@inkican - Agreed - Kbin will live or die based on its content. One thing that should be mentioned to those on the fence about contributing is how powerful Kbin is as a publishing platform in comparison to either Mastodon or Lemmy - this is one of the few places where you can post and get your content on both style of instances.
There are a couple of factors degrading contribution that could be alleviated by more stringent moderation - particularly the bot networks and downvote spammers. I've seen a couple of instances where folks have gotten bullied out of trying to run a forum, and Kbin's flaws in blocking (a blocked user can still downvote your posts and message you), make ongoing harassment an issue for contributors. No one wants to submit something to have it shat upon.
The other factor is that a number of users set up magazines, grabbing popular names from Reddit, then did nothing to maintain them. I think removing or reassigning these ghost magazines to interested moderators would go a long way in improving the content quality here now that the dust has settled from the Reddit collapse.
From a moderator standpoint, if you're looking to expand the reach of your magazine and get new subscribers (and thus, hopefully, more contributors), one thing I've found that helps expand the audience is using a Lemmy account to crosspost, as the cross-posting functionality is built into that architecture and provides a link back to the original. This both expands the range of the content, and draws subscribers from Lemmy that normally wouldn't see you on Kbin to subscribe to your magazine. Mastodon is similar - a single supportive account there boosting magazine content expands your reach dramatically.
Side note: I run @13thFloor and wanted to say if you or your users ever feel like cross-posting our scifi content from there, or cross-posting your content to our magazine, feel free to do so - we fucking love scifi over here.
For those having issues with the aforementioned downvote trolls, @some_guy and @YourContentSucks kindly showed up to illustrate the problem. These two accounts are accompanied by a third, @cre0 -all the same user. If you're pre-emptively looking to protect your users from downvote spam, keep these accounts out of your magazines - he likes to try to dox folks. This is his theme song.
The problem is that Kbin sucks as well. For example, /m/science lacks actual moderators and gets flooded with spam on the regular. And even where there are active moderators, moderation actions often do not get federated.
I was hoping these issues would get fixed soon, but here we are, three months after the Reddit apocalypse, and Kbin is still not a fully functional platform. For example, I filed bug #1102 fifteen days ago, and this has still not been resolved. And bug #570 has been open since early July.
If Kbin wants to become and stay relevant, it needs more hands on deck.
No, the problem is that you're a person who posted 34 diff. items to K.Bin and two bug reports and you think that qualifies you to comment on K.Bin overall. Not for nothing - what qualifies me to speak on this topic is that I've been posting stuff every day to /m/scifi (with time out for vacations and illness). I know there are things wrong with scifi and K.Bin - but I'm putting the time in to make things better. What are you doing? You moderate /m/men and your stated goal is "This magazine is dedicated to discussions of issues that men and boys face, especially disadvantages or discrimination due to their gender, from an egalitarian perspective." People want stuff to read, not people to point at 'the problem.' K.bin is fine for what it is - if you want 'more hands on deck', go be one of those hands.
Jesus H Christ... congrats on being the one millionth person on kbin to say "What are YOU doing?" while talking down their literal list of what they are doing.
a-man-from-earth is right, Kbin is in a sorry state right now. I still get asked to login when I want to comment, despite being logged in, at which point it takes me to the home page. Viewing a reply to your comment is still not pagination-aware.
Ernest has said this version of kbin is frozen until he rolls out the next, hopefully the end of September, so by his own admission Kbin as we know and use it is the same pile it was months ago. That said I remain hopeful that the next rollout will be a big improvement.
Back to the topic, if the site isn't easy and intuitive to use, or if it's broken and remains a thorn for a long time, then you can't expect people to go out of their way to do the thing you want them to do. That's not how the world works.
a-man-from-earth has submitted bug fixes to try and improve the site so people might be more willing to stick around and post themselves, while you're just posting content that'll eventually become irrelevant. What are YOU doing? (See? It's asinine right?)
So, I post content (on average once every 3 days, despite my drop in activity this month), I engage in the comments (more than you do, if we're counting), I moderate a community, and I file bug reports in an attempt to make this a better platform.
So yes, I am doing my part, and that does qualify me to comment on the state of Kbin. Suggesting I don't is toxicity we don't need here.
And pretending that Kbin is just fine won't help this platform to become successful. And yes, despite my criticisms, I want this to be a successful Reddit replacement. But it's struggling to become relevant, and I'm frustrated with its lack of progress.
People want stuff to read, not people to point at 'the problem.'
People also want interesting discussions on topics they care about. I know that because for years I was a moderator of a small but active subreddit.
The m/men magazine I moderate used to be the #20 most active one on Kbin, a place you're now proudly proclaiming m/scifi has...
I'm waiting to see if ernest's promised next version of Kbin will actually improve things, especially on the moderation side. Otherwise I have to reconsider where to direct my efforts.
I understand wanting to help the platform grow, but I don't think invalidating the opinions and contributions of a-man-from-earth is a good way to approach it. The holier-than-thou attitude might also have the opposite effect that your original post is attempting to achieve. The lack of active moderators is certainly an issue, along with spam and the existence of various federation issues are problems as well. I get that these things take time, so I'm being patient. The platform still has it's flaws, however I still enjoy kbin and am contributing when I can.
I understand wanting to help the platform grow, but I don't think invalidating the opinions and contributions of a-man-from-earth is a good way to approach it. The holier-than-thou attitude might also have the opposite effect that your original post is attempting to achieve. The lack of active moderators is certainly an issue, along with spam and the existence of various federation issues are problems as well. I get that these things take time, so I'm being patient. That said, I still enjoy kbin and contribute how and when I can.
It's time to start posting links to our own blogs, again. Reddit brainwashed us into thinking that "self advertisement" was a bad thing. What they actually wanted you to do was instead turn your content into text posts on reddit itself so that we'd get locked into the platform.
Self advertise. Write interesting things on your blog and then share your posts here.
Yes I always thought Reddit’s rules against self promotion were pretty dumb. Like how did Reddit want people to find out about cool new things that Redditors make? From other news sources and then post to Reddit afterwards? That makes no sense and just means Reddit is the last place to find out about the cool thing that the Redditor made.
Now with Lemmy and KBin we have the chance to self promote again, and we need more posts anyways.
Eh those rules seem dumb and are in some ways... but as someone who moderated a roughly 200 and 250k subscriber subreddits for around 6-7 years, I can say from experience that an insane amount of people just tried using the platform to shotgun links to their bullshit youtube channels or content mill tech blogs.
You'd see one of those links, look at their profile and sure enough they just had a huge list of them firing off the same link to 10-20 subreddits, then the next link, then the next. No discussion, no commenting history in those subreddits for the most part. They were just using them as a way to get clicks and nothing more.
Left unchecked, that shit destroys the quality of a community. I know because the first big sub I grew from about 10k to 250k had been left open to that stuff for years and had totally stagnated. As soon as I started cleaning house the place blew up in numbers and quality of content.
The vast, vast majority of people linking their own off-site content on reddit (in my experience as a mod) was definitely people just spamming. And if you let them do it the subreddits go to hell.
I've been blogging since 1997 and prefer to write things on my own site, but yeah, the sort of "rule" on Reddit was to not link to your own blog. I disabled Google Analytics this year, and it should also be free of any ads, so I feel okay about linking to my own (long) posts about stuff, complete with plenty of photos and the occasional video, but I'm still not sure if that is frowned upon as "self promotion" even on the Fediverse...
My counter-argument is a small minority create content and a much smaller minority of them actually create interesting/engaging content.
I'm not opposed to a 'blogs' magazine where people share their own content, but from my personal perspective, self-promotion often skews the OP's ability gauge's the outside world's interest in their musings about the world.
and if the content is not interesting, it falls by the wayside with no votes. the creme rises, the cruft falls. with more volume, your will get more cruft, but also more creme.
reddit gets tons of spam and absolute garbage posts, but the volume and user voting brings good stuff out.
there will be some shitty blogs, but i think that's an ok price to pay for more content being posted.
Yup! Unfortunately the activity seems to be going to the lemmy side of things first, due to kbin’s sometimes functional, sometimes kinda-functional federation.
Yeah. I created a thread recently that had over a hundred replies, but over time, each notification became a frustration because the notification link doesn't take me to the actual comment, just the first page. I'm not sifting through 10 pages to read an entire comment and see if it warrants a reply.
Experiencing the same "amazing UI but frustration experience that makes me check out" UX w/ firefish (fka calckey) as well.
More visible promotion of active magazines would go a long way too. Almost every suggested magazine across the top of my nav bar is an empty ghost community, probably made on a whim during the Reddit kerfuffle and then abandoned.
It also feels bad when me and one other person are the only active people in a community and I’ve already advertised. I want to advertise again but don’t want to come off as an annoying spammer.
I’m taking the risk I’ll be annoying—I’m specifically referring to https://kbin.social/m/Musicals (@musicals or musicals@kbin.social in case the link does not work for you—kbin has been having a bug that makes !communityName@instance links like the one I just wrote not always federate out properly from kbin).
Very good point. I understand the desire to give all communities equal opportunity to be promoted, but if the promotions are towards dead-ends, it really does a disservice to the fediverse as a whole
That’s from 2021, what an innocent, less-enshittified time it was. These days the argument would just be pointing at the toxic dumpster fire of regular social media and shouting “how much worse do you want it to get before you leave?”.
These all sounds like really good changes. I’m excited about them finally revamping search, because a lot of folks never really adopted using hashtags.
Honestly, given the ruckus they've been raising for a while now, my feeling is that Beehaw wants to push themselves away from society as a whole. I don't agree with their perspective, which is part of why I never engage with much of their content or users. All I can say is that I wish them only the best for their echo chamber.
I have been unsubscribing from communities on beehaw and finding their siblings on other instances so that if they decide to leave i have already mostly disconnected from them and my home feed wont become a shell of itself.
It’s less an echo chamber and more simply an attempt at creating an Internet community that doesn’t constantly argue or insult people. Where you treat people like they are smart humans and where others return the same assumption. All different opinions are welcomed. I know I hold a few strong differing opinions than the norm on beehaw and have always been treated with decency. Taking those same opinions in to lemmy general I’ve been called names and attempted to be invalidated instead of people trying to see a different opinion. So if anything it seems like lemmy general is becoming an echo chamber and beehaw is trying to be a respectful discourse community.
The impression I get is that Beehaw is trying to seclude itself not to be an echo chamber, but because an admin saw CP get posted and is traumatized by that, and it’s really highlighting the lack of mod tools. They want to moderate the space to ensure it’s nice (and it’s frankly needed. I made a Beehaw account at one point in time. I reported quite a few not-bigoted-but-still-nasty posts) and right now being federated with everyone makes it way too hard because even if 1% of posts are anywhere from “not nice” to “you literally posted child porn,” 1% of 100 is easy but 1% of 100,000 could be a lot of work.
Ah, yes that too. I was thinking of the defederating with lemmy.world and sh.it.works when I was reading that. But Also, yes, they are likely moving because mod tools on the fediverse are a nightmare. Honestly, I see why the US Congress and major lobbyists want to hold service owners accountable for what their users post. Creating a platform for users to post whatever then not moderating it properly should be and I think is illegal in the USA. The fediverse at heart seems to be designed without any moderation in mind.
Very well thought out post. It seems like they are considering pretty big measures. I think the next logical place to go for them is to whitelist instead of blacklist. Sucks for self hosters, but in general gives Beehaw what they want.
Moderation tools seem to be the biggest problem for the poster. They also say the devs don’t see it as a priority. They say they’ve even offered bounties to add better tool support. Moderation tools get brought up all the time on Lemmy—I agree that it should be the main focus or development right now TBH.
A big problem a lot of mods had on Reddit, and why they basically needed 3rd party apps - was that moderation tools weren’t up to snuff. So I don’t quite understand why getting good, robust moderation tools isn’t a top priority for the lemmy devs.
Now, I am on the can we ban Threads train, I wasn't at first because they hadn't gotten involved in actually joining the rest of us, now they are and they've admitted they want all our information too, I just don't want any part of that.
Things collected from fediverse participants that interact with Meta users...
- Username
- Profile Picture
- IP Address
- Name of Third Party Service
- Posts from profile
- Post interactions (Follow, Like, Reshare, Mentions)
They've never met a piece of data they didn't want to mine, have they?
I think the implication is that threads/meta is going to use it for different purposes than your average fediverse application/server owner would.
However, it is kind of a silly argument to bring up in the context of fediverse since everything you share publicly online is, well... public info from that point onwards - even more so in the fediverse that by design sends and stores it to countless other, privately owned and maintained, servers beyond your control. This comment is public and any other individual or company can get it whether they do it through activity pub or by just scraping it off any of existing (or their privately owned) instance.
The real risk threads poses is competition and taking away content creators from mastodon, indirectly pushing everyone else under the facebook's corporate umbrella again. I want FOSS to take over but if there's nobody actually using it and everyone is still creating content elsewhere then there's few reasons to stay.
I don't understand the point of this article at all. How would an instance federate without processing these information? (And I think the IP cannot be collected; not sure why the author indicates so without source.)
Not sure if the author understood anything about the fediverse, either. Feels like an AI-generated article, honestly...
The point of the article is to appeal to people's hatred of Meta (which is well-earned, admittedly), not to actually say anything meaningful.
Having observed conversations about Threads here and on Lemmy, it's a pretty dependable tactic. I completely understand not wanting to associate with Meta and not trusting their intentions, but there are plenty of things to criticize them for without trying to whip up a fury over what's objectively not problematic. But this is the internet and people like being in a fury, so whip one up they will.
@BraveSirZaphod Hey, I'm the guy that wrote this. While I absolutely hold negative bias towards Meta, the point of the article was not to produce a piece of propaganda, but instead illustrate that their policies have updated to acknowledge the existence of third-party accounts on other servers, that they will be collecting data, and that this is likely a sign that federation may be happening sooner than expected.
Not everybody is happy about that, and some developers are working on hardening their applications to protect against unauthorized access for edge cases related to this.
@stopthatgirl7 This seems like quite the lift and shift. Moving to a new platform would definitely split their user based. I would also thin that any form of aggressive defederation would split their user base as well. From what I can tell, there are not many (if any) fediverse platforms that have the level of moderation tools they they are looking for.
Unfortunately, It just looks like they are in a tight spot. One the could make or break that community.
I think part of the problem is that moderation tools, in general, on the threadiverse are extremely weak. It’s easy to share across platforms and instances on kbin and lemmy, but it seems to be a nightmare to moderate across platforms and instances, in a way that it isn’t on other Fediverse sites. I can’t tell if it’s by design or by oversight, but it’s going to only become a bigger problem in the future if it isn’t sorted soon. Beehaw’s issues with moderation seem like the canary in the coal mine.
This I think. Every platform that is not just a mess needs moderation. There are things you just cannot allow especially in a platform that is suppose to be a safe space or at least not a total shit fest. Some of this is the law too, CSAM for example or copyrighted material. The rest is just about not putting up with trolls. When lemmy was 1000 users total this problem is a lot different then 1 million to 10 million or 100 million. It is just that Behaw is a bit more particular on one hand and probably more of a target on the other.
Looking at all the spam on the science community proves you wrong. It’s on lemmy, and the mods smack down all the spam quickly…On Lemmy. But people looking at it on kbin see constant posts of spam and advertising, making the community completely unusable, because the lemmy admins can’t moderate the page on kbin once it’s federated into the kbin server. Likewise, mods on lemmy and kbin might lock comments on a post that’s getting toxic, but that lock doesn’t carry over to kbin, and they can’t do anything about it. That’s the issue I’m talking about.
If the community is on kbin that the kbin mod removes the spam. If the community is on lemmy instance than mod on lemmy instance removes spam.
Isn't that how it works? The mod on the community instances removes the spam and then it gets removed on all sites right?
Likewise, mods on lemmy and kbin might lock comments on a post that’s getting toxic, but that lock doesn’t carry over to kbin, and they can’t do anything about it.
Wouldn't a lock on a thread on that community's site prevent any new comments from coming back to that site over the fediverse?
Yes, but the problem is it doesn’t federate. A lemmy mod can remove spam on their lemmy community, but there’s no one to remove the spam once it federates to be on a kbin server. That’s why the science community seen on kbin is swarming with spam - the mods on lemmy remove it, but there’s no one to remove it on kbin until Ernest removes it, because communities default to him as the moderator of the kbin magazine version, and no way for lemmy mods to make someone on kbin a moderator for it.
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