It took about a minute for my comment from reddthat to show up here, but it looks like it made it through ok, so inbound comments are working. (Note: replying to myself from my kbin account)
Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven't kept up with most of mbin's specifics.
Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information...
Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.
You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text -- but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the "@ user @ instance" syntax -- e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties -- e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called "kbinMeta" and this magazine as search results -- but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you're copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance's local version of a thread and that isn't the original source it probably won't find it. (I've had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)
@piotrsikora@ernest -- FYI searching for this thread by the exact title "Multiple questions regarding Kbin" does not find it currently but searching text like "as a new Kbin/Mbin user" will find it. Is that a bug?
@piotrsikora@ernest -- Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.
Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).
You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.
To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?
It's fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/fedia@fedia.io maybe? Sorry if that doesn't link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )
On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?
DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.
You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user's profile and clicking "Send Message" on the right side.
Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn't work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error -- is this a bug?)
Hope that helps!
@piotrsikora@ernest -- this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn't see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io's side or on kbin.social's side)?
@piotrsikora -- FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.
Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind -- with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.
I'm assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side -- 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you're unfamiliar) -- but it'd be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what's going on rather than guessing.
In particular, it'd be helpful to know:
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies -- or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all -- knowing if there's federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between "no one saw this", "no one liked this", and "people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn't made it to kbin yet")
Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?
Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?
We don't need to depend on federated downvotes to judge what does or does not belong on kbin. In fact, I think it's probably better if we don't. People are downvoting the bots here. I have yet to see an account with negative rep. on kbin that wasn't a spammer.
Regardless, rate-limiting incoming posts will limit the damage and annoyance to us.
I wonder if there needs to be some kind of "governance board," like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.
I'm not sure that would help with this particular issue -- and there's already a fair amount of bad relations between instances so I don't think a wider fediverse board is likely to succeed even if it could help somehow... I guess instance admins that do agree on general moderation principles could help co-admin each other's instances to cover better for when they're offline (maybe some of them already do?), but we shouldn't have to depend on remote admins being responsive to deal with an issue affecting our instance.
Some ideas for anti-spam measures that might help:
block users who post flood -- e.g. if an account makes 10 posts a minute, it's a spammer
block accounts that end up massively in the negative shortly after they start posting -- e.g. an account at -50 within 15 minutes of making its first post is probably a spammer (exact thresholds may need some tuning). Note that this is different from blocking new accounts that go into the negative since people can register accounts in advance of an attack and wait until later to cause disruption.
block users who post repetitive comments/links excessively -- e.g. if the same link is in 10 comments/posts from the last hour or they've submitted the exact same comment a dozen times, the account is probably a spammer (again, thresholds may need tuning); that won't catch all the bots (one of them added a bunch of random words) but will catch some of them. More clever filtering could catch the other bots.
block new posters who are reported many times by established accounts in good standing -- at least until an admin can check what is going on
I'm poking around at it now. I'm guessing it's probably something to do with JavaScript -- which I block by default via NoScript. (That's kind of odd though since I thought it was generating a <details>/<summary> HTML block server side, but maybe it's doing it on the client and I just happened to have JS unblocked when I saw it before?)
Edit: It looks like it is coming from this webpack'd JS file currently which I think is built from this JS source file; there is a handleSpoilers function defined which manipulates details/summary elements. Oddly, there is also PHP code for manipulating details/summary like I thought.
@ernest can chime in on if that's a temporary thing or what, but yeah, it seems to not work for me because I block JavaScript.
If it's really bugging you, you could put something like this in a GreaseMonkey script:
function move_comment_add() {
let comment_add = document.getElementById("comment-add");
let comments = document.getElementById("comments");
comments.insertAdjacentElement("beforebegin", comment_add);
}
move_comment_add();
https://kbin.social/u/ernest is in charge but it seems like he's having serious IRL issues from his most recent comments. Some people appear to have managed to get his attention through Matrix in the recent past but I don't know how to use it.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I don't see any content via kbin. I've tried to access it as a magazine (which is what would make the most sense for a blog, probably) and as a user. Both are recognized (i.e. I don't get 404) but neither has any content (just get "Empty").