If my account is deleted, it’s done and over with.
And if you log out and walk away, it's done and over with. I'm not seeing much of a case for it being all that different. You're just choosing to stay any whine rather than leaving the account be.
Plus, I want to delete my posts.
Realistically, the nature of federation makes that practically impossible anyway. Even if deleted from kbin, your shitty posts have already been copied to all the federated instances.
Anyway, why do you care so much? Practically speaking, why does it matter to you personally whether my account is is deleted or whether I just stop posting but keep my account active? Why is it so important to you that I not be allowed to delete my account?
Because your pointless bitching shows up in my feed. To be clear, I don't give a shit if your account gets created or not. But if you logged out and walked away, kbin would be a bit better for it. Hence, I'm encouraging you to do that.
Why do I have to be on trial for wanting to delete my account?
You're not on trial; you're being told how to effectively solve this situation yourself. You're the one that posted this, knowing the vast majority of people who saw the post don't have any more ability to delete the account than you do.
you all won’t even let me leave!
That you choose to get defensive and keep using the account is a choice you're making, not something anyone's forcing upon you.
I'm super excited about the #Fediverse. I've been online since the 90s, been through most evolution stages of the internet, and it feels like we're changing it once again - and this time in a good way.
Quoting this post anonymously because I don’t want to be the one to burst their newly reformed bubble. However I believe the honeymoon’s almost over with Threads entering the space, regardless of their intentions. They’re just too massive of a player not to shift the power dynamics in their favor.
People have long been angry at Gargron for sucking most of the Fediverse attention towards Mastodon through no particular fault of their own, and I believe it’s about to change, and not necessarily for the better.
For fringe projects like #Friendica, it won’t change much though, we never were prominent in the space and Threads’ arrival will not change that. @heluecht ’s willing, we’ll start supporting the new API quirks Threads will inevitably put forth and leave the decision to interact with Threads or not to Friendica administrators and individual users.
@hypolite@heluecht I personally think that every instance should limit their threads interaction or the global feed will become nothing but threads posts. I just want tot be able to follow some people on threads I can't here because they haven't come over. I don't want my options of global feed destroyed by threads users.
The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.
Oh yeah that’s my mistake, it was a plugin for WordPress, not ownership. It looks like it was co-authored by someone as part of W3C to be an internet standard, but I don’t know if that changes much.
It’s mostly that if something somewhere can be bought, Meta will try to. I don’t see any reason to extend any open arms. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean that ownership won’t change or changes can’t be implemented or influenced.
That aside though I also feel that any integration is just asking for an invitation to reckless abandon. I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol? As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Why risk 100m Facebook and Instagram users for the “potential growth of Masto-lemmy” when it seems like the very obvious reality is that Threads would just leech users from here after some integration then “oops Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub instances all your communities are with us now sorry!”. Not to mention the imposed tracking, dark patterns and monetization - which from my understanding instances can set fetch authorization, alongside defederating it would mostly prevent the data scraping? However I’m not entirely clear on all that.
Anyway, not trying to claim that I’m extremely well versed in the subject or the specific logistics of how it works, I just don’t see a single reason to trust Meta or why there would be any reason to federate with them.
I also personally have no issue having separate spaces for separate things, so to me the integration just seems a bit much. Some people have told me that’s a positive for them, and that’s cool. If I could functionally have one and actually interact in full I’d probably just use one account too. I occasionally view microblogs on Kbin alongside my subscriptions, I browse through here (Beehaw), both slrpnks lemmy and Mastodon instances, all different accounts. If I were interested in the content I’d have made a threads account (but the posts I get shown from Instagram don’t really pull any interest).
If someone is interested in using Threads, why not just use it there? I don’t entirely understand the reason we would need Threads to be seen in the same space as Twitter posts and Reddit threads all alongside our microblogs and posts (if say, Reddit and Twitter were also to federate). It just seems so much more centralized compared to the nature of the decentralized instances, I could see Meta’s interest here being to make their version of WeChat. A space where you have Microblogs, Forums, Marketplace, and games all in one spot no need to ever use anything else.
I dunno, I just feel like the desire to consolidate everything into a single bitty package is asking for a disaster. And to an extent, I genuinely can see this being the start of that path.
Anyway, sorry to get so long winded. Maybe I can take advantage of this idea and develop an app to centralize your Fediverse, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, GameFAQs and any account you can think of all in one spot. Then you can just interact from all of them as a single master user posting from each individual account as you come across the content. Support for all that will probably get pricey so I’ll just charge for extended account integration, maybe I can make my own subscription based off this to cover the cost (/s but feel free to use it!)
Now that for-profit tech companies are beginning to implement #ActivityPub, I think it's important to establish what we want with the #fediverse and whether federation with #Threads, #Flipboard, Tumblr, and the like bring us closer to or further from those goals.
With that in mind, I've come up with a few statements (in no particular order) that describe what I think is an "ideal fediverse" — a fediverse that's not necessarily realistic but that we should aim for:
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
Creating and running an instance requires minimal effort.
People on or entering the fediverse understand the variety of available options.
There is no downside to using free and open-source platforms over proprietary ones.
These definitely aren't comprehensive, and if you have anything you'd add, let's discuss that! They're currently helping me reassess my stance on Threads now that Flipboard is also entering the stage, and I hope they're helpful for others as well.
I'll elaborate on these five statements in the comments.
No actor controls a large portion of visible activity.
This is important for instances to be able to defederate from those with bad moderation, harmful values, etc. If a person or group controls a big portion of the content that people see on an instance, then that instance will lose a lot of that content should they defederate. That person or group would essentially be able to do whatever, and instances would find difficulty defederating because they'd lose so much visible activity and thus users.
If a single entity gets enough dominance over activity, they could make defederation from them out of the question for a ton of users. Furthermore, that entity could cripple the fediverse by simply leaving it, taking a bunch of users from other instances with them. This is a big concern many people have with Threads; if 90% of the activity you see on mastodon.social comes from Threads, then Meta would be able to nab a ton of mastodon.social users by leaving the fediverse, facing those users with the choice of either losing a ton of their connections & follows or jumping ship to Threads.
But you don't even need a supermajority of content to cause that much harm. For example, take the threadiverse (Lemmy/Kbin). A large portion of visible activity is controlled by the admins of lemmy.world. Thankfully, they seem to nice people, but if they were to start (for example) being more lax with hate speech, other Lemmy/Kbin instances would either have to deal with it or lose access to a large portion of the activity pool. If any threadiverse instance were to defederate from lemmy.world — even if the lemmy.world admins started acting against the interests of the fediverse and its users — that instance would lose a dangerous number of users.
Users can move between instances without penalty.
One of the main benefits of the fediverse is that you can move to a different instance and still be able to view the same content. If the admins of your instance start making moderation decisions you disagree with or you just decide that you want to be on an instance that you yourself run, you're able to move and still interact with the content pool. Thus, as long as the platform your destination instance uses (e.g., Firefish, Kbin, Mastodon) supports the same type of content as your old one, you should be able to move without any downsides. The more penalty there is for moving, the more people will feel trapped on an instance even if they want to leave.
This is partially a matter of robust systems for moving accounts, but it's also a matter of having good options available. Mastodon has a ton of active, stable instances, so if you ever want to move (e.g., because your instance is or isn't defederating from Threads), you can do so and still be able to use Mastodon. However, the only such instance on Kbin is kbin.social (not counting instances that run Mbin, a fork with different features & development). If you want to move from kbin.social to another Kbin instance, you don't really have a lot of options. And if you're on something that's closed-source, you'll be forced to move to a different platform entirely, which may not be great for the user — an important reason why free and open-source software should be prominent on the fediverse.
Obviously, this is something that might be impossible to achieve. But even if we can't eliminate the strings attached to moving to another instance, we should try to minimize them.
People can create and run their own instances to their liking with minimal effort.
If a user wants to, they should be able to control their interactions on the fediverse through running their own instance, and doing so should require as little effort as is feasible. Many people have already set up single-person instances for the purpose of having more control over their data. If people can't do that, then they're forced to put their account and content under the control of other people. Of course, most people are fine with this provided that they trust their instance admins, but the option to be your own admin should be as available as possible.
This is part of why it's so important to have prominent open-source platforms. If Mastodon weren't open-source, then anyone who likes Mastodon but wants to control their content would be out of luck. If you like the Threads interface but don't want to be on an instance run by Meta, you just don't have that option.
I started on kbin.social with this account, then moved out to kbin.cafe to try to avoid overloading the flagship instance and help out with decentralization. Then the admin went inactive, so I fled to kbin.run. This is active and I am satisfied, but it is also running Mbin, a fork of Kbin. I'd like to try regular Kbin again, but...
Flipboard has recently begun federation, starting with 25 accounts. These accounts can be viewed from Kbin with their posts showing up as microblog posts....
It's not a bad thing, gives you the option to read them on the Fediverse and it proves that the Fediverse could possibly be the future of Social Media. It's good to see other people want to see it grow.
If people don't like it then personally block it, the only reason for blocking a whole instance, instance wide is if it has morals that conflict to much such as a Anti-LGBT instance vs a LGBT one.
@LALegault my personal opinion is that we have Twitter/Facebook etc because of closed proprietary standards they use to keep everyone hostage. Want to talk to friends and family? Create an account. Want to leave? Haha lol no.
The activityPub standard give people the ability to flee a sinking ship with their contacts and talk without joining a walled garden.
Anything that moves us to open standards is a good thing.
The nice thing with Mastodon it’s messy but every instance can have their own moderation policies. Then it becomes a choice as to which home suits you best.
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
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.
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.
Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it?
I don't think it could put the entire instance in jeopardy, but personally I think the microblog tab has a lot of potential (there have already been strides to incorporate it more), and I'd feel a lot less positive about its possibilities if it were full of content from Threads.
With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't...
I don't think "the development" is what is claimed to be at stake here.
OP is not talking about the software, they're talking about the content. And the content model from Mastodon is not interchangeable with the one from Lemmy, Pixelfed, etc. they serve different purposes and have different models. In fact that's the main interoperatibility barrier between them.
It's like saying that if most people use gmail for email you will switch from email to audio calls to avoid communicating with google's service. As if real time audio were the same thing as sending a message (or as if google was unable to add compatibility with that call service too if they wanted).
One thing you could argue is, instead of switching services, switching to an instance that does defederate if you dont want threads content. But that same argument can be said as well towards those wanting threads federation...
But dont think the point is what does the individual want (if that were the case, just use the option to block threads content for your user, without defederating), the point is what's best for the fediverse. I think people are afraid that something similar to what happened with "google talk" and their embrace of xmpp will repeat.
Personally, I think there's no reason to jump the gun this early... all of this post is based on a lot of weak assumptions. I dont believe that threads content would overwhelm the feeds, and if that were to happen then the software could be tweaked so the contribution of each instance to the feeds can be weighted and made more customizable, for example.
With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site. The site is really not suited for mobile devices however, and there have been minimal user-facing changes in the last few months....
Kbin core is first priority still last I saw. Which is more important IMO since then devs can use the API.
I always felt that Artemis was doomed from the start given that it was working around not having an API and seemed to be more focused on Kbin support over lemmy. Not that that’s a bad thing, Kbin is the only fedisite I use other than this one. But for example, I’m on Boost for Lemmy right now and the dev has mentioned Kbin support, but there’s been no mention of it until some comments about the API releasing, then again nothing.
Idk, it just seems like modding an early access game. You can make your own fork and spin it up and it can make great, incredible strides until the maintainer loses interest. That’s not to say that it shouldn’t be done or no one should ever make and maintain a fork, but I was just always confused as to why I was always seeing posts on Artemis alpha releases but the subject matter revolved around Kbin if the app also supported lemmy. Have compatibility be the focus until you don’t have to maintain the instance fork and the app development at the same time.
Moreover it’s just unfortunate that the instance is gone, hopefully there was an account merge available if anyone wanted that. I also certainly don’t have the full picture by any means, just the development posts and then the moderator goodbye post.
I’m personally happy with Kbin on Firefox until the account is supported in Boost. Yes, I have noticed a bug or two that has been mentioned but they are consistent in how they appear in my experience and I tend to not interact with how they often pop up. (I comment less on Kbin so scrolling up isn’t often an issue.) The bug I get most commonly is trying to view the bottom of the page with infinite scroll turned on. If it’s styling that’s an issue, Firefox Nightly or Fennec to play with CSS to your liking with something like Stylus.
I feel bad for the Artemis community, hopefully everyone finds something that works for them soon.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
Mastodon has the responsibility to promote diversity in the Fediverse
I love the Threadiverse. Compared to the microblogging Fediverse’s sea of random thoughts, Lemmy and kbin are so much easier to navigate with the options to sort posts by subscribed, from local instances or everything federated. You can also sort by individual community, and then there are the countless ways to order the posts and comments (which are stored neatly under the main post, by the way). That people can more easily find the right discussions and see where they can contribute also means that the discussions tend to be more focused and productive than elsewhere. Decentralisation also makes a lot of sense, since it is built around different communities. All that’s needed is users.
Things were going quite well for a while when Reddit killed third-party apps, prompting many to leave and find the Threadiverse. However, it is quite difficult to entertain a crowd that has grown accustomed to a constant bombardment of dopamine-inducing or interesting content by tens of millions of users, if you only have a couple hundred thousand people. This is causing some to leave, which of course increases this effect. The active users have more than halved since July, according to FediDB. The mood is also becoming more tense. Maybe the lack of engagement drives some to cause it through hostility, I’m not quite sure. Either way, the Threadiverse becoming a less enjoyable place to be, which is quite sad considering how promising it is.
But what is really frustrating is that we could easily have that userbase. The entire Fediverse has over ten million users, and many Mastodonians clearly want to engage in group-based discussion, looking at Guppe groups. The focused discussions should also be quite attractive. Technically we are federated, so why do Mastodonians interact so little with the Threadiverse? The main reason is that Mastodon simply doesn’t federate post content. I really can’t see why the platform that federates entire Wordpress blogs refuses to federate thread content just because it has a title, and instead just replaces the body with a link to the post. Very unhelpful.
The same goes with PeerTube. There are plenty of videos on there that I am quite sure a lot of Mastodonians would appreciate, yet both views and likes there stay consistently in the tens. Yes, Mastodon’s web interface has a local video player, but in most clients it is the same link shenanigans, may may partly explain the small amount of engagement. This is also quite sad, because Google’s YouTube is one of the worst social network monopolies out there, if not the worst.
And I know some might say that Mastodon is a microblogging platform and that it makes sense only to have microblogging content, but the problem is that Mastodon is the dominant platform on the Fediverse, its users making up close to 80% of all Fedizens. It has gone so far that several Friendica and Hubzilla users have been complaining about complaints from Mastodonians that their posts do not live up to Mastodon customs, and of course, that people frequently use “Mastodon” to refer to the entire Fediverse. This, of course, goes entirely against the idea of the Fediverse, that many diverse platforms live in harmony with and awareness of each other.
The very least that Mastodon could do is to support the content of other platforms. Then I’d wish that they’d improve discoverability, by for instance adding a videos tab in the explore section, improving federation of favourites since it is the dominant sorting mechanism on many other platforms, and making a clear distinction between people (@person) and groups (!group), but I know that that is quite much to ask.
P.S. @feditips , @FediFollows , I know that you are reluctant to promote Lemmy and its communities because of the ideology of its founders, but the fact is firstly that it’s open source and there aren't any individual people who control the entire project, and that the software itself is very apolitical. In fact, most Lemmy users both oppose and are on instances that have rules against such beliefs, so I highly encourage you to at least help raise awareness on the communities. Then, of course, there’s kbin, which isn’t associated with any extremism at all. As a bonus, it has much better integration with the microblogging Fediverse, but it is a lot smaller and younger, and still very much under development.
Anyways, that was a ramble. Thanks for hearing me out.
I've noticed that a lot of people on the #fediverse aren't particularly welcoming to those who don't initially get it or have trouble with it. You'd think that if multiple people say they have trouble picking an instance, it might be a genuine barrier to entry that we need to consider when introducing them to the fediverse. But no, instead of suggesting an instance to get rid of that barrier everyone gives unhelpful advice like "just pick one" or "it's not that hard." We'd have a much easier time getting people on the fediverse if there weren't so many people with this attitude of "the fediverse is simple, and the people who don't get it are lazy and should try harder."
@ThatOneKirbyMain2568
It would be nice if there was a search option when people signed up, like “Pick which top three words represent the type of person you are,” and each instance does the same (if it wants to be searchable) and then it gives people matches to instances. Or something along those lines.
Right now, downvotes (reduces) don't federate to (and from?) Kbin instances. This lack of federation makes the downvote counter really inaccurate—a comment that looks like it's +10 might be -15 when you look at it from lemmy.world....
I understand what you are saying here, and I have flip-flopped on the issue myself. At the moment I personally am a fan of the limited downvote federation because I do think it acts as a hivemind barrier; to use reddit as an example, as it got bigger the downvote was used as a means to disagree without adding any value to the discussion or to simply silence a dissenting point of view.
That is not to say there were not times when a downvote was warranted - hateful comments, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and general bigotry are all more than deserving of a downvote. There are also bots and general off-topic posts & comments that may warrant a downvote.
Overall though, I think the problem is how the downvote was used (on Reddit, at least) was not conducive to discussion. However, due to the fact that upvotes and downvotes are public on kbin it is possible that behavior could change, but then that could create problems with other instances where none of that information is public to begin with. (Nobody wants to have a crazy person come after them over a downvote.)
Right now, the fediverse is pretty small and Kbin is actually the most welcoming instance I have found so far. I am not sure if the lack of downvote federation has anything to do with this, but so far I actually like it. Maybe once kbin and the expanded fediverse grows larger my opinion will change, but right now I feel like it’s helping to make it more hospitable than reddit.
At the moment I personally am a fan of the limited downvote federation because I do think it acts as a hivemind barrier;
I think it's a lot less straightforward than this. While it definitely drowns out the "hivemind" of the wider fediverse, it also creates a bubble within your own instance. If a lot of people outside of your instance think you made a bad comment but few inside your instance do, limited downvote federation creates an inaccurate representation of what people think.
Additionally, having downvotes but limiting their federation makes them extremely unintuitive and only serves to further confuse new users. It's actively misleading—you'd think that if you see 0 downvotes that nobody clicked the downvote button, but that might actually be 5 people or 10 people or 30 people. At least if you don't have a downvote counter at all, it's clear that downvote functionality just isn't recognized on the instance. I'd much prefer that over a straight up incorrect counter.
Overall though, I think the problem is how the downvote was used (on Reddit, at least) was not conducive to discussion.
I agree that there's a big problem with how downvotes are used. I personally use downvotes if something is:
spam
straight up hateful
completely off-topic
a nonsensical take that the poster doesn't support
In other words, if something isn't a reasonable contribution to the discussion, I'll likely downvote it.
However, lots of people seem to use the downvote button as a disagree button. I see this less on kbin.social than I do on other instances, and that could be a potential reason to not federate downvotes. If downvotes are used differently on kbin.social than on other instances, then I can see it making sense to not lump them all together. However, that only makes sense if people on kbin.social aren't using the downvote button as a disagree button (which they are, just less so than on other instances). And even still, there's the problem of an unfederated downvote counter still being misleading.
Rambling aside, I see three ways of handling this:
Remove the downvote button entirely.
Remove the downvote button, but replace it with reactions that people can use ("This is spam," "This is hateful", "This doesn't contribute to the discussion," etc.). If other instances adopt this set of reactions, reactions from those instances could federate.
Keep the downvote button and federate downvotes.
I don't like #1 very much because then you don't have a great way of indicating spam, hateful posts, unhelpful comments, etc. outside of reports that only moderators can see. #2 seems really nice, though both it and #1 come with the downside of filtering out negative feedback from instances with downvotes. #3 is also good, though it comes with the problems of downvote misuse.
We on kbin have not developed a knee-jerk "downvote everything I disagree with" behaviour that reddit had and lemmy.world is starting to have.
I think this is because we can see each other's downvotes and so we use them more responsibly. People from other instances don't have that so they behave differently.
Downvote-to-disagree has an offputting effect on discussion and creates echo chambers.
Not federating downvotes from much bigger instances allows us to develop our own culture here on kbin without it being buried in an avalanche from elsewhere.
Brigading from places like hexbear doesn't really affect us.
I'd prefer that kbin communities continue to develop based on the ethos of the people here, rather than potentially having our upvotes cancelled out by downvotes from a larger instance.
@Doll_Tow_Jet@kbin.social I don't know if that's the official word for it but I'm using "backfilling" to refer to loading the history of a person or group after first federating with it.
the outbox is a special collection (list in activitypub speak) that's intended to work kinda like an old school email outbox where you put messages to be delivered and it would deliver them to the inboxes of people (and servers that were offline at that time would later pull them in from the outbox)
or, well, that's what the spec says. nobody uses it like that in reality because activity pub was intended for a completely different kind of social media than how it ended up being used (it seems to expect more "everything apps", including an entire client api that would completely abstract away the instance into nothing more than a dumb pipe for activities unlike the current reality where instance software dictate what you can do)
this probably confused you even more but it's getting pretty late here so I can't words good, sorry!
You see, I don't know how I would act now in hindsight. You have to take into consideration that, at the peak, hundreds of people willing to help appeared out of nowhere, people I didn't know at all. By nature, I am rather distrustful and approach new relationships cautiously - I really need a lot of time to get to know another person well. It's true that after some time, a certain structure began to take shape, but not everything is always as it seems at first glance - especially when so many strong personalities converge in one place. Perhaps it was a mistake that instead of addressing many things publicly, I tried to solve them in private conversations.
And you're right, anyone who knows me a bit knows that I have trouble asking for help. Sometimes, I take too much on myself, which is not good in the long run. I'm working on it. But this time was something more. I promised to take care of things, and under normal circumstances, it would probably be easy for me because I have some experience in resolving such situations. But these were not normal circumstances. I realized this too late. I was just overwhelmed by real life. So many problems collapsed on me that I could never have anticipated. These were the worst months of my entire life. I don't want to write too much about it or make excuses, but at some point, even getting out of bed or eating something became difficult. When I tried to get back to the project, the thought of the backlog and how many people I let down made me feel sick. That's why I'm really glad to be where I am now. I can only apologize to you and try to fix some mistakes. I need to do it at my own pace. I want to clean up the mess, find my rhythm, and then engage in broader communication with people. I'm still recovering on my own.
What I did was indeed a bit malicious, but I believe it was the only way to achieve the intended effect. The fact that I really like you all should not mean that I will be uncritical of your work. I don't want you to fully trust everything that comes from me - only in this way can we fully utilize the potential we have in developing the fediverse. Frontend errors are just a trivial matter; they can be quickly found and fixed. However, the situation is completely different when it comes to backend mechanics. Seemingly minor errors when I was developing karab.in made me undo them for weeks. With larger instances, there may not be a second chance. This is not a centralized system, you have to consider others above all. That's why I am so sensitive to it and have so many doubts about making changes.
It's not that I want to make things difficult for you. I really care about mbin developing in the right direction. I am curious about what the future will bring. I would like kbin to remain rather ascetic, subtle, and something that you need to learn and understand a bit, rather than having everything handed to you on a platter. Mbin can be a different face, with more features, bolder, and I know that you have many great ideas for it. A simple example is the labels for marking mods/admins/ops that you are currently working on - kbin has it marked in a subtle way with a faint left border outline - you can do it differently, and that's great. As someone very wise once said, "If it's not diverse, it's not the fediverse."
@melroy I am sure that this is just the beginning of our shared adventure. I hope you won't hold a grudge against me for long ;) Guys, I deeply regret that we met at this stage of my life, but as I say, all I can do is try to fix my mistakes. Thanks for everything!
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