I've seen this article circulating and I think it's a really good cautionary tale. If meta arrives here in full force it's completely going to take over the fediverse, they are already splitting the community as it is.
Note that this is different subject from being anti-corporate. I don't think there's an issue if companies start booting their instances and creating communities for their games or content, whether its EA, Bioware, CDPR or something like pcgamer, LTT, gamersnexus, etc. They want the PR and visibility on a social network but their goal probably wouldn't be take over the AP, and could add some validity and get other bigger names to be active here. That is assuming we want growth at all.
They can't do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.
Now maybe it'll never happen, but it's hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn't mean the project isn't going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.
This is why the big threat is Meta, because they are a tech company. I think any instances spun up by Silicon Valley should be blocked preemptively, but other corpora can have a probationary period.
Honestly, it Meta spun up a Mastodon site to host Meta employees and just have a corporate presence, the way they might have a Twitter account, that wouldn't be an issue at all.
The issue is that they're arriving as platform developers, not social participants. And that's their business.
We should be super suspicious of people showing up to sell the Fediverse, because you can't profit off of community. Community costs money, not generates it. To generate money, you need to exploit people, and exploitation is anti-social. Anti-community.
this is the closest someone has come to convincing me that this would be a big problem. i still happen to think that the smaller instances will be fine in the long run. big consolidated instances are inevitable because people like being where people are. look at twitter and facebook. i suspect the worst problem we'd have is people switching from "facebook" to "federated facebook".
now maybe meta will be able to fuck with the standards body that is responsible for the standard. that would be very bad. then i'd be on board. until they do that, i won't worry. i'm open to having my mind changed, but i've found most arguments to be unconvincing as they basically boil down to "but they're big!"
As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.
I say they can, this is kind of what we have seen with Chrome tbh.
Google came in, made an awesome browser got market majority and started just implementing things to the point where its hard to keep up and the various specification bodies kind of just have to ratify things that is already in the browser or become obsolete, afaik this happened with components such as the in browser DRM which by design makes it hard to implement.
I think this can come true as long as we let them insert themselves into the ecosystem. The difference here is that we have the option to keep our part of the fediverse pristine by not federating with these servers, even if we doom ourselves to obscurity by doing it.
Damn, this article's interesting. I never knew about either Google or Microsoft's actions on that matter. I suppose it's not very surprising anyway. "Don't be evil", LMAO
I was originally in the let’s just sit back and see what happens camp, but this article completely changed my perspective. A very interesting read. I do, however, agree that companies creating their own instances to advertise their products can only be good for us in the longrun.
On a similar note, I was recently reading about Microsoft’s efforts to dominate the whole browser space in the 90s, and I think it’s a very good example of the worst kind of capitalism.
It's really helpful to see a previous example of something like this happening. I was aware of many instances blocking the potential Meta instance but didn't really get the reason why. Now it makes sense.
@Kaldo Thank you for the link, that's exactly what prompted this thread!
I think it's just too hard to draw the line of "not rich enough to be a concern." Amazon instance is obviously bad. Pepsi? If they put their minds to it they could do something lol. Hasbro?? They're greedy enough for sure.
Or what if a company starts as a relatively minor player, but suddenly get big. Steam acquires the entire video game industry or something lmao. Then we still have the same problem, they're going to be motivated differently.
So I say we defederate all profit driven instances. They can still make magazines on our instances, if they can follow our rules. If they have trouble following our rules... Well, then I definitely don't want them in a position to affect the whole Fediverse lol.
I'm still working on it because it doesn't happen to everyone, which is why it's not that simple. Before the release, the problem should already be resolved, so please have a little more patience :)
Thank you for all the work you're doing to improve kbin!
Only somewhat related, but along with periodic logouts, I've noticed that if I interact with a page that's been up for a while (I get distracted, read a bunch of headlines, or going back to a previous page) it will error out and attempt to resend the data when I try refreshing. I can go back to the original page and reload and it works just fine.
@ernest Thanks very much for taking the time to reply. Kbin is great and I appreciate all of your hard work. Take the time you need, no one could have imagined how this instance would take off!
While you're correct, it's just a clunky term. I think some other way to refer to the whole thing will probably come along soon, and in a few years, people will regard saying fediverse the same way we look back on people talking about "surfing the information superhighway" or whatever.
“Internet” is closer to a lot of existing English words than “fediverse,” though. “Fediverse” might get familiar over time, and it might make more sense to non-English-speakers, but I think it’s a more exotic construction than “internet.”
Yeah, but we used to call it the information superhighway and the worldwide web. Internet IS the good term. It may well be that fediverse sticks around so long that we all get used to it, but at the moment, eh. I think if someone somewhere suggests a good alternative, we'll all likely jump on it.
Dang I totally forgot all about that term. Been awhile. Well it eventually reduced to "surfing the net".
The thing about the internet, is it was the thing to make it only one net. Previously there were weird systems like bitnet, VMSnet, where you had to juggle email address encoding standards to get balkanized college campus networks to talk back and forth to each other.
"The web" became the subset of the net, that worked with web browsers. Only one thing.
Was there a "The Facebook" period? Or was that just a movie name?
So then we passed through a period of brands. Reddit is a brand. It is not altogether surprising that people would refer to the fediverse in terms of brands. Lemmy, kbin, beehaw, whatever.
Email and the web had/have specific protocols associated with them. The fediverse has multiple protocols. We're using ActivityPub, which seems to have won as a standard. It isn't exactly catchy or smooth flowing off the tongue.
Ok, if we try to brain crunch all these previous trends, here's what it's going to be called, if it hasn't been already:
THE VERSE
The difference between the fediverse and the universe will be forgotten. Linguistically, people will not keep up with that detail. Only old timers / early adopters will notice that linguistic change.
Possibly, 'verse' will come to be seen as short for multiverse.
I myself was enamored with vampire stuff and in high school met an online boyfriend who really committed to the shtick of being a vampire - though a significantly weakened in bloodline so he could walk in sunlight. I think at one point he was also claiming to be a vessel for the archangel Michael. Please know this was all happening in 2000/2001, so long before Supernatural!
I caught up with him briefly about 15 years after high school, and he's still claiming to be a vampire. A divorced vampire who smokes a lot of weed, but still a vampire.
I went through a period a few years back of catching up with some of my exes, and it was a montage of dodging bullets. One guy was heavily into opioids for pain management after flipping a truck during street racing. One was married to a homophobic Renaissance faire kind of woman while over time, he had come to understand he was bisexual. And then there was the divorced vampire.
I learned my lesson: I don't want to follow up with any of them ever again.
Yeah, I thought for sure he would have outgrown it by then, too. He copped to making up the archangel Michael bit, which surprised me, but he was keeping the dream alive as a vampire.
Ok. I am someone who feels like kbin doesn't really need a mascot at this point in time. It seems really early and tbh the whole thing feels a little forced. Really not into the bird design either. I just don't get it...
But holy shit this new icon on the right has 100% changed my mind.
It is adorable and I'd put that on the first page of my phone home screen, no questions asked.
oh wow i didnt expect that turn around in your comment lmfao. i am so happy you guys like it, i just whipped it up expecting it to fail and was like hmm not so bad, let me send it out into the world and see. its great to see positive reactions :D
Lol this is exactly why I held my tongue for the first few of these posts. My first reaction was a pretty strong NO but I thought, let's let this evolve organically and see what happens. Boy was my initial reaction wrong.
A lot of people on kbin are here because we don't support reddit anymore, and we are especially displeased with spez holding decades-worth of accumulated knowledge and content for ransom.
Even if they're questions which could be easily found on reddit or with a Google search, I think it's a good idea to ask them here (and on other instances) anyway. It will give those who are boycotting reddit a new space to search for answers, it will foster more content creation on kbin, and it will decentralise the combined niche knowledge and expertise of all netizens, so that it is less likely to be lost or held hostage again.
I think it's also a good starting point for anyone who is usually a lurker, but would like to create quality content here to promote community growth. Ask a question you could easily search (or maybe one you already know the answer to?)
We can come together as a community to ask and answer those questions, rather than each user trying to single-handedly create valuable content from scratch, which is much more daunting.
Go to the relevant domain's front page (e.g https://kbin.social/d/kbin.social for kbin.social).
The URL scheme is "https://kbin.social/d/DOMAINHERE" assuming you are currently on kbin.social.
On the right in the sidebar you can see "Domain" and below that options to subscribe or to block.
Really it's the same thing as magazines, just that you generally don't visit the domain itself.
kbin is still in its growing pains phase. there are tons of little user experience items that need to be worked on. good thing is that @ernest is working hard on it.
Does that actually work for you? I'm still seeing posts from magazines on domains that I blocked that way. It looks to me like it only blocks articles, and also link posts to the domain, but not link posts on magazines from the domain.
What I hear is that a copy is still made so the posts made before defederalization is available and basically forks without them connected now at the point of being deferated
I hate tankies myself as well, but I also hate that some communities are only created on lemmy.ml. Plus some official subreddits moved over there as well (and no - no far-left ones).
Uh, they do, actually. The belief is that the USSR was attempting to build communism.
I reject this because they didn’t implement any communist policies, even Lenin himself said what they were doing was state capitalism.
The tankie defense is that they were doing it to later establish communism, but nobody who knows what they’re talking about actually believes the USSR achieved socialism.
They even refused to help Yugoslavia after they implemented an actually socialist policy (workplace democracy).
The situation with the USSR was rather clearly that an authoritarian dictatorship wanted to call themselves a utopia so they said they were communist.
I don’t understand why people give the USSR the benefit of the doubt and assume they were actually trying to do something good.
A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
A system of government in which the state plans and controls the economy and a single, often authoritarian party holds power, claiming to make progress toward a higher social order in which all goods are equally shared by the people.
1 is "real communism." Everyone owns everything (to an extent. Despite assertions to the contrary, there is still private property in communist thought. No, nobody wants to collectivize your towels), everyone has a job, everyone has all needs met and exceeded. Healthcare, transportation, tacos, whatever you need is covered.
2 is what we've seen in the real world because dictators gonna dictate. A group of individuals will get to the "we're in charge and can really do a communism this time!" step and immediately go "but it's kinda cool being an asshole and living in a fuckin' palace, you know?" and BOOM, STALIN.
"Real communism" is something that has actually, literally, never been achieved because it devolves into a dictatorship.
Meanwhile, all captalism devolves into oligarchies but people are fine with that because... reasons?
Problem is that there's a bunch of major communities on that instance. They have no affiliation with the server admins and mostly just chose the instance because it seemed like the default very early in the migration to the Fediverse.
The term "tankie" is a slang term used to describe a person who supports or apologizes for the actions of authoritarian communist regimes, particularly those that have used tanks or military force to suppress opposition or maintain control. The term originated from the Soviet Union's use of tanks to quell protests and uprisings, most notably the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
While there may be varying interpretations and uses of the term, it is generally used pejoratively to criticize individuals who defend or downplay the human rights abuses, political repression, or atrocities committed by these regimes.
I’ve stayed off it since the blackout started, but I did visit a sub yesterday that I used to read regularly about a topic I haven’t seen covered here. I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say, but maybe I’ve forgotten just how much crap I used to scroll through before landing on something decent. Either way, I’m OK with not going back.
I left after a few minutes because it really seemed like no one there had anything intelligent or interesting to say
Reddit has always been that way to an extent. Half of the time it's just people making bad jokes and quirky references that border on derailing the thread to get that sweet karma dopamine boost.
I stayed off of it for a bit after the first 48, because I needed one of the support subs there. Then the Titan news was going on and the wealth of shitty remarks about the people in the sub was too much for me. I get the whole ‘eat the rich’ mentality, but the sheer vitriol people had against someone they didn’t know didn’t exactly paint the commenters in a favourable light.
Hoping that such opinion is tempered somewhat over here.
What's goes around, comes around... That sentiment is not coming from a no where. Note how people didn't say similar staff about refugee boat sinking and actually calling media out for lopsided coverage.
These views only get more extreme as social fabric and economic conditions of the working people degrade.
These people spent more than most people will ever save up in their lifetime for a one time ride in a tube. Money that could go to feeding people, planting trees, etc. They had the US Coast Guard and Navy looking for them with helicopters and sonar buoys. One of them was a billionaire who could have done it right like Victor Vascovo, but instead chose to pinch pennies and ride in the Home Depot special.
They cost society massively, they won't pay shit for inheritance tax, their families will remain wealthier than I can ever dream of being. I make decent money and I drive past houses with river views and hot tubs and pools and boats and all sorts of rich people stuff I know I'll never have, those people can't dream of the amount of money these people have. I feel bad for the kid, that's about it.
Not to mention the fact that they are thrill-seeking at a mass grave where a horrific tragedy occurred. Similar circumstances, too. The first class survivor ratio compared to the "steerage" survivors... Kind of like how we pulled out all the stops for these rich fucks but can't be bothered by a boat full of refugees. It's a sign of the times and people have a right to be livid about it.
Silver lining: if not for these guys creating an actual need for search and rescue, the USCG would have to perform search-and-rescue drills at similar cost anyway.
these are the same morons who like to send everyone under the guillotine... don't ever try to direct them to history book to find out how the guillotine proponents actually ended in real life. trying to have discussion with someone who is 12 yo (mentally at least) is just a waste of time.
I agree. It’s pretty clear that trying to set any record straight (I looked up the philanthropic efforts of that one gent who went with his son) in these situations is a pyrrhic victory. At best you may have offered clarification on some inaccurate talking point they picked up that now someone else might not repeat further, but it only pokes the bear.
It’s taking some time to get over the withdrawal, but despite the fact I really liked some subreddits, staying off has become the best internet habit-related choice I’ve ever made. The low signal-to-noise ratio you mention is one big factor. The other is I needed some obstacles to ease of use to make my choices more deliberate. I have found alternatives, sure. But now I spend maybe a tenth of the time on social media that I used to when I was redditing every day.
I actually disagree with this being an example of why seeing downvotes is bad. I also think it's good we can see which mod is doing the banning; I've noticed the standard lemmy moderation log doesn't show that. This kind of transparency allows for poor behaviour to be discovered more quickly and remedied with less speculation about who did what.
Edit: For example, I can also see this person has gone through your entire comment history and downvoted every comment. I didn't see any troll-like comments from you though. I hope this person is doing OK mentally, but this isn't OK community leader behaviour on their part.
Edit 2: I can also see that OP has downvoted every single one of the other person's comments too. On the same day as the other person did to OP. Uh... I don't know what conversation spawned this entire exchange, but I dont think that downvoting all someone's comments outside of their contexts is productive.
Edit 3: And for the couple of other accounts who are going through the post histories of the people involved and downvoting because of this thread? Also not helpful behaviour. Be better.
This is exactly why transparency is great. These people are ridiculous and lose credibility. Keeping everything visible is the best defense against manipulation
Agreed, if somebody is spam downvoting comments (Which is honestly quite the pathetic act), then people should be able to see that, and block/report them
Unfortunately, blocking doesn’t actually do anything aside from stopping up from seeing their comments. Someone I blocked is still able to see, reply to, and downvote my posts. It’s frustrating, to say the least.
On the other hand, if one of the actual spammers were to just block downvoters and their downvotes, this would allow them to more easily evade detection as bad faith content creators. It's hard to say how that should be remedied beyond more moderation, which would require more unpaid mod labour and time. And relies on moderators always making fair and sensible decisions.
People and communities are tricky. Why do we all got to be so damn tricky?
The whole moderation process is still getting a revamp. There's a fair few black holes where the system needs to be tightened up. Being an open source project it just all takes time. Be great to get it to a polished level where blocking / banning feels refined :)
Yeah, and being able to see who downvotes you will hopefully lead to people being encouraged to actually leave a comment if they disagree instead of just downvoting everything they disagree with they see. People still are not aware that downvoting is public, so still fall into old habits of using downvote as a I disagree or I don't like you option.
I avoided some of the finer details because the downvoting isn't the point - the bans are. Especially from so many magazines.
But - to give the full story:
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I downvoted something of his - I don't even remember what, exactly. I made some comments and noticed when checking replies later that I had been downvoted on a bunch of them.
Curious, I checked to see where the downvotes were coming from - all of them were this guy. I checked their profile and saw that I had already downvoted one of their posts, hence my guess as to why he was mad.
Usually I'd let these things pass, but I found it a bit childish and I was feeling petty, so I did it back to them. You can judge me if you like; I'm not exactly proud of stooping to that level but I was already in a sour mood that day.
I haven't been on Kbin for a couple days, but I checked back this afternoon and saw 18 messages, all of which said "you have been banned." Evidently they got angry and decided they weren't going to let me participate in any of their communities.
I got pissed at this and banned him back - which is, again, perhaps childish on my part. At the same time, I've been a mod for a long time across multiple platforms, and I have a low tolerance for BS at this point. I've seen folks like this start spamming communities in retaliation to perceived slights - something like that happened on the first forum I ever ran, way back before Reddit even existed - and frankly this guy has already proven to be acting in bad faith.
One reason why I didn't delve into details is because this is going to devolve into petty he said/she said arguments, which frankly isn't the point.
The point is that this guy got pissed off at something I did and decided I wasn't able to participate in any of their communities anymore. Like I said, I was only subscribed to one of these communities anyway - so it didn't really affect me - but I worry what would happen if these weren't small communities. What happens if a powermod that runs multiple big magazines decides to ban people for perceived slights?
I know this was a issue on Reddit (awkwardtheturtle), and I'd hate for it to be an issue here, too.
It actually seems to be central to the point. If I take your account as the truth, it appears that by using the dislike functionality to leverage your personal UI extension side effects, you have actually had the effect of delegitimising this person's contribution. Because downvotes on kbin also affect everyone's content sorting.
This person may have felt harassed by those actions, even if it wasn't your intent. While you have asked for us to excuse your actions as childish retaliation and an attempt to defend your communities from bad actors, you have also cast the exact same actions from the other person as being "troll powermod".
That seems problematic. If i were in your position, I would look at modifying the tampermonkey extension to provide a hide function which only affects your client. And also retracting downvotes which it created, as a show of goodwill. I hope you can both get past whatever it is that happened here.
Downvotes not having reasons attached allows for a lot of room for misinterpretation and uniformed assumptions. Instead of hiding the downvotes, perhaps we could all just be more mindful of how we use them.
I hope you all have a better time from here on out.
I have a Tampermonkey extension which hides posts after an upvote/downvote. Because of this, I'm voting on basically everything in my subscribed feed.
I do want to call out some concerns here. I'm not excusing op's behavior, but indiscriminate downvotes is the kind of thing I'd say we don't want here and I'd say you're both in the wrong even if one of you is farther down the path.
The script is causing poor behaviour by subverting the purpose of the up/down vote system.
The downvote button should be used to indicate a post doesn't add to the conversation. It isn't a dislike/disagree button, your supposed to comment in those situations.
I try to put effort into my comments, when they get randomly downvoted for no reason it can be upsetting.
Obviously you upset the mod and they overreacted, but your behaviour triggered the event.
All of the downvotes/upvotes are public via the ActivityPub protocol. That's part of the system. Hiding it on the front-end for kbin only obscures the mechanism.
That's just the limitation of the current technology.
I feel the downvote is equally as important as the upvote, sometimes bad posts and comments just need negative reaction
First and foremost: Thank you @ernest for your incredible work and dedication.
Pay yourself a salary. Whatever you feel is appropriate & covers your personal costs. Developing and maintaining /kbin seems to be a full time job (or at least will become one)
THANK YOU FOR YOUR TRANSPARENCY. That's why we are here. This builds such a huge trust with the community. Whatever you need, we'll be here.
Lemmy can see kbin magazines. I’m on a lemmy instance right now.
kbin.social itself has had some federation issues in the past month, but I think that’s more growing pains of a new platform than anything inherent in the system itself.
Oh, maybe that's where I got the idea that Lemmy couldn't see them, I've only been on the fediverse for a couple weeks. People were saying Lemmy couldn't see kbin, but I didn't realize that was temporary.
There's some suspicion that the specific instance lemmy.ml is rejecting incoming requests from kbin via a configuration, but lemmy.world, lemmy.ca, beehaw, etc. seem to be federating well enough.
Not really suspicion at this point. They are proveably 403 rejecting requests from the KBin useragent. You have the letters "kbinbot" anywhere in your useragent (case insensitive) you ain't getting content.
As a bonus they're still sending out stuff to instances though. But since KBin can't then resolve it it amounts to a DoS attack as the messages just build up in KBin retry queues.
Noted and I'll make sure that my list is clear of .ml subs. Honestly, with the "not so much rumors as facts" information swirling around out there about the devs, I'll not be surprised if they're intentionally tanking (pun intended) any competition that isn't parroting their views.
Yeah this seems to be a temporary thing. I've been following the federation issues we've been having on kbin and I'm hoping they can resolved as everything stabilizes.
I'm unsure if the ingest from kbin > Lemmy was working because last I checked they were returning error responses on requests that had "kbinbot" in the name.
Yeah that doesn't look like it's federation correctly. I'll raise it again with some of the other devs, maybe one of them will know. Pretty annoying ;(
I'm unsure if the ingest from kbin > Lemmy was working because last I checked they were returning error responses on requests that had "kbinbot" in the name.
It's only lemmy.ml, not all of lemmy, that's returning a forbidden response on requests from kbin.
I hope kbin gets federated by lemmy.ml it seems they have been rather trigger happy with blocking. It seems we will have to wait and see which instance is the most free.
A lot of the original Lemmy instances are quite trigger happy. It’s one really nice thing about the new instances with new admins who block but still prefer not to unless it’s really necessary.
i kind of knew what i was signing up for with this lemmy ecosystem, so at worst people will just switch instances and the most free gain the most leverage, it beats this hopping from one centralized service to another by far.
I’ve been all-in on the fediverse since early 2021, including the threadiverse. It may not be the future for the masses, but I think it might be the future for people who value freedom and autonomy.
there are like 10 times or 20 times more users online than back when reddit even started, i think we will be fine even if it wont be for "the masses". I respect that you got in early, a true pioneer.
Sprog is the cat we all know and love
I've asked myself: 'will he make the move?'
Sprog's poems make life a little more fun
Hard to accept this joy might be done
Signs of life are a blessing from above!
I find the kbin website to work rather well, it’s good work. Also the backend seems stable for now, I didn’t notice any hiccups recently when commenting. If things can be made simpler and more intuitive over time, it does seem like a viable alternative.
Why do we want another reddit? Why don't we want something better/different/more engaging than reddit? Reddit has made the mistakes, we can learn from them. And even better, we don't have angels to make happy at the end of it all. Just us.
In my opinion, Reddit did many things right and there is no shame to copy what Reddit did right, and now we have the chance to improve where Reddit did not want to improve on.
I don’t understand what people are seeing in terms of issues. Maybe once or twice my comment or someone else’s seemed to not be fully synchronised. And Kbin had some notification issues (processing backlog), but the federating problems seem far worse on the Lemmy side. Lemmy has outright protocol bugs.
I wonder if a lot of people are seeing the Kbin error message and assume that is “federation”, when really it’s a host of things that still need to be ironed out site-wise. For example, there is clearly a maximum file size allowed for a photo, but I don’t think there’s a warning coded in there yet, so try to post something too large and you get a site error, reduce the size and it works 100% of the time. That’s not federation, that’s simply Kbin being very new.
And lo and behold it seems like Lemmy’s fault the Kbin isn’t federating properly (blocking inbound Kbin traffic).
Thanks man. I had to crawl through some filthy comments, I'm pretty sure it was worse than whatever those chumps on Juno Beach during the D-Day Normandy invasion had to endure... You got a medal for me? Let's see what you have.
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