I really don't get why they're doing this.

Reddit has already showed how much it cares about its users. We've tried going private, we've tried going restricted, we've tried going NSFW, we've tried spamming John Oliver posts, we've tried asking nicely in open letters, and Reddit has consistently given its community the middle finger in every single situation. And now that we've seen the admins change rules, remove mods, ban users, and break privacy laws, the plan is to just do the exact same thing they did before in the hopes that it'll work this time?

If a blackout on the platform was going to get Reddit to change its mind, that would've happened already. The time to induce change was two weeks ago, when the protests had lots of momentum. But it didn't work, and trying to make another stand now is going to be even less effective.

I still think that the best move is to leave Reddit for alternatives like /kbin, Lemmy, and Squabbles. Thankfully, some of the comments on the /r/ModCoord announcement are also saying this. Instead of desperately trying to cling to a platform that doesn't care about you, go somewhere else.

What's this? You're telling me that crypto based on Reddit blockchain points—points from a company that's constantly making rash decisions and removing large features—didn't end well? And people with inside info were able to get out before this concept failed?

Man, if only someone could've seen this coming….

Breaking news: Fossil fuel company CEO who was somehow allowed to run an international climate change summit says that fossil fuels aren't bad. Everyone is befuddled as to how such a thing could have happened.

• White has pawns on the first rank (a1 & b1).
• White has an unpromoted pawn on the eighth rank (h8).
• Black has an unpromoted pawn on the first rank (h1).
• White has three bishops (c1, f1, & d4) while no pawns have promoted.
• Black has two dark-squared bishops (h4 & f8) while no pawns have promoted.
• The black and white kings are touching each other.
• The black king is being attacked but it's white to play.

While that's definitely a notable downside, I think the upsides outweigh it.

For one, being able to see upvotes & downvotes seems to have made a lot of people a bit more thoughtful with handing them out. This obviously isn't the case for everyone — there's still a good bit of downvoting people for disagreeing with the hivemind — but I and others have observed that downvote quality is a lot better here on kbin.social, and I think that vote visibility is a big part of that.

It's also just transparency on kbin.social's part. If votes federate, anyone can set up an instance to view your votes or just go to one that shows them. Someone could literally make a website listing downvotes throughout the fediverse, and there's nothing stopping them. Kbin.social is being transparent about the fact that votes on the fediverse can be accessed by the public, and I have no issue with that.

EDITː Removed a stray asterisk

No, Reddit, I think you also know why.

Nah, just some teen making very inefficient use of his time

Thanks a ton for the update Ernest! It's great to hear from you, and I hope your health improves soon.

That being said, I do have a few things I'd like to suggest.

--

In February, I spent my time visiting doctors and undergoing treatment with medications, which often had very unpleasant side effects. Therefore, I decided to hold off on any major updates to avoid causing even more chaos.

If I'm interpreting this correctly (i.e., that you chose not to give any updates as to prevent people freaking out), I don't think this was the best move. I understand where you were coming from, but (if you were able) some sort of small status update would've been preferable to a month-long silence (especially since you'd previously said that you'd be unavailable for only 2–4 days). A simple "Hey, I'm currently not doing well. I'll get back to things as soon as I'm feeling better," would've at least let us know that you were alive and that the project hadn't been abandoned.

--

Just because it's not visible that something is happening doesn't mean I haven't been doing anything during this time. In fact, two really significant things have been successful, which I've been working on for a long time and which I intended to announce soon once I recover.

I don't think this whole "holding off for a big announcement" thing is a great approach, at least not now. There are currently several issues that we're waiting to see fixed, and we have no idea which ones (if any) are being worked on. If you must wait for a big reveal though, at least telling us, "I'm still working on stuff" would be better than nothing.

--

And finally, I really suggest getting some more admins for the instance. You're absolutely correct to prioritize your health over Kbin; nevertheless, it's far from ideal for your absence to mean that spam piles up, moderation requests lie unanswered, and accounts can't be deleted. We'd all appreciate it if you could have at least one extra person on deck for whenever you're ill or in need of a break.

--

Thanks again for all you do for Kbin, and I hope things get better!

Not sure if I can think of a favorite, but here are a few candidates:

• The fact that Kbin is built for both microblogs and threads. They're neatly distinguished from one another, and the UI accounts for their unique formats. It's very clearly thread aggregation + microblogging, not thread aggregation with microblog posts crammed in there or vice versa.

• The UI, which is what made me pick it over Lemmy. I just find it a lot cleaner and more pleasant, especially with the Tokyo night theme.

• The community around userscripts and userstyles, or at least what there was initially. It's dwindled a ton, but it's what got me to learn HTML/CSS. Being able to make a userstyle is also really nice for improving Kbin's UI to my tastes.

• @ernest. Alongside just being kind, he also keeps us up to date and lets us be involved in the development process. The daily updates on @kbinDevlog have been awesome for seeing and helping the platform develop.

But Eigel isn’t alone in his condemnation of the bill. Another Republican, Missouri State Senator Sandy Crawford, claimed the incest and rape provision shouldn’t pass because “God is perfect.”

“God does not make mistakes. And for some reason he allows that to happen, bad things happen,” Crawford said. “I’m not gonna be able to support the amendments because I am very pro-life.”

You can't help but appreciate the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance you gotta have to say, "God is perfect," and "…for some reason He allows … bad things [to] happen." How delusional can you be to say that raped children giving birth is part of some perfect, divine plan?

Social conservatism is a complete joke.

en passant on croissant
problem solved

On the whole, Kbin and the wider fediverse have been great! I feel that I've been able to engage a lot more meaningfully with others here, though that's likely due to it being relatively small. Likewise, I've been posting a lot more to help this place grow, which has been great.

The whole decentralization aspect is particularly great. From Kbin, I can view threads from other Lemmy & Kbin instances as well as microblogs from Mastodon instances, and it's great to be able to view all of those in one place with Kbin's UI.

All of that being said, there are definitely some growing pains, primarily related to activity. Outside of general communities on big Lemmy instances, people don't post much. This is the case with any social media site — way more people are willing to view or even engage with content than to post it — but I can't help but wish that some of the people voting and commenting on posts would also make some of their own and contribute to magazines. Often, this is due to people just not having ideas for what to post (speaking from experience), but I think a lot of it is people just not thinking to post that cool thing they saw somewhere else or on another magazine.

There are also a lot features that have yet to be implemented on Kbin. Microblog federation is very poor, there isn't a built-in subscriptions panel, the image UI in post creation provides no visual feedback, you can't follow tags as useful as it would be, moderation is still limited unless you're the owner and have access to the magazine panel, etc. Of course, Ernest et al. can only work so quickly, and the progress that has been made so far is great — for example, the crossposting UI is awesome and has helped me discover more magazines — but the lack of features does still impact the experience regardless of what can be done about it.

Kbin is great, and I'm hoping that development continues at the current pace. Above all, I'm hoping that a few more people here decide to post a bit more regularly or at all.

Bad bad bad bad bad bad.

I firmly believe that no instance should harbor a large portion of activity on the fediverse, as it makes it difficult for other instances to defederate from them (as users there would lose a massive portion of the content that they see) and easy for them to take users from other instances by just ceasing to federate (as users on other instances would have to go to the large instance to keep the level of activity their used to). And that's in regards to microblogs like on Mastodon.

With communities, it'd be so much worse.

If Reddit federates, and Lemmy/Kbin instances don't defederate en masse, almost every active community will be on reddit.com. No reason to post on minecraft@lemmy.world with its 5 posts a week when Minecraft@reddit.com has millions of subscribers and thousands upon thousands of active users. Nearly all activity will go to subreddits, the exceptions being from people who have blocked Reddit or on communities pertaining to non-Reddit platforms/instances (e.g., kbinMeta@kbin.social). And if Reddit defederates after that, the threadiverse will be a ghost town. People are already (and justifiably) concerned that too many people and big communities are on lemmy.world. Just imagine Reddit coming in with all of its users.

If Reddit federates, it's just gonna straight up be embrace and extinguish — no extend required.

I prefer Kbin. It has the latest features (magazine collections, an aggregate view that combines threads and microblog posts, more options, etc.) , and I really like the developer @ernest. Aside from just being cool, he posts frequent updates over on @kbinDevlog.

Something worth noting is that Kbin doesn't have many instances. Kbin.social is the main one, and the only other decently up-to-date one I know of is kbin.earth, run by the creator of the Interstellar app for Kbin. On the other hand, Mbin has more instances, as most established Kbin instances switched to it at the time it was created (during which Kbin development had been inactive for about a month). Also, Mbin has a more community-oriented development system tmk, whereas Kbin development is closely managed by Ernest.

Bad idea imo.

Blocking someone means, "I want nothing to do with this person," so it makes sense that you'll be unable to see what they do. This should include direct messages, threads, comments, etc. @PugJesus's idea of a setting to hide votes from blocked users is a great idea, as you should be able to fully ignore someone you've blocked.

It also makes sense that someone you've blocked wouldn't be able to do any 1-on-1 interaction with you. If you've blocked somebody because they're spamming or harassing you, it wouldn't be great for them to be able to DM you.

However, preventing them from voting on your posts is something different entirely, as votes don't just concern the creator of the post and the person doing the voting; they also concern everyone who sees the post. Upvoting a comment is a message not just to the creator but also to everyone else that you like that comment, and the same goes for downvoting. Blocking voting is much more farther reaching than blocking DMs, and with votes being visible on the fediverse, it's a great way for trolls to hide people's views on their posts.

EDIT: Typo

I'd say it's three different things:

1. Many of the people who came from the initial Reddit migration left pretty quickly. This was always going to happen. Reddit alternatives are relatively undeveloped and lack the sheer amount of activity that Reddit has, so people were inevitably going to lose interest and leave after the initial rush of wanting to stick it to Spez.

2. Kbin development stopped for about a month. This was due to the developer, Ernest, having real-life stuff to deal with and thus very little time to work on Kbin. Development has since started back up since then, and you can take a look at the progress over on @kbinDevlog, but that long period of silence led a lot more people to lealve.

3. The people who are here aren't posting a ton. There are a lot of magazines where threads will get tens or hundreds of votes and comments… when someone decides to actually make a thread. Any social media site is going to have more lurking and commenting than posting, but if all the people who want to see content were to post a bit of their own, many of these magazines would be a lot more alive.

I agree: migrating a community is really challenging. I'm a subreddit moderator myself, and when we were initially discussing this stuff, there was a lot of doubt because of how daunting the task is. Mods from other subs see the challenges as reason to not even try. However, I think it's important that people at least make the attempt given the current state of Reddit.

Something that I think people should keep in mind is that this stuff is gradual and doesn't have to happen all at once, especially since the alternatives aren't fully polished yet. Even just establishing a small, active community outside of Reddit (like people have been doing with all these fediverse communities) is a big win.

Some of the best things we can do right now are

• providing feedback and suggestions for alternatives
• making sure alternatives are approachable (/m/quickstart is great)
• simply being active and providing stuff to do here

I think there are a few culprits here.

• Not everything wants to be an everything app. While everything in the fediverse uses ActivityPub, that doesn't mean everything has to aim to be interoperable. I wrote a lengthy rant about this here, but essentially, it's important to have things with a more specific, restricted purpose if we want the fediverse to be accessible. If someone just wants a thread aggreegator (i.e., just Reddit's style of media), they shouldn't be forced to grapple with microblogging features more fit for a Twitter-like. There are some platforms that aim to combine different media types—Kbin/Mbin has both thread aggregation and microblogging, and I've heard that Friendica tries to work well with everything. Even so, if someone wants federated Reddit, they should be able to have federated Reddit, and Lemmy aims to provide that. The same way that Pixelfed (an image-sharing platform like Instagram) doesn't need to incorporate Reddit-style threads or Twitter-style microblogs, Lemmy doesn't have to do it all.

• Federation is still in the works. Something to keep in mind is that most of these platforms are early in development and still working out a lot of bugs. Kbin (the platform I use) is an obvious example due to its currently incredibly spotty microblog federation (tho I've heard that Mbin has implemented fixes to fare better in this regard). We have to be patient while all the kinks are worked out. As much as we all wish it didn't, software development takes time—a lot of it.

• Admins can sometimes be a bit trigger-happy with defederation. I don't think the fediverse has quite grasped that defederation is essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation tools, cutting off interaction with all users of an instance. While there are times where this is justified (even preemptively, such with Threads imo), there are times where the nuke has been threatened over a quarrel between admins or disagreements about other defederations. Hopefully, this will cool down as the fediverse matures, but we'll have to see how that pans out (especially with Threads federation growing ever nearer).

I think there is something to lose though. Aside from being a waste of time, it's a waste of user goodwill. We've already seen how momentum for this stuff wanes over time. If you wait too long before starting the migration process, people just won't be interested. Obviously, it's a gradual thing, but many moderators don't seem to have even started trying.

Which do you think is going to be more effective:

• Spamming your sub with John Oliver shitposts, going private occasionally whenever /r/ModCoord says so, and then making plans to migrate when interest has gone down and people have returned to the status quo
• Starting the migration process ASAP

I see where you're coming from, but this to me seems more like a property of the fediverse than an issue with Kbin in particular. Right now, anyone can make an instance and choose to show downvotes. Someone could make their own instance, gather downvotes federated from other instances, and make a list of who's downvoted who. Being on an instance that doesn't show downvotes doesn't hide your downvotes from everyone — just you and others on instances that don't show them.

On this end, I feel that Kbin instances are just being transparent about the publicity of your votes. If anyone can see your downvotes just by looking at an instance that shows them, I think it's important that people are aware of that. Showing public votes is sort of telling you, "Hey, people can see how you voted on the fediverse," and that's preferable to pretending that nobody can see them.

I don't think kbin needs a mascot, but if it gets one, this should be it! I really like the design on the left, though I would try adding the white reflection from the one on the right.

100%, but the hardness of a cricket ball doesn't change with who's using it. A really really hard ball moving really really fast is still a really really hard ball moving really really fast, so it's not like there's some significant difference in danger posed. And even if there was such a big danger posed by someone assigned-male-at-birth playing cricket, why would it still be perfectly fine for men's cricket?

Right now, boosts increase reputation and downvotes ("reduces") decrease reputation. From what I've heard, this is a mistake from when boosts and upvotes ("favorites") were switched in some way that I don't really understand. Upvotes should be the thing that increases karma, and the fact that they aren't is a bug. The kbin developer has mentioned plans to fix that.

Thanks for the response, Ernest!

This is a good time to start a discussion on how it should work on kbin.social

A while back, I made a thread on /m/AskKbin about this. While it's not solely kbin.social users, there's still a lot of good input, and you could use KES to sort through those who are and aren't on the instance if you want. My two cents are that it's important for downvotes to exist, be federated, and be shown separately so that (A) people can easily express that they feel something doesn't helpfully contribute to the discussion and (B) similar expressions from other instances aren't drowned out.

Downvote federation only applies to remote threads from other instances, without affecting local threads

To be clear, what exactly do you mean by this? Does this mean that downvote federation is one-way (i.e., that downvotes federate from Kbin instances but not to Kbin instances)?

EDIT: Fixed quote formatting.

"company get money → u/spez good" is probably the thought process among the circus ri—I mean board of directors.

>:(

I've been enjoying Kbin a lot, and it's been awesome seeing the progress that's been made over the past few months. We have magazine collections, an aggregate view for threads and microblog posts, awesome crosspost functionality, a marker for new comments, options for the homepage, and plenty more. I've gotten a ton of use out of all of these new features, and I've enjoyed working on my CSS userstyle (something that Kbin introduced me to) to further improve the UI to my tastes.

Because of the issues during the holidays and the previous focus on API and ActivityPub tweaks (as opposed to visible frontend features), a lot of people think that development has slowed down a lot, but I'm personally excited to see further improvements over the coming year. The things at the top of my wishlist are probably improved federation, better features for moderators, and some sort of subscriptions / favorited collections dropdown in the header please ernest I beg you. But of course, development takes time, and I'm happy with Kbin so far.

All of the people there? They seem fine in my experience.

100%. Additionally, there's a difference in magnitude between lemmy.world and Threads. While it's obviously not great that so many of the large communities are on lemmy.world, Threads would have a vast majority of the fediverse's microblog content. If Meta leaves the fediverse later on, people outside of Threads will suddenly lose almost all of the activity their used to and will likely move over to Threads. And Meta, being a profit-driven company, has all the incentive in the world to do this given that it would pull tons of users from competing platforms like Mastodon.

These corporations have shown time and time again that profit is their priority, and that profit explicitly goes against our own interests. You're not going to see Zuckerberg asking people to keep things balanced by joining other instances. He'd love to pull users from Mastodon, Firefish, and Kbin over to Threads, and it's easily doable if he's welcomed with open arms like big instances across the fediverse are doing right now.

… why? They just seem like a Lemmy instance for sports. Who are these people you have issue with? What are they posting that's so bad? Why do these few people justify what's essentially the nuclear bomb of instance moderation?

I think it's that a lot of the people who were protesting have this mentality of, "I'm only protesting if other people are doing it." Unless subreddits have shut down, they themselves aren't getting off Reddit—either because they don't want to have left while their favorite communities continue on the platform or because they don't see the need to continue if they feel Reddit won't change. Many people just aren't willing to stick to their values in these situations if it means missing out or not having an immediate effect.

If you are willing to stick to your values in spite of these, then getting off Reddit (and even encouraging your community to migrate) is a no-brainer. Reddit has disregarded their users' wishes again and again, changing rules and shadowbanning moderators in order to keep their profits. If that's not something you want to support, then you get off Reddit, move to one of the alternatives, and maybe even go outside more.

I guess it's not the worst thing in the world, but who exactly did they think would prefer this? The logo it had was great — no need to change it.

At this point, I'm certain that platforms like Reddit and Discord just undergo random UI changes to keep the UI designers actually doing something.

The issue is that this does affect Kbin because Kbin is a microblogging platform. It's also a thread aggregator, but it has microblog functionality that some people do actually use. Should we not defederate, stuff from Threads will flood the microblogs of Kbin. If your home page is set to use the All Content feed (like mine is), you'll see microblogs from Threads there. This doesn't have as much of an effect as it does on a purely microblogging-focused platform like Mastodon, but it does still affect a big way that Kbin is used.

Unfortunately don't have OP; if I did, I would've just done /kill @e[type=cow].

As for mods, should I use Forge, Fabric, or Quilt?

Upvotes are called favorites on Kbin, so the Favorites feed is stuff you've upvoted.

@Pamasich @ernest Can confirm that this is an issue. I brought attention to it a short while back, and there are also some bugs with the visuals for vote buttons not consistently working as they should.

I'd change a single bag of Cape Cod party-sized sea salt potato chips so that it would be at my current location.

The first request would definitely be a nice setting to have.

As for the second one, I think microblog posts are pretty easy to distinguish from threads already, as everything's organized completely differently. There's no title, the avatar is in a different spot with a different shape, the upvote button is in a different spot, there's no downvote button, etc. I think changing the color would just be visually jarring more than anything.

I think if most people genuinely liked these features, you'd see people say that more when they're being discussed. What's more likely (and what I see way more often) is the second thing you mentioned: that most people don't really care and just go on with life. But if most users don't care, it again begs the question of why waste time making these changes at all. It seems like it's just to keep the UI design team busy more than anything.

Let me try to explain a bit better.

Let's take an instance called Instance A. Instance A is currently on the fediverse, which we'll say is pretty evenly distributed. No instance has a large enough portion of users whereby others would have problems with activity loss if they defederated, which is good. If any instance starts doing things that Instance A doesn't agree with, they can defederate, and less activity won't be much of a concern with defederating from that single instance.

But now, let's take Instance B. Instance B is planning to implement ActivityPub and join the fediverse, and when it does so, it will control 80% of the activity. In other words, it has as much activity as the rest of the fediverse combined.

However, Instance B isn't particularly trustworthy. They don't value the open web like the rest of the fediverse does, their moderation is extremely poor, and they haven't cared for general well being in the past if it meant raising profits.

Here, Instance A and instances like it have two options: defederate immediately, or wait and see.

• If it defederates immediately, Instance A will see some users move to other parts of the fediverse because they're excited about the 5x increase in activity from Instance B. They probably won't go to Instance B now, but maybe Instance C or D. However, a lot of people will be fine. After all, activity is staying the way it is, and Instance B is untrustworthy anyway.
• If it waits and sees, this allows people on Instance A to enjoy and get used to the 5x increase in activity. Not bad so far.

However, let's say Instance B starts having moderation issues (e.g., widespread hate speech and more-than-usual spam) as everyone reasonably predicted. Instance A now wants to defederate.

• If it defederated before, no problem! Nothing needs to be done.
• If it didn't and wants to start defederation now, good luck. Now, everyone on Instance A has gotten used to the 5x activity on Instance B, and you're going to have an extremely difficult time convincing them to cut the activity they see and the users they follow by 80%. Way more people will leave Instance A if it defederates now than if it had just defederated early on.

In other words, if people on Instance A come to rely on Instance B for the activity they're used to, way more people will join the camp of "I'm leaving if you defederate with Instance B" then if Instance A just defederated from the get-go.

Let's take another example. Instance B wants to try to grab a bunch of users, so after some time, they stop federating at all.

• If Instance A defederated, the people there are fine. They never saw stuff from Instance B anyway.
• If Instance A didn't defederate, then 80% of the content that people are used to will suddenly be gone. Most of the accounts they follow will be disconnected, and activity will fall a ton. These users on Instance A will have two options: stay, with a horrendous drop in activity and no posts from the accounts they're most interested in; or just go to Instance B.
  In either case, Instance B will be fine. Most interaction was between Instance B users, so this won't be that much of a deal. But for users on other instances that are used to seeing stuff from B, it'd be catastrophic.

In short, defederating immediately has much smaller consequences than trying to defederate when whoever you want to defederate from controls most of the activity that your users see.