Prouvaire

@Prouvaire@kbin.social
3 Post – 54 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

Now the creator has gone inactive and hasn't been around for for 4 days.

Question from someone who might want to start a couple of magazines/communities: Is being away for four days long enough to be considered inactive?

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Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan's ability to save the human race wasn't the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn't feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

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Agree, but it's not a question of him appointing moderators. It's a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn't been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn't enough interest in the userbase at the moment.

However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don't appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.

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It would be nice to see people engaging with old posts when they stumble across a community and subscribe to it.

One barrier that will make this difficult is that instances only get a community's feed from the moment they first subscribe to it, if that community's home instance is on another server. So if you're a user on - say - leminal.space and you're the first person on that server to subscribe to - say - Musicals@kbin.social then you will not see any of that community's old posts, only posts created (or boosted) after you've subscribed. This makes it difficult to engage with old content unless other people on your instance have been members of that community for much longer.

This is one of the issues with the fediverse model that doesn't exist in a centralised model like reddit. And - sadly - smaller, niche communities are the ones most likely to be affected by this limitation, because they're the ones least likely to be federated to a large number of instances. It makes smaller, less active communities look even more inactive than they actually are.

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Yes.

Troy is the first Sinead O'Connor song I ever heard. It's filled with so much love and pain and rage. I was too young to understand it, but I listened to it a lot. It remains one of the most powerful artistic expressions I've encountered. Here is a live performance and the music video.

I just love how pervasive the hate

The opposite of love isn't hate. It's indifference.

I've been thinking of starting a theatre-focused kbin instance, but realistically not until the platform has matured, as my sysadmin days are well, well, well behind me. In the meantime I've started a Musicals magazine on kbin.social.

@AnonTwo @ernest is aware of the issue: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/80

Hopefully this will be changed soon, as the current system is confusing can be off-putting.

Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven't tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don't know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.

It so happens that I had a discussion with someone about this very issue on the kbin codeberg some months ago, starting with this comment here:

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/455#issuecomment-977168

But while I've also gone back and forth on the question, I've basically settled on the view that public downvoting encourages _responsible _downvoting, and the risks associated with downvotes being public are exaggerated given how much else of one's activity is public anyway.

This is one of the biggest issues and barriers to discoverability with the Fediverse in my opinion.

As I understand it, unless an instance has already subscribed to a community (magazine in kbin parlance), then in order to make that community (magazine) appear in your own instance, you need to:

  • First search for the community (including the community's home instance) name in the magazine search function.
  • The search will come up blank, but the act of searching for it will trigger a backend request for your instance to start federating content from that community. However there's no message to tell you that it's doing that. It just looks like that community doesn't exist.
  • Further, it may take up to several days (in my experience) for federation to start, ie, you have to repeat the search for the community and only then can you subscribe to (follow) that community
  • And when it does start, it only starts grabbing new content. So first it looks like the community doesn't exist, then it takes a long time for content to appear, and then it looks like the community is sparsely populated unless you go back to the community's home instance, rather than staying in your own instance, to catch up on old content.
  • Further pinned posts aren't federated (at least between lemmy and kbin I believe), so you can't even rely on a "here's what you need to know" introductory post to orient new members.

Contrast this to reddit, where (because it's a centralised system) searching for a subreddit produces immediate results, you can join a subreddit immediately, and you can immediately see all current and past content for that subreddit. Much more intuitive and useful to users.

Unfortunately the activitypub protocol that underlies lemmy and kbin doesn't appear to have been designed for reddit-like communities in mind. Ie communities that tend to feature long-form content, posted relatively sporadically, and where having access to the community's archive is very useful to members. It works somewhat better for twitter-like communities where it's easier to jump in "mid-stream" and - because posts tend to be only a few words long - you're more likely to start seeing new content after only a short delay.

I wish that this is something that's addressed at the Fediverse level.

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Ernest hasn't posted since last week, so hopefully he's okay. He's alluded to having a fever and having to figure out kbin's finances (and a bit before that, mentioned that he had to take on another job to cover the bills), so I'm guessing life has gotten in the way of kbin. It's worth bearing in mind that all the threadiverse projects are basically someone's hobby at the moment.

Some of us _aspire _ to dwelling in a basement!

Magazine moderators have the ability to delete posts in their community (also pin/unpin them) and ban users from their community. I don't think it would take a huge amount of time as a rule - it's just a matter of checking in regularly (I suppose ideally several times a day) to see if there are any moderator actions that need to be taken.

Beyond that, moderators typically play a role in curating content and setting/monitoring community guidelines. But we've been talking about people being appointed solely to carry out the more technical/administrative functions in certain magazines to prevent the recent flood of spam. Ie, people have said they'd be happy to ban spam accounts without necessarily taking on the curation of the magazine in question.

When I was younger I had a crush on Jane from Speaker for the Dead, so I wouldn't be weirded out by that person, cause I'd probably be that person. 😅

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The "sort by hot" algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the "sort by hot" view. For larger communities, where the threshold for "new" and "hot" may be set higher, so it doesn't matter so much. (I don't know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like 'hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community'.)

You're not the only one who's picked up on this:
https://www.primetimer.com/quickhits/the-west-wings-hartsfields-landing-has-never-made-any-damn-sense

If you watch the show (and I've watched it a lot) you can tell that Aaron Sorkin wasn't writing to a detailed plan. I think a lot of his ongoing storylines grew organically (and were often turned in very late, which ultimately led to him being sacked from the show), which meant he sometimes repeated, or retconned, beats, or made other mistakes.

Hartsfield's Landing was probably named after Hart's Location, another New Hampshire town that has often votes at midnight. I recall reading a story that, because of the weather, of the three towns that usually do vote at midnight only Dixville did so this year.

edit: Hrrm. Turns out that's what the linked CNN story actually says. Serves me right for not RTFA.

It means you weren't the first person on your server to subscribe that community/magazine.

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Movies:

  • Rebel Moon. If you gave an AI the prompt: "A Star Wars movie written and directed by Zack Snyder but with all Star Wars copyrighted material disguised" this is what you'd get. I know that's exactly what the movie was, minus the written by AI bit (though I wonder), but it felt almost like a parody of itself.
  • Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Mediocre, except for Patrick Wilson who elevated every soggy line he was given to read. They desperately wanted to recreate the Thor/Loki dynamic to the point where I thought in one scene I actually heard Aquaman call his brother "Loki".
  • One Life. Schindler's List if Schindler's List focused more on the red tape needed to rescue people from the Nazis, and Oskar's twilight years. Kidding aside, a decent movie, but more on the "worthy" end of the spectrum than the entertaining.
  • Poor Things. The best movie I've seen this year. May still be true 51 weeks from now.

TV:

  • For All Mankind. I enjoyed the "retro" early seasons more, but it's still a very watchable show, and one I still consider to be a Star Trek prequel if I squint and look at it slightly sideways. They certainly seem to be heading towards a Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies scenario this season. One of the few shows I'm watching week-by-week instead of saving up and bingeing.
  • A Murder at the End of the World. Well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s.
  • Bodies. Decent crime mini series set across four time periods. I thought the more modern settings and characters were more interesting than the oldey timey (wimey) ones, but the show managed to bring all four storylines together in a pretty satisfying way.
  • Silo. Halfway through. Pretty good, but maybe not as good as I heard it was.

It didn't help that they cast people who sounded like they'd done a couple plays in high school and never had a paying acting job in the decades since.

I'm only talking about the English speaking actors of course.

@Lilkev You may want to edit the link to Hariette's kbin page to https://kbin.social/u/hariette (instead of https://kbin.social/u/@hariette)

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An interesting gambit.

Arts and culture is a very broad topic area. It covers (among other things):

  • performing arts (eg plays, musicals, film, TV, radio)
  • visual arts (eg painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts)
  • literature (eg books, poetry, the various literary genres)
  • design (eg fashion, typography, architecture)

Mastodon has several instances focussed on different aspects of arts & culture, eg:

Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren't). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.

Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:

Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren't necessarily comprehensive. So it's worth spreading your search over several tools.

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Mine's more like slash fiction.

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Agree with all of the above.

Another thing I wish kbin would do, is that while kbin picks up mastodon posts (ie microblogs) - albeit not as seamlessly as would be ideal, as Mr Murdoch points out, it doesn't go the other way. When I post a thread to kbin I always attach relevant hashtags, but my Mastodon account does not pick these up. Mastodon does have the ability to follow kbin users, but not pick up kbin threads based on the thread's hashtags.

That doesn't work for me though. Entering

https://kbin.social/tag/sondheim broadway

produces zero results. What am I doing wrong?

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Thanks Daredevil. Hmm. While the following search:

https://kbin.social/search?q=broadway+sondheim

does produce my post, the search query seems to act as a logical OR rather than a logical AND. Ie, it returns posts with tag #broadway OR #sondheim. Is there a way of constructing a search with a logical AND?

Further, this search:

https://kbin.social/search?q=broadway+lesmis

should produce any number of posts, but returns nil results.

Eg, this post is tagged with both #broadway AND #lesmis, but does not appear:

https://kbin.social/m/Musicals/t/553845/Have-There-Ever-Been-Two-Productions-of-the-Same-Show

And there are a number of posts tagged with #lesmis: https://kbin.social/tag/lesmis which, one would assume, should also appear in the search results.

So searching for single tag queries seems to work well, but searching for text queries is inconsistent.

Unless... using the search bar ONLY searches the body of the post, rather than also the associated tags? Whereas searching for tags ONLY searches for tags attached to a post, but not the text of the post itself? If so, then it would be great if kbin had the ability to do logical AND searches on tags to help narrow down results.

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It's something that's been requested:

https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/352
https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/551

I imagine it's a matter of getting around to adding this feature.

Thanks DD - will raise a Codeberg issue in the next day or so (just in the middle of work right now).

I'm a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I've only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the "had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn't get out of Bronze league" sense of suck.

But I love it. It's my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

Thanks very much for this. I've been hoping that raltsm4k updates Floating Subs List to incorporate collections, but they haven't been active since mid-last year.

Given your code is partly based on this script, I wonder if you might consider modifyingraltsm4k's Floating Subs List script so that collections appear as part of the sidebar. As a fallback, maybe modify your script so that collections appear before magazines rather than after. This would make it easier to use both scripts, one to access magazines in the sidebar, and the other to more easily access liked collections.

If you enjoyed On the Basis of Sex you should check out RBG, the 2018 documentary about Ginsburg. Ginsburg also appears as a character in a couple of episodes of the fifth season of The Good Fight, played wonderfully by Elaine May.

I think I preferred the early Wes Anderson, before he went full Anderson. Check out Rushmore and (what I think is his best movie) The Royal Tenenbaums.

No worries. Even more unfortunately:

https://kbin.social/u/kostyassmchuk

https://kbin.social/u/nipa

Wonder if these all originate from the same IP address and, if yes, if there's a way of banning accounts from specific IP addresses.

That's good to know, thanks.

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

It's all a little confusing. Here's my understanding of how things work, though I can't claim to be an expert so may have gotten something wrong:

  • A community's home instance will always have the complete history of a community/magazine. So if you click on a lemmy community or kbin magazine and end up on that community/magazine's home server (eg lemmy.world or startrek.website or fedia.io - the first two being lemmy instances and fedia being a kbin instance), you will always see everything, including any pinned posts. The critical distinction is that you're viewing the community not on YOUR server (eg kbin.social), but on the HOME instance of that community (ie lemmy.world or whatever). Here's an example of a community on another server: https://startrek.website/c/startrek
  • If you are NOT on that community/magazine's home instance, ie, if you're on kbin.social, but someone had already subscribed to that community/magazine from your server (ie someone from kbin.social subscribed to fediverse@lemmy.world or whatever) than you will be able to see all posts from whatever date that initial person first subscribed. So if you are on kbin.social (like me), and looking at startrek@startrek.website while on kbin.social then you will see all posts from whatever date someone from kbin.social first subscribed to that community and kicked off the federation process. I assume this also means that you will see any pinned posts, as long as that post was created after that first federation. Here's an example of that startrek community, but viewed on kbin.social: https://kbin.social/m/startrek@startrek.website
  • However if nobody on your instance has subscribed to a community/magazine before, you first need to subscribe to that community/magazine from your home instance (ie kbin.social), and from that moment on only new posts will be seen in the feed for that community while you're on your server (ie kbin.social). If you want to see the complete history, including any posts pinned before that first federation, you need to visit that community's home instance.

Not sure if I've explained all this clearly, it's probably something best represented using diagrams.

Anyway, the way I've tried to address this for my little Musicals community, is to include the pinned post (in my case a "Welcome" post), and where to find the complete history, in the community description, like so:

For lovers, performers and creators of musical theatre (or theater). Broadway, off-Broadway, the West End, other parts of the US and UK, and musicals around the world. Welcome post: https://tinyurl.com/kbinMusicals See all/older posts here: https://kbin.social/m/Musicals/

@Lilkev I didn't realise that the URL was inserted automatically. Not sure if it helps, but on lemmy the link also points to the same incorrect URL (ie a URL with the @ sign in front of the user name instead of without the @ sign).

Adding a !Musicals@kbin.social identifier didn't work, so removed it from the post.

how I sign up to mastodon instances and whatnot with kbin

As I understand it, you don't sign up to a mastodon instance with kbin. Rather, kbin has the ability to act as a way of following fediverse users and hashtags in the same way as mastodon does.

In other words, if mastodon is the fediverse's version of twitter, and lemmy is the fediverse's version of reddit, then kbin is a combination of the two.

However, while kbin's lemmy/reddit features are maturing nicely, the mastodon/twitter functions are still pretty embryonic. (Bear in mind that kbin is a young project that for most of its life had only a single developer.)

For example:

  • On kbin you can follow fediverse users by clicking on the "Follow" button in their profile (similar to the way you can follow users on mastodon), but I don't think there's a way of having their posts appear on a timeline yet.
  • Similarly, while you can create a magazine that follows certain hashtags in the "microblog" section of a magazine, you can't currently do that as part of your kbin personal profile in the way you can choose to follow hashtags on mastodon and have them appear in your feed. (And the propagation of hashtags between kbin and the wider fediverse seems to be haphazard at the moment in any case.)

What I would recommend for now is to create a mastodon account on a mastodon instance of your choice, and treat the two ecoystems as largely independent, until kbin's feature set matures.

I was going to start a @theatre magazine but someone beat me to it, though they haven't been seen since (no threads, no comments, and barely any communities that they're following other than the four they started themselves). So I started the more focused @Musicals instead, which is growing slowly.