Great to hear kbin is back on track, and assumably so are you @ernest. With so many improvements having been made, however, I can't help but wonder if and how these changes are being made public?
Heaven forbid but the hosting bills are paid up through now at minimum.
You got to think if he were (again, forbid) dead or something the site wouldn't refresh and we wouldn't see ads for drugs and pirated MMA streams.
The fact that we’re sitting here theorizing where Ernest is like he’s Kate Middleton is why this can’t be a one-man operation anymore. It’s too much for one person to begin with, and when people have no idea what’s going on, they’ll start going wild with theories as to what’s going on.
The fact we're here talking on kbin.social when for all we know Ernest is talking to aliens right now on some Jodie Foster Contact shit shows how rather robust this place actually is when you think about it.
The site errored out repeatedly when I tried to like a comment
Has there ever been a time kbin.social didn't do that from time to time? 503 is a friend of mine at this point. Neither one of us has abandoned this place for twitter so this place is clearly at least robust enough (code- and community- wise) for us still to be having this conversation here.
Heck, I could (though won't and don't yet) argue the errors are a feature to keep you getting hooked on scrolling. There's at least 2 projects I have finished I wouldn't have worked on if this place hadn't been down at the time.
Has there ever been a time kbin.social didn't do that from time to time?
You understand that’s not a selling point, correct?
Hilariously, I got an error message trying to load the notification for your comment.
And as I’ve said before, I can put up with wonkiness. But I can’t put up with no communication and not knowing what all is wrong or how long things are going to be messy. I like kbin, but I do not like wondering if social is going to go belly up with no warning and no idea when it’ll get fixed when it did start erroring out for days and no way to find out what’s even going on.
At this point, the best thing would just to move to an instance using mbin, a fork created by many devs who contributed to and wanted to improve kbin but were upset at lack of progress. With Ernest's many absences all the improvements weren't being merged. Many instances using the name kbin, such as the one I'm on, have switched to mbin long ago and have many of the features and fixes that have been requested and long waited for.
This might be a good idea, at least until Ernest gets back. To my knowledge, he's the only instance admin, so as long as he's inactive, the spammers won't get dealt with (especially on magazines he moderates, like /m/tech).
Ideally, there could be another admin or two to deal with this stuff when he's not available, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
I tried to report some spam the other day and I got a message along the lines of "this message has already been reported" so I don't think anyone is getting 100 reports of anything, only 1 for each spam.
I should have had a look at codeberg before making my post. As well as the entry you identified, there's also this, a suggestion to rate limit accounts: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/948
The first request would definitely be a nice setting to have.
As for the second one, I think microblog posts are pretty easy to distinguish from threads already, as everything's organized completely differently. There's no title, the avatar is in a different spot with a different shape, the upvote button is in a different spot, there's no downvote button, etc. I think changing the color would just be visually jarring more than anything.
That makes sense. I’m actually not used to microblogs, and I never actually got into Twitter, so the distinguishing characteristics don’t really stand out to me as much. I think the color variation would help me better process what I’m looking at.
I think the color variation would help me better process what I’m looking at.
You can change the color yourself btw. The traditional method is to install the Stylus extension/addon, but I think kbin now lets you define your own styling in your profile settings, though I haven't tried it. (tried it now and this doesn't really seem possible there, has the same selector deletion issues as magazine css)
In the HTML code, microblog posts and threads are represented differently. Posts are blockquote, while threads are article. This makes it easy to restyle them via userstyles.
Edit: actually, this isn't behaving as expected, it's coloring comments too... will edit this comment in a moment when I find out why.
Go to your settings (via the dropdown that opens when you hover over your avatar and name in the top right) and you should see the "Appearance" section right at the top, containing a textbox labeled "Custom CSS".
Just paste the code in there.
Here it is again for reference:
If you want to have a bigger textbox, you can drag it longer by clicking and dragging below the scrollbar.
After pasting the code into the textbox, scroll to the bottom of the settings page and press the "Save" button between the Notifications and Account Deletion sections.
Now you can go back and change the color to something you actually want to see.
You can replace the red with another color name, or you can look up your desired color using this color picker and then copy the HSLA color it outputs below the color picker.
I recommend HSLA over the other options because it's easy to change later. It's just a base color + saturation + lightness + transparency. Rather than having to mix red green and blue in your head like you'd have to for adjusting rgb.
If you just want microblog posts to be a bit lighter or darker (depending on your theme) than threads, you can use hsla(0,0%,100%,0.15) (this makes them lighter, change the 100% to 0% for darker). Tweak the transparency (the last value) to change the intensity of the color change.
Besides the background color, you can also change other CSS properties. Just add additional lines in the pattern property: value;.
For example, you can set a border using border: 1px red solid;, which creates a red solid border of 1 pixel width.
I like to use this site as a reference myself for what properties exist and how they're used.
The images I'm using here probably won't work as embeds, but opening them as links should work.
Depending on if you use Firefox or a Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Edge, and almost all the others), get yourself the Stylus extension (chromium) or addon (firefox).
Give the style a name to the left and hit the yellow "Save" button. The site will update in real time, you shouldn't even need to reload it for the changes to take effect after saving. In fact, after saving it once, you don't even have to keep saving it after every change in my experience.
I've changed the above code a bit to also cover the replies to posts, that's what the .comments stuff is about.
This will give you a very red background. I just chose this for the example to make the change obvious to see at a glance. You can replace the red with another color name, or an RGB or HSL value for a more granular choice.
I recommend using HSL if you want to tweak the color later without having to open up a color picker. You just choose a base color, how saturated it should be, and how light you want it. And optionally the transparency.
The HSL equivalent for red is hsl(0,100%,50%).
If you just want microblog posts to be a bit lighter or darker (depending on your theme) than threads, you can use hsla(0,0%,100%,0.15) (this makes them lighter, change the 100% to 0% for darker). Tweak the transparency (the last value) to change the intensity of the color change.
Besides the background color, you can also change other CSS properties. Just add additional lines in the pattern property: value;.
For example, you can set a border using border: 1px red solid;, which creates a red solid border of 1 pixel width.
I like to use this site as a reference myself for what properties exist and how they're used.
I always assume that repeat errors on the user end means significantly more to deal with on your end, but it's clear you're doing your best to keep everything going, so I try my best not to get frustrated lol
Hope you've managed to have some time to enjoy the holidays despite all of this!
Yeah. It started yesterday for me.
Read something, I think, on another thread about Ernest, the admin, being away with family for the holiday. Might be somewhat limited functionality for a little bit. But, he's been pretty on top of things over the last few months. I'm sure he'll get it sorted out when he gets back.
Lots of people here worried about Meta destroying their space, and rightly so.
But I see this from another lens. This is what success for the fediverse looks like. The fediverse was never going to compete with the big players in social media. But it can influence them to be less shitty.
Is this a threat to the fediverse as we know it? Absolutely. But we have the opportunity to make things better for several orders of magnitude more people than are currently here. To me that is a risk worth taking and fighting for.
I’m not saying everyone should roll over and do whatever Meta wants. There’s going to be tension and we are going to need to fight them tooth and nail on many things. But let’s at least participate.
The fediverse is an obvious threat to Facebook and any other corporate social media company. If the fediverse wasn’t a threat or has the potential of ever one day becoming a threat … then companies like Facebook would not want anything to do with the fediverse.
The fact that a major social media company like Facebook even remotely wants anything to do with the fediverse means that this new start up is doing something and has the potential of becoming something some day. Otherwise, Facebook would not want anything to do with it.
Besides, Facebook already has a huge market share of the social media pie … they literally control over half the social media content on the internet right now. They already have more than enough of a platform to connect to their userbase … why should we allow them onto our space? We need the content … they don’t.
And like others have said, if you allow a big fish onto your small pond, the big fish will automatically control everything. The big fish will swim around your little pool for a while and kill everything and then leave, leaving an empty pool that nobody wants.
Admit it … Facebook just wants in to kill the fediverse. They don’t want to add it to their service, they don’t want to incorporate it … they want to swallow it whole, let it die and abandon it.
Defederate and don’t let them anywhere near our space. Otherwise, we’ll be signing our own death warrant.
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