I think it confuses everyone. I have no idea why these two things exist in KBin. It's a complete mystery the thought process that went into it.

I would, but I've already set up shop with my forums here and trying to recreate them and move all the threads would be impossible.

I used to be against removing the downvote button, but honestly, it's used a weapon more than anything else. It's also used as "I disagree with this person" instead of an indicator of the value or veracity of a given post, which is not the intent. As such, I've now come around to the position that removing downvotes is the way to go.

Upvoting if you like a post, or do nothing if you don't is the correct answer I think.

@Kalcifer

The long term solution is something like IPFS object storage that's read only for everyone but the author instance. One copy of the data but all instances can read it and it's stored forever in a redundant medium with bitrot protection.

I'm viewing this from KBin and I don't see strikethrough.

This explanation and suggestions from @poVoq was the absolute best I've seen and I agree with nearly all of it.

The stated rationale for up and down-votes in Lemmy is to crowd-source content curation as an alternative to what other social media platforms do with their algorithms. A secondary goal is to crowd-source a sort of light moderation of comments by partially sorting comments threads after votes. This is similar to how it works in Reddit and HN etc.

While both sounds good on paper, in my experience neither works on Lemmy. I think this is mainly because the number of votes and comments (aka the number of active participants) is just too low on 95% of the posts for it to result in a meaningful content curation signal. But to make it worse, there are some notorious heavy users that abuse the system, which is easy to do as a few down-votes are usually sufficient.

I think the Lemmy devs still hope that at some point there will be sufficient scale for their vote curation system to work, but I started to think that a design that only works at a certain scale is fundamentally flawed in a federated context.

For Kbin I think it is even less likely to work, as the decision to use boosts as upvotes will make people hesitant to up-vote. While I agree that boosts make certain sense to use for this, I also know that people un-follow accounts that do too much boosting as it results in it occupying their entire home-feed. For me a boost is a stronger signal than a star/favorite and thus should be used more seldomly.

However, I still think using boosts as upvotes is not necessarily a bad idea, but it IMHO requires to get away from the up/down vote idea of Lemmy where it is encouraged to vote as much as possible (and even that isn't at a sufficient scale for the idea to work in Lemmy).

My suggestion is to lean into the idea to use boosts as up-votes and very explicitly use the "double-arrow" boost icon where currently the up-vote button is and do away with the down-vote there all together. That will integrate better with the rest of the fediverse and not lead to people being confused that others unfollow them over boost spam. You can still count the number of boosts to do some basic "hot" sorting, but this will work better with small communities that do not have sufficient scale.

You can still add a "dislike" or so button where currently the "comments, favorites, more" buttons are, but that should be an optional thing and not federate, or only federate in the local bubble (a concept of Akkoma for forming closer relations of a small number of instances).

Edit: for comments I would forget about votes all together, as on Lemmy vote abuse is even more common in the comments. Boosting comments out of context is often a bit jarring in the fediverse anyways, so the option to boost them should be probably de-emphasized.

It was a divide by zero and you killed us all. Now we are in a different timeline.

https://kbin.social/m/MandelaEffect checking in.

The RCS issue hits the nail on the head I think. It's really the biggest stumbling block for everyone at this point.

@ernest I can't imagine how stressful it is for you. I've run a few larger projects (ShowEQ back in the day, being one of the bigger ones), but nothing that blew up so quickly like Kbin has and I don't envy your position. I really appreciate the work you've put into KBin and I want to see it succeed!

Indeed, and when you kiss someone you are making one big hole connected by two assholes.

Indeed it would. The CO2 would trigger the breathing reflex and panic. Hypoxia does not trigger that and you start to lose yourself, similar to being drunk.

Ive decided not to block him so I can follow him around annoying him and downvoting everything he says

Perfect example of why voting should be public!

Blocking him is the right answer, it's the right thing to do and solves the problem of him presenting posts you don't want to see.

I've been investigating this more. It seems to be a problem with Kbin.social... I can view anything on lemmy instances from Kbin, but I can't view anything on Kbin from lemmy instances. I can't search my own name, I can't search Kbin.social communities from Lemmy (tried lemmy.world and beehaw.org) ... so I don't know what to do. This problem basically kills kbin.social for me if it won't federate properly.

Its does let people see that their comment has been seen as is unpopular, compared with just unnoticed. I'm okay with that style of downvote being private.

I think that's the fundamental problem though. Just because a comment is unpopular doesn't mean it's not valuable or even correct. It's often the unpopular opinions that are the most important. No always, obviously, but social change starts from unpopular opinions. It's a double-edged sword.

@mojo Tell me you don't know what IPFS without telling me you don't know what IPFS is, lol. What the fuck does IPFS have to do with crypto?

@Kalcifer

That's correct and that's the problem. If a given community server goes down, that community basically just becomes an archive. It really needs to be able to continue without the host instance, similar to how a mesh works. Each remaining server routes around the dead node.

There is also the problem of search engine indexing... If a given server goes down, that information is lost to the search engine, even though it's still on other nodes.

Which also leads to duplicate content problem for search engines, as ECU m each node of a given community contains the same information for a given post, making it crappy to index and search.

Yeah that got me, too. It's pretty bass-ackwards. Why have a giant button for Add Photo when you actually have to click that little icon to add the photo. It makes absolutely no sense.

That's changing the AP protocol, which is a huge undertaking, as it affects everyone in the Fediverse at that point, requiring new code to whatever platform that they are using. I think that's the hardest route to go down.

I don't know if it's temporary, but you can't post from Lemmy.world to Kbin, or even see any federated content from KBin. Also, anything I post from KBin doesn't show up on Lemmy.world.

Also, if you go to Lemmy.world and view this thread, there's 174 comments and counting. They aren't showing up here. Something is wrong with Lemmy.world federation.

@mojo Just keep telling people you don't know what IPFS is without coming outright and saying it. Lol.

"IpFs GeTs PaId In FiLe CoIn"

IPFS is a protocol, you nitwit. That's like saying "ActivityPub is gets paid in Filecoin" Makes no fucking sense. Build a Fediverse layer on IPFS, no crypto needed. FFS get educated before you start trying to talk to adults.

Jesus... just stop.

@Kalcifer

I feel like it has to be MotörBin

tossmysalad.com ... right along side patreon.com. I'm in.

Is there any list like that for Kbin?

It's a good question, and yeah I dislike that the community owner is now the owner on the instance in question. I guess it kind of makes sense, but it's confusing as hell.

Is there any way to "Follow" a topic without putting in a reply, like this? Because I'd like to follow this topic, but I don't have anything useful to contribute, except this text, which isn't very useful.

Yeah exactly

Right, so boost behaves like Reddit upvote at the moment. So the title of the post is accurate still.

Crashing for me. Switched to Connect. Works well... except you can't pinch zoom images, which is a huge problem...

Thank you for the reply! I'm still not getting any federated content either direction with my node from KBin.social

I'm running a KBin node for the record, not Lemmy

Still working on it?

What do you mean "quickly?"

@ernest it started working a couple hours ago. No idea why . Thought maybe you knocked something loose

Spez and his ego are too invested in it now. He can't back down, his ego won't allow him to. Although, I could see a vote of no confidence from the board removing him and them saying "Oops our bad, we've removed him and we're going to listen to the community."

@ernest I restarted my instance and it seems to be receiving federated content from kbin.social, but any content I post isn't being received by kbin.social.

400C is like 650K. Not even close to absolute zero