon.social usually posts within seconds. Note that due to spam issues, kbin.social has been dealing with a recent wave of defederation, so if you're not seeing your posts appear, that might be the cause.
@readbeanicecream Hashtags are really hit or miss in general across instances.
I found that most Mastodon instances only collect posts from other Mastodon instances under hashtags (definitely the case with mastodon.social). I suspect this is because they are sharing the same posting format.
The long form posting format that Lemmy and Kbin use for Threads has a 25k character limit, too big for most Mastodon instances. This long form post is truncated into the posting limits of the Mastodon instance, but the conversion protocol is not sophisticated enough to read the JSON file to flag the enclosed hashtags as data fields defining the post.
The user-facing presentation layer then adds hyperlinks to what it can determine as hashtags (as it does to anything with a # preceding it), but the federating instance itself thinks the entire post is just post content.
Related notes - I found that when posting to Kbin from Mastodon, the order of the hashtags determines which Microblog the post appears under. Also, Lemmy strips hashtags placed in the "Tags" section of a Thread or Link when content makes its way there.
I haven't been able to post using Kbin for a bit due to a bug, but I can answer the reverse - posts on Lemmy generally show up on Kbin within a minute.
If you've got domains blocked, that might be causing the error. Domain blocking seems to gum up posting and comment visibility. Removing my domain blocks cleared up the issues I was having about a month ago.
Odd that comments are working for you. During my previous issues I did note that there were posting differences when I used the "Add Link", "Comment" and "Post" functionality (which worked) versus the "Add Thread" and "Add Picture" options (which didn't, or worked partially after throwing an initial 500 error). Given that you can still comment, you may have some posting access with the other options.
'Add picture' is the one that's denied to me, I can still post links. But I mostly post pictures and I hate going through the hassle of uploading to a third party site first, so I just use my Lemmy.world or DBZ alts for now. Been going on for two weeks or so, figure it might get cleared up after Kbin's upcoming update.
Ahh gotcha. The add Pics function never worked very well for me, so I haven't used it in a bit (mainly rely on Links and Threads). I've also noticed that kbin pictures only occasionally make it through Federation (seems to happen on other kbin instances as well) - seems really random whether or not they appear on the federating instance.
Based on what I’ve heard from kbin instance admins (especially jerry, the owner of fedia.io, where I usually post from when not dealing with errors), it’s not an easy thing to keep running in its current state. I imagine if you instance hop sub-100 user kbin instances many of them will end up shutting down or having inactive owners.
For example, feddit.online is kbin instance #6 by user count (yet it’s still <100!) and has announced they’re shutting down in a couple of months: feddit.online/m/…/SERVER-GOING-AWAY-ON-NOV-26th
To have a stable instance experience without going with a large instance you might have better luck with another AP platform as your home base, whether Lemmy or something else entirely.
Notification issue I ran across today - a person can delete a message in a thread leaving "deleted by author" but the message still shows up in notifications (or part of it since notifications cuts them off at some point).
he’s eventually going to make sure abandoned instances have admins
I think he meant magazines on kbin.social in this context. I don't think he has any way to control another instance and change who runs it, besides a kindly worded letter.
I do try to keep track of kbin instances and how up to date they are and their admins, but I can't really advertise in their place. One thing I've kind of been thinking about is it'd be nice if nodeinfo had information next to current user count of like: desired user count, max user count. Otherwise you have no idea what an instance admin is hoping for, whether it's just their personal instance or they're willing to support tens of thousands of users. Without that I don't want to send people to x instance and suddenly the admin being in for a surprise. But I just looked up nodeinfo and it looks like there's plenty of worms in that can about it being too complex already, so maybe I'll avoid opening my mouth about it... for now.
Last time I just reported all their posts, and put snippets of the Monty Python spam skit in the various reports.
Hopefully it gave the admins a chuckle while they removed the account.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the two terms are unrelated, and that most people on a non-Japanese-speaking community would not make that same connection.
I thought I had a friendly tone and was being nice. I really did not intend to come off as aggressive. Rereading this I see how it can come off sarcastic and condescending instead of the friendly informational tone I was going for. Sorry.
As someone on kbin.social, I'm not seeing it. I saw a comment in a similar thread saying that moderation done on Kbin doesn't federate to Lemmy instances, and I think that's the culprit here. @ernest (the Kbin dev) is working towards a full release, and I hope that it might fix this issue—or at the very least, that it's dealt with shortly after.
EDIT: Yeah, I looked at @science from lemmy.ml, and my God is it awful. This really needs to get fixed ASAP.
This week, I've been dealing with cleaning up instances from spam. Several hundred accounts were removed, along with several thousand posts - these were massive operations. It's possible that due to the volume of requests, other federated instances hit rate limits. I see that some of them are still in the queue with a "fail" status. I will gradually resend them after some time. Along with the update of kbin.social and the first release of kbin, new modeartion options will be available, including spam blocking (such as global blocking domains), a new reporting panel for moderators, and improved federation between instances. I will also address abandoned instances and ensure that each one has at least a few active moderators. I know how urgent this issue is, and it's my top priority. I just need a bit more time as Piotr and I are preparing for the update.
It looks like all the spam I've seen are from newly registered accounts. Perhaps this is something you've already considered, but would shutting off registration on kbin.social and pointing people to other instances until things are more manageable help?
Can you also add moderators to those magazines? I volunteered for the science mag, but have not gotten a reply. Active mods will help with your workload too.
For all the time you have to type excuses, you could be smashing the ban button, but you don’t. This does not look like a “top priority” from this end. Stop making excuses and just ban the spam accounts. If you have communities without moderation, then close them. You’re managing this very poorly.
Of course, I'm taking action, and on kbin.social, those posts have been removed, which you can verify. However, for some reason, it doesn't always federate with Lemmy. It used to work before, but practically after every Lemmy update, there's something to fix in the code, or it could be related to API limits because some requests receive a "fail" status in the queues. The same applies to spam from Lemmy instances - I had to manually clean up hundreds of posts from other instances because they didn't always send AP requests, which I verified in the logs.
Do you seriously believe that it's a matter of individual accounts, and banning a user solves the problem?
Am I taking crazy pills? Ban the user, or they’ll keep posting spam. Vet your applications like a valid instance instead of letting any spambot create an account.
You are not taking action if all you’re doing is removing posts. You are handling this in an entirely inadequate and incompetent way, and you’ve made kbin a blight on the fediverse. Get your shit together.
Do you seriously believe that it’s a matter of individual accounts, and banning a user solves the problem?
It’s certainly better than allowing these accounts to continue to post harmful spam. Then when people sign up, there should be some red flags in their application that you can watch for. It’s not like these spammers are highly intelligent. They’re pretty blatantly spam accounts, especially when they have literally just a number’s difference in their username.
By the end of September, kbin.social will receive an update that will address some of the issues. For now, I'm banning spam accounts, and registration is disabled. Additionally, external links are marked as "nofollow." I just want to emphasize that this is not solely a kbin issue - I had to manually remove spam posts from Lemmy instances as well because moderation didn't federate, which doesn't happen with, for example, Mastodon.
For now, the admin of your instance can choose to defederate or remove communities, as the admin of lemmy.world did. Once I've dealt with the update, I will reach out to other admins and discuss the possibility of restoring valuable posts.
The problem is that at this scale and with this infrastructure, hotfixes are no longer as straightforward as they used to be - when I could solve these kinds of issues in a matter of hours.
I understand this is a frustrating experience dealing with so much crud in your feed. Admins and mods for many instances of Lemmy and Kbin are trying to work with the tools available to stem this. Attack the problem, not the person. Bee nice.
Please don’t lash out at those trying to help you and the community. We certainly do appreciate your reports as well, hopefully we’ll find a solution that won’t require so much of your report efforts.
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