Kbin is currently designed to encourage brigading. The fix is easy.
The current default "Homepage" value is "All". That makes sense for users with zero subscribed magazines, so they see something.
But for users with one or more subscribed magazines, the default value for "Homepage" needs to be "Subscriptions".
That's partially just because subscriptions mean little if the default frontpage ignores them. But there's a more important reason than that.
The current situation is that posts in m/Conservative are heavily downvoted, and barely upvoted. (Whatever your politics may be, consider if this was happening to you.) As more ex-redditors join, this problem is likely to worsen.
Eventually moderators need better controls, to say things like "Only members can vote", etc.
But for now, a very easy fix is to change the default value of "Homepage" to be "Subscriptions". Of course, "All" should still be a selectable option for those who prefer it.
It’s really not brigading by definition. Brigading is a conscious and coordinated effort by many people to target a post or community. There is nothing conscious or coordinated about random people randomly seeing a post and downvoting it.
Brigading is not the right term. Unpopular is.
Really the only way to avoid this is to create your own instance and de-federate. This is precisely why the far-right social media platforms (like Truth Social) have had to isolate themselves. They’re simply a significant minority on the internet.
You're the third person to point out that it's technically not brigading. I think that's splitting hairs, because it's happening by design, but I hear you. I don't know the right present participle, but it seems like a moot point.
To everything you wrote after that, I wholly agree. I don't think this really is about politics, though, so much as it's about unpopular perspectives held by minority groups. IMHO the platform should encourage a diversity of thought.
Yes, I could create a defederated instance, or I could just go hang out on Gab or TruthSocial. I was hoping I'd find a more well-rounded community here, like I had on reddit. It's worth noting that reddit is strongly left-leaning, but has a bunch of conservative communities that thrive due to its configuration. But again, this isn't just about politics — it's about minority groups.
I don’t think you’re being entirely unreasonable, I’m just not sure it’s possible.
It’s not happening by design, that would imply intent or bias on what the site shows on all. It’s happening naturally, all literary shows everything to everybody. Claiming it’s by design is like saying it’s by design when your entire office votes “no” to you banging on drums during the workday. It might be they just don’t like that idea.
Remember that the situation, the configuration you’re referring to, only existed on Reddit because those subs banned people left and right, and people blocked them. In other words, they were and are isolated. r/conservative would ban people for any dissenting comment, and conservative subs got delisted from r/all for a variety of reasons by the Reddit admins.
The only way to achieve what you’re describing would be to do the Reddit thing and pre-select magazines for the “all” tab, rather then them truly being all. Even if subs were the main page, people will still flip over to all regularly, just like they flip over to new.
You may just have to be content knowing that people that subscribe to /m/conservative go there intentionally despite the posts falling down on the all tab. Maybe there will be more people here that agree with you and the situation will change.
@10A Or people just don’t want to see it. It is not brigading. As I don’t want people putting photos of their masculine genitals in my eyes, I don’t want to read about conservatism in my /all or /sub. Do whatever you want on this site, but don’t complain when people disagree. That’s called opinion.
That's my point, @pasci_lei. It's natural to downvote something you dislike. And the site's set up to show everyone everything by default. So any community breaking with the hivemind is naturally downvoted by users who are not members of that community.
The whole point of a voting system is to do exactly what your trying to stop. If you don’t want people to vote on your posts maybe you should find a platform that doesn’t use a voting system.
It's impolite to vote unless you're a member of the community. And by "impolite", I mean it's extremely rude. Members of the community have free reign to vote as they see fit. The result is the community's content is weighted according to its own values.
I think gimping and entire platform of discussion so you can build an echo chamber is foolish. I get you don’t want to interact with the rest of the platform because your content is unpopular but I’d rather promote free interaction than pander to unpopular communities.
This is an ignorant and entitled take. You pass right wing ideology as deserving of special treatment and you indignantly pass conservatism as a minority voice needing to be heard. The federated community doesn't have algorithmic preferential treatment nor does it need to imitate Reddit's worst qualities because your ideology in unpopular. It's a community's responsibility to make itself appealing to the masses if it wants acceptance. You want a place for right wing discourse on a platform dominated by capital L Leftists. I personally would hate to see a fascist gateway community form on such a small platform like this. While you have the freedom to think and speak, you don't have the right to preferential treatment or your voice to be heard or liked.
This level of control is generally handled at the instance level.
If you want to host a magazine and control interactions on it, host your own instance.
There should only be one instance IMHO. And it should be able to support widely diverse communities.
kbin is part of the Fediverse. It is one instance of many.
I draw your attention to the sidebar:
Several communities who have more difficult interactions with others have already followed this route.
Encouraging fracturing into factions does no good for anyone. The internet needs a frontpage, and for years that was reddit. Now it seems to be kbin, maybe. Under the hood it may be a distributed system, but in practice normal people want a single website where a wide diversity of topics and opinions is embraced and protected.
Does it though? The Fediverse feels a lot different to Reddit, which many here are taking as a positive. As others have mentioned, if you want a conservative safe space then go make one.
Maybe, but it won't be kbin, or other Fediverse sites.
It's a common enough opinion to want one site to handle everything, but that's not how this is set up.
Honestly I think it is. Much as the underlying architecture expects federation, each instance competes in a market of commoditized goods, which leads to coalescence. So if the fediverse thrives at all, it will be with one giant instance. Perhaps there'll always be a few other tiny instances for nerds (I use the word lovingly) who value that sort of thing, but normal people don't understand the concept of an "instance", and just want to show up at a .com to feast on data.
At any rate, even if you're right about federation, any social media service should seek to accommodate a wide diversity of ideas, opinions, and perspectives.
Any user on one instance can interact freely with users and content on another instance as if they were on that instance, unless there are specific restrictions put in place, or one of the two instances has blocked the other. This is rare and often to prevent brigading, as your main post complained of.
So, not really. Normal people understand the concept of email. I don't agree with the "It's too complicated" suggestion. It's been presented confusingly in this mad rush, sure.
I think that's entirely up to each instance. Not every instance has to be about everything or for everyone. Again, that's the point.
With regard to federation, that's true, but consider the bigger picture. A major news outlet discusses the up-and-coming website kbin, and a hundred million people show up to create an account. A popular search engine returns search results linking to kbin, and nobody says "I could click on that, but I have an account at some other instance, so I'll just manually edit the URL." The bigger picture is that the world wants a single instance.
With regard to the diversity of of ideas, opinions, and perspectives being up to each instance, I suppose I agree with you in principle, though I would find it deeply disappointing if any platform intentionally wanted to create a hivemind and actively silence dissenting voices. But if that's where I am, then I suppose I'll have to leave.
I think this is a valid issue and I think it's something that deserves some attention if it isn't on the mind of developers already.
From a generic developer perspective I see no reason why it would be impossible or even that difficult to improve the roaming experience.
Thank you. But judging from the number of downvotes I've received here, I'm pretty sure the community prefers to stick its fingers in its ears.
Eeeh...
It seems to me like people have quickly identified the group you are attempting to get started (Or simply looked to see that you were), and it's a group that is almost always involved in contention and drama at best, and actively causes problems in the community otherwise.
It's the first thing I did, anyway. And I downvoted the OP, because it was clearly presenting the most optimistic version of the situation not the one that usually follows - and I don't want to deal with it here. You still seem pretty.. I duno. "Willfully ignorant" of the context around a lot of communities and media that identify as conservative. It's baggage that really can't be ignored, even if you should be allowed the opportunity to move past it occasionally - ignoring it seems disingenuous.
I've been ignoring that and attempting to focus on other things you've mentioned, eg the above scenario with search results and how federation works. Because regardless of my feelings about other things, we could still have a productive conversation about other issues.
I would not enjoy holding a "reasonable" conservative opinion (subjective, I'm not saying that as an insult) and be faced with the challenge of trying to establish a community for it on an instance like this or many others with a heavily progressive lean.
Which really does lead me to saying that starting your own instance really is in your best interest. If your instance behaves well, other instances won't blacklist it, and it will be standing on its own feet and won't have to deal with admins that would likely be personally difficult to deal due to that context.
It could even become a force for positive conservatives. That would be a good outcome for everyone - I would like to see divides healed.
They don't really need to understand the concepts of an instance within the federation system because ultimately you join whatever instance you want and search and then you can subscribe to anything you want it doesn't matter whether it's a one entire instance or one tiny instance in the federation.
There are already many observable instances (pardon the pun) of confusion, even among us early adopters. Time will tell if you're right or if I am.