I got a response from them on Reddit:

We didn't know which platform would take off, and we were nervous that because Kbin and Lemmy are so similar one platform might shut down in some sort of consolidation down the road. Also when we made them, each had very serious drawbacks for our media (Lemmy needs a lot of clicking to access the media, while kbin turned any media that wasn't in a 3:4 aspect ratio into a funhouse mirror.) So each of us took a community and somewhere down the line we'll re-evaluate.

around the world

fully blocking ad blockers

One of those two has to be false, because I'm still not seeing any anti-adblocker measures on my end.

A quarter of all subreddits are still private or restricted (can't post in them). This includes ones like /r/music or /r/programming. Of the 6 30+ million subscriber subreddits, only 3 have returned to normalcy. One is restricted, two others are in john oliver mode. The developers of Minecraft have officially abandoned Reddit as a platform, and advertisers are still pulling out as well.

But also, remember not to automatically assume someone with negative reputation is a troll. Given kbin currently doesn't calculate reputation correctly (it counts boosts not upvotes).

I'm putting this as a top level comment, but I mean to be talking here to the people suggesting to report or block, or moderators looking at this and thinking of taking action against trolls.

Not surprising, given they were the only ones serious about advertising. We got so many leaflets from them at work and home and I even saw them on Reddit, yet nothing at all on those distribution channels from any other parties. I've seen some billboards by others, but it feels like 80% of the ones I've seen were SVP.

I personally hate them and didn't vote for them, but I don't think it's surprising they have such a big following.

It's a shame what has become of them, they made such great games in the past...

Twitter has taught me that nowadays people are too adaptable, 90% of people will stick with Reddit no matter what they do.

kbin is written in PHP, but if you want to contribute, it's opensource on codeberg.

Depends on what the purpose of the button is.

A setting should show the current state, but an action (referring to the play button example) should show the state it'll transition to.

On the other hand, if people really wanted to contribute, there's plenty of open issues on Codeberg that are unadressed. I agree that it would be better to announce plans in advance rather than surprise drop them, but I doubt there would be more contributions from the community.

It it like he can see us but we can’t see him?

Opposite way around. We can see him but he can't see us.

The reason you can't see him is because you're on Lemmy which will only display microblog posts if they're (1) a reply to a Lemmy post, (2) made from kbin/mbin, or (3) replied to by someone from kbin/mbin (not entirely sure about this one).

Modern Bing is a lot more useful for me than modern Google.

For example, I finally learned how something works after months of trying to wrap my head around it. Didn’t end up using it for a few months more, and now I forgot it again. I’m back to square one, trying to relearn things I already learned.

If this is such a frequent problem, start writing down what you've learnt. Get a notetaking app (my personal choice is obsidian) and record any knowledge that took you work to acquire. Then next time you need it you can just check your notes and there it is, instead of having to put all that work into it again.

seeing "span" and other tags instead of the actual code block

If you're using Firefox or Kiwi, the Kbin Enhancement Suite userscript now has a fix for this. There's also a standalone version here.

Well, for the span tags, I haven't seen other tags being an issue. If you see a code block where the same issue occurs with other tags, tell me so I can update it.

If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone.

I don't know if ernest's views changed since the last exodus, but iirc people joining the platform wasn't really his intention, it just happened. Kbin hasn't even had a proper full release yet, it's still beta software, so I don't think people bouncing off is that big an issue yet.

With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site.

That's the case for now, but app development is still happening with other projects:

• ernest has mentioned intentions to revive his kbin app project
• Lemmy's Lunar (ios) app is adding kbin support
• @jwr1 introduced their Interstellar app prototype for Android recently.

I can't post someone else's book on my website and charge 5 bucks to read it.

No, but you can read someone else's book and then later write a book inspired by theirs and sell that.

Which is what ai does, as far as I know.

I'm not trying to argue with the rest of your comment, but that middle part looks like false equivalency to me. "I can do this but not that, so why would ai developers be allowed to do this completely different thing" just has no logic to it.

The AI isn't redistributing copies of even sections of the book, it just learnt from it. It's like when you read books and gain an understanding of how they are structured and such and then you write your own book based on what you've learnt from reading books.

So, I asked this to the three different conversation styles of Bing Chat.

The Precise style actually tried to solve it, came to the conclusion the question might be of philosophical nature, including some potential meanings, and asked for clarification.

The Balanced style told me basically the same as the other reply by admiralteal, that the question makes no sense and I should give more context if I actually want it answered.

The Creative style told me it didn't understand the first part, but then answered the second part (the turtles being blue) seriously.

Ernest hasn't abandoned kbin this time, he did post an update last week.

Today, I'm going for a minor procedure at the hospital, and I won't be available for the next 2-4 days. When I return, I'll push all the corrections and fixes I've been working on and present plans for the near future.

Him not being back yet probably means the hospital procedure didn't go as smoothly as expected, but he's not gone on purpose.

Zuck is already defederated.

Fully blocking only if you aren't using uBlock Origin

Not even that, I use Adblock Plus and have no trouble accessing Youtube and watching videos. Didn't even need to update any filters, it just keeps working as-is.

Not sure, I'm not familiar with the test, just figured I'd tell the results from asking the AI.

I think based on what you said about it

AI will actually TRY to solve it.
Human nature would be to ask if the person asking the question is having a stroke or requires medical attention.

That the Balanced style didn't fail, because while it didn't ask about strokes or medical attention, it did point out I'm asking a nonsense question and refused to engage with it.

The Precise style did try to find an answer and the Creative style didn't realize I'm fucking with it, so I do think based on the criteria they'd fail the test.

Though, honestly, I'd fail the test too. When asked such a question, I'd think there has to be an answer and it's stupid of me not to see it and I'd look for it. I think the Precise style's answer is very much where I'd end up.

I'm not using the most popular one (I use Adblock Plus, which iirc most people hate) and I can also freely use Youtube with it turned on. So it's not about ublock.

The project definitely accepts contributions, the mbin devs have contributed to kbin before and a few weeks ago a minor code change was committed and merged by someone other than ernest.

As I understand it, the issue is that people with merge permissions other than ernest are only allowed to merge their own pull requests, not those of third parties, which require a review from ernest.
(At least that's what I've seen explained before, though I haven't seen any proof of it so I don't fully know if it's real.)

This means a majority of contributors can't get their pull requests merged when ernest is gone. Which is why they went and made mbin when he was gone for months last time.

I'm just focusing on clearing spam

This is good to hear, but there's still soooo much spam on the instance, it's clearly too much for you. Can you please accept some of the magazine ownership requests (and moderator requests on your magazines) so we can actually help you with this? I know I've applied to a few, which are still pending, so there's definitely people waiting in line.

Probably american-based like the other commenter says. The American left is the global center-right iirc.

I understood OP to be talking about mobile specifically.

And that's why I said Firefox or Kiwi. Both of those are mobile browsers (the latter is chromium) that support extensions, so you can just install your favorite monkey and stylus and add userscripts/userstyles the exact same way as on desktop.

It's definitely not ideal at all currently. You've already found out how to do it currently, but I'd like to point you towards some alternatives that currently exist to make this easier until ernest adds something official.

Here's the userscripts I know of, each approaches the task a bit differently:

• KES (Kbin Enhancement Suite) has a feature that brings up your subscriptions with a hotkey.
• Improved Channel Select Menu adds your subscriptions and collections to the select channel menu. It's the one with the 3 dots and lines next to your username. This one is the only one that currently supports collections I think.
• Floating Subs List adds a new (collapsible) sidebar to the left which contains your subscribed magazines.

Choose whichever sounds like more your thing, or try each and go with which works best for you.

If you're not familiar with userscripts: just get yourself either Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, or Violentmonkey from your browser's extension/addon store, then head to the script's greasyfork page (I linked you to them above) and click the big green button. For KES it's a bit special but just as simple, just use this link, it should bring up an installation page. After installing KES, you're looking for a wrench next to the user button to access its options and turn the feature on.

Check if any userstyle/userscript is hiding it maybe? It's definitely still there for me, and I'm sure @ernest would have said something if he was A/B testing removing it.

So given Reddit's CEO idolizes Musk and his ideas for Twitter, I wonder how long it'll take for Reddit to adopt this.

Banners for magazines

You should be easily able to add a banner using the magazine CSS. Though that's not being federated currently, I hope magazine CSS federation gets added in the future at least between kbin/mbin instances.

This should give you a banner above the threads section:

main > header {
    /* Change both of these */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}

While this should give you one that also extends over the sidebar:

#middle:before {
    width: 100%;
    display: block;
    content: '';
    /* Change these two: */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}

Changing the #middle to #header would put it above the kbin header (with the logo, the threads/microblog buttons, etc).

Community Engagement

There is an Active People section in the sidebar.

I think the issue here is that kbin simply doesn't have a lot of users yet.

One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight.

This won't improve if you show people "0 people are viewing this thread" on every thread. Actually, it would worsen the impression that the site is dead.

Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances.

The issue is, how does defederating not promote leaving for Threads or instances that federate with Threads?

I think it's a good argument against Threads federating at all, but a poor one for defederating from Threads.

If Threads produces 95% of content in the fediverse, and your instance defederates from them, then your instance just doesn't have access to those 95% of content. Threads and its friends will be a lot more attractive then because it has 19x the content of what you have access to on your instance.

I think this will still lead to people leaving for the threads fediverse.

Also, I get the argument for Mastodon, but does /kbin actually have anything at all to fear here? Sure, the user numbers and content would be way higher than the rest of the fediverse. But Threads is a Twitter contender, not Reddit like /kbin and Lemmy. We will only see their content in the microblog tab.

Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it? I honestly don't see it happen, I feel like this is an imported issue from microblogging platforms that's just repeated here despite being a non-issue for us.

They both federate and they both look the same I think.

However, Mastodon search works by tags iirc. And kbin/lemmy users tend to not use tags. So discoverability is low.
The Microblog section is supposed to add the magazine's tags to your posts there, though I don't know if it currently does. I remember reading issues about it not being the case, but those were rather old, so not sure about the current status.

In the footer you can find a link to the instance's Terms of Service.

Some examples:

• kbin.social
• fedia.io
• karab.in
• readit.fuzz

Some keep it simple, some go full legalese (only one of these four).

I don't know any other social media site that allows you that level of freedom of customization.

Reddit used to have custom CSS, still does if you use the old design via the settings or the old.reddit.com address. Check out /r/steam for a subreddit with heavy custom styling.

Sadly in later redesigns they threw that feature out in favor of a more professional but boring looking uniform design.

Some stuff like spoilers started out on the platform using custom CSS. Spoilers used to be done by styling links pointing to a specific address. The worldnews subreddit uses it to hide paywalled articles.

I just use the Swiss keyboard layout. Here's an image from Wikipedia.

Don't have any experience with any others.

Thing is, as I understand, on kbin, you don’t really get a feed of the people you follow like on mastodon.

There's no dedicated follow feed, yeah, but I noticed posts and threads of followed accounts showing up in my subscribed feed, even though they were made in a community I'm not subscribed to. So I think the follow and subscribed feeds are probably just merged together currently, or rather "following" a user is being treated as just a flavor synonym for subscribing to a user.

I'm not sure what KES

Kbin Enhancement Suite. Inspired by the Reddit extension of the same name (RES).

It's a userscript that provides many opt-in atomic features with a shared api and settings interface.

Current features include:

• hiding various sidebar elements
• bringing up a list of subscribed magazines via hotkey
• displaying the instance next to usernames and magazines
• a mail icon next to usernames which starts a new message when clicked
• notifications easily accessible in the navbar
• softblocking magazines
• syntax highlighting
• fixing broken lemmy code blocks
• and various others

kbin can interact with mastodon freely, so if that's something you want to be able to do easily, you might want to switch over from lemmy.

I was thinking you can probably open the user's profile on lemmy and reply to the post from there, but testing that didn't seem to work. I assume that's just federation taking a while though, so I'd say try it anyway. Searching for @name@usersmastodoninstance I mean. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I can see recent (few hours ago) comments of mine on lemmy.world (and kbin.social is in the linked instances list), so it doesn't look like it actually stopped federating. But yeah, I can't access kbinmeta from over there.

edit: I think I've read, back when ernest was gone, about some big Lemmy instance blocking kbin.social magazine federation because of the bot spam in so many magazines. I assumed it's just rumors, but is it actually real and still a thing lemmy.world is doing?

That's how it was on Reddit, and idk about lemmy, but given you're a kbin user too: the kbin upvote is actually a like button. It's called "favorite". You use boost for your use case.

Maybe in comparison to the US layout? I'm not having any trouble with them.

If you mean the [] (and {}), they just use the right alt key, which is close enough to them.