I went ahead and requested mod for a couple of those mags. I wouldn't be able to dedicate too much time to it, but I could at least take on a janitorial role and help clean up the spam that keeps flooding in.
He's not really the moderator for those magazines. Those are communities that exist on Lemmy instances. For some reason, the actual community owner/mod list doesn't get synced over to Kbin from Lemmy communities. His username shows up as the "owner" for those, presumably as a failsafe for a null entry in the community owner metadata.
EDIT: Actually, these accounts are just spamming the local Kbin magazines, in which case yes that is something that should be moderated from the Kbin side.
That's the default error text, it's been showing up for any downtime for a few months now. I think Ernest probably set that once for a server upgrade a while back and never changed it lol.
There've been some stability issues with kbin.social for a couple days now. Been having trouble loading threads and even just voting on things sometimes doesn't work. Hopefully it gets resolved soon!
Kbin is still in pretty early development. I believe it's technically still in alpha. It'll take a while before we get some QoL updates as there's more imperative things that need to be fixed first.
The API should be coming out soon-ish, which will allow app developers to actually start making Kbin-compatible apps, so we should be seeing some more development in that area shortly.
I have a similar problem, but with a different user than you. About once a week or so, this user will go through my comment history and just downvote everything. I don't even know what his issue is, because he constantly deletes his own comments and has zero visible comments on his profile anymore, so I have no clue if I've somehow angered him or if he's just a random troll. Unfortunately, blocking him doesn't have any impact on this.
I agree, though. There should definitely be better protections in place against this sort of bad behavior. While I'm not a huge fan of Reddit's implementation of user blocking, it does at least prevent this sort of trolling from occurring. It would be great if there could be a middle-ground between what we currently have and what Reddit has.
If you're going to use 12ft.io, you should include that link in the body of the post, and keep the original URL as is. As a user browsing their feed, there's no way to tell - prior to clicking - where the link is going to. Masked links are a security/privacy nightmare without any context that lets the user know "This will load content from Scientific American in your browser".
The version you've installed is the PWA (Progressive Web App). It's effectively just a stripped-down browser window that loads the mobile site in its own dedicated "app" on your device, even though it's technically just a separate Chrome window.
For a lot of users, this may be all they need. But because it's just the mobile web page, you won't get any extra features that you might find with a dedicated app (like notifications or custom UI elements).
"Why won't they just let us make wildly unpopular decisions that jeopardize the livelihoods of Americans without having to make us feel bad about it?!"