Removed Kbin.social communities

Hello everyone,

Recently we have been dealing with a lot of spam from the kbin.social communities. There is a bug in kbin where moderation tasks are not federated to other instances. That means even if a moderator over at kbin removes a post, it will still be visible on Lemmy instances and it’s up to the instance admins to clean it up.

There have been talks about this in the Lemmy admin channels with some instances considering defederating from kbin.social - and others who have already made that step.

We don’t want to defederate, because we know this would impact the kbin community greatly - but we have to do something. That’s why we have currently removed most of the kbin communities from Lemmy World, making them unavailable to our users. But the kbin users can still view and interact with our communities and users.

This means that those spam-accounts will stil be able to post in our communities too, but at least it makes the task of moderation already a little bit lighter on our team. But it was either this or defederation. The moderation tools on kbin are in an even worse state then Lemmy’s.

We will keep monitoring the situation and will keep you up to date should anything change.

We hope you understand and support our decision.

The Lemmy World team

TairikuOkami, (edited )
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

kbin.social seems to have gone too pro-fasicts, pro-Ukraine, pro-LGBT. I do not like hypocrites. It turns out to be just like reddit.

EDIT: It seems that this platform has gone full pro-fascist, pro-Ukraine, pro-pedophile, pro-war, just ban me, so I can get over it.

Geert,
@Geert@lemmy.world avatar

Pro-Ukraine? Pro-LGBT? And that’s a problem to you? gtfo

TairikuOkami,
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

Yes, imagine that, as a gay, I do not like fascists and pedophiles and I do not care how many dislikes I get for it, it is just WRONG!

Mistic,

It’s interesting how one entity is being described as both pro-fascist and pro-LGBT. What an oxymoron.

Also, what an irony you call them hypocrites whilst being one yourself, because:

  1. Learn what fascism actually means
  2. Stop putting your hand in other people’s pants
  3. Realise that step 2 is exactly what fascists are known for doing

Maybe then you’ll stop being one.

TairikuOkami,
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

Ukraine literally uses fascist an nazi symbols and according to CNN the are fascists, so … whatever makes you happy hypocrite.

thenightisdark,

Can’t believe I’m responding to a troll but Russia is a bit behind the times Ukraine is no longer run by Hitler and the Nazis.

Times has changed it is no longer 1940. Back in 1940 it’s true there were Nazis in Ukraine. I repeat back in 1940.

There are Nazis but they’re in the United States not Ukraine.

TairikuOkami,
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

Can’t believe I’m responding to a dumb troll but Ukraine uses enriched uranium ammo banned by every civilized country, because it is used by terrorists only, that alone makes it evil.

btaf45,

The attack on Ukraine was literally a fascist imperialist war of aggression like Poland in WWII. Putin is the fascist and the fascists are all supporting the Kremlin.

TairikuOkami,
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

There was no attack, it is a defensive operation allowed by treaty signed beforehand to denazify Ukraine, but you are obviously one of those people, who do not care, that Russian kids were killed for 8 years, which was acknowledged by every country in the world , even by UNICEF, because Russians are not human, just like jews were not in WW2, right, hypocrite.

btaf45,

Defensive operations, as you are aware Ivan, do not involve sending troops to another country to attack them. Russia agreed in a 1995 treaty to never attack Ukraine. When Putin kidnapped thousands of Ukraine kids, did he sell them to pedophiles to finance his war? Why are Russians meekly allowing butcher Putin to shit all over their country? All Russians ever do is eat Putin’s shit over and over.

WAR IS PEACE. OFFENSE IS DEFENSE.

ChunkMcHorkle,
@ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world avatar

just ban me

Or maybe grow up and take charge of your own life instead of acting like a dick and waiting to see if anyone scrambles to eject you, lol.

TairikuOkami,
@TairikuOkami@lemmy.world avatar

I will, I will celebrate every dead American, Ukraine or NATO soldier, I kill during my duty, because killing evil is considered heroic.

candle_lighter,
@candle_lighter@lemmy.ml avatar

How can you complain about Lemmy.world being pro war and then say this statement? Please seek therapy.

MCForTheBest,

Damn, I main Kbin 🙃

Kevnyon,
@Kevnyon@lemmy.world avatar

Same here, on desktop it is my go-to. Sync doesn’t support it yet, so can’t use it.

MCForTheBest,

You can technically use Artemis for kbin though at the moment it only supports artemis.camp (another kbin instance) and I don’t know currently how long it is until other kbin instances work as well.

fushuan,

alexandrite.app is pretty great for me for desktop, you can log into any instance from it and the interface is quite awesome.

Gabu,

So that’s why the modlogs were going ballistic. Oh, well, I hope things are fixed soon.

Flax_vert,

Hopefully this is resolved quickly. We are stronger together.

ViewSonik,

Manager of Managers (MoM) will be required long-term it sounds like… thanks for the good work all.

grue,

That makes sense, to be honest: add a layer of complexity in the software (such as federated instances), add a layer of management.

SwallowsDick,

Yep; ideally, each person should be able to specialize. I hope there are enough well-intentioned and knowledgeable volunteers. Over reliance on free mod labor is part of what ruined Reddit

menemen,

Understandable, but sucks. Hope it won’t last long.

RxBrad,
@RxBrad@lemmings.world avatar

I’ve definitely noticed the spam, and had to unsub from a couple kbin communities on my own. I’m pretty sure !fediverse was more spam than not-spam…

Elevator7009,

Thanks for not cutting us off. I sub and post to a lot of lemmy.world communities, some of them small, and wouldn’t want to have to stop contributing or make a new Lemmy account.

Chickenstalker,

We have always been at war with Kbin.

_Mantissa,

bro what

Transform2942,

It’s a reference to 1984

fkn,

Can we stop stickying these posts to the instance? We are super appreciative of the hard work you guys do, and you are super transparent. I personally trust you guys to make good decisions and this could be a support community sticky instead of an instance sticky.

V0lD,

No, this should be an instance sticky since it significantly affects all members of an instance. Community stickiies are easy to overlook

fkn,

It really doesn’t… it doesn’t affect me at all.

DigitalPortkey,

“this thing that doesn’t affect me at all annoys me and shouldn’t be visible”

There’s other people here who like the transparency. Literally all you have to do is keep scrolling…

fkn,

And all you would have to do is look it up? This isn’t a good argument. What is being gained here by posting about it? This isn’t a secret. They aren’t pulling a fast one over on you.

You know what would be great? If there was a way we could… I dunno… collate all of these kinds of posts into a kind of… group… where like minded people could… get together and talk about it. I wonder if someone like this could exist. What do you think?

DigitalPortkey,

Do you believe that on a social platform like this, democracy is the best policy when it comes to what is shown and what is not?

fkn,

No. Not in the slightest. If you think that we should vote to defederate from csam before we defederate from csam you have something wrong with you. If you say “that’s not what I mean.” No. That’s exactly what a democracy is.

Should we have a responsive, responsible team that makes decisions for us? Yes. Is it a democracy? Fuck no. Is it nice that they listen to their users wants and needs? Yes. Should their be transparency in the process? Yes.

citrusface,

It must be so taxing to have to scroll down 1/4 of the page to see new content.

fkn,

Awesome response!

citrusface,

🙏

DigitalPortkey,

Ah, the Internet equivalent of “I know you are but what am I?”…

fkn,

If I am being treated like a child then is it not expected behavior to see my response as childish?

amio,

That sounds reasonable. Thanks for not just slamming the door, frankly I wouldn't have blamed you if the reason is "hey, this adds a shitload of work". It's neat that this is an available workaround.

ShadowRam, (edited )

So, that means no one from Lemmy.World can see https://kbin.social/m/functionalprint anymore?

This thread is now broken?

https://kbin.social/m/functionalprint/t/353785/Replacement-wheel-for-a-child-s-RC-car

Maybe I misunderstood, is it some kbin communities (for now) or all?

ChunkMcHorkle,
@ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world avatar

I can see kbin.social/m/functionalprint just fine from my own lemmy.world account, if that helps.

This doesn’t involve all of Kbin, just a select few communities that have been hosting waves of spam.

ShadowRam,

Thanks for checking that.

Yeah, it does appear to be select communities so far. I know a few were spammy and even I blocked them.

Hopefully kbin developer will get a chance to update the tools/site so us moderators can help out and keep the spam controlled so it doesn't spill into other instances.

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Hi - mod of a small kbin.social mag here - @13thFloor - and a lemmy.world user. Is there anything we can do on our end to help mitigate the problem, or make it easier to flag spam that makes its way to Lemmy? I'd be more than willing to include a note to the lemmy.world admins if a spam post is deleted off of a mag I mod here- just need to know who to contact.

Side notes - Ernest (kbin.social admin) just responded on the spam issue here. The community has been actively working over here to flag and remove spam accounts (I've personally flagged close to 100). According to the most recent news from @ernest earlier last week, we've got a software update incoming, and a magazine cleanup in the works that will hopefully make an impact.

thisisawayoflife,

How is it so easy to create spam accounts with Kbin? What kind of account validation is implemented? Email? Enforced 2FA? Just a curious dev who hasn’t started their own lemmy or Kbin instance yet.

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

There's just email verification at the moment. 2FA is on the roadmap, but I'm not sure if it will be in the next release. Here's the kbin codeberg site for more detail.

HowdWeGetHereAnyways,

It’s a start, but 2fa can’t stop spam.

If one can automate account creation including saving totp secrets, you suddenly have 2fa authenticated bots able to send spam.

Maybe you could get around that to some extent by leveraging sms verification during account creation, but how do you set that up to prevent burner numbers? Or smishing?

These are hard problems to address

elscallr,
@elscallr@lemmy.world avatar

Not to mention there are a lot of fediverse users who moved here because they didn’t want to give away personal information like their email and phone number.

Venat0r,

Also a lot of real people might want to sign up without needlessly giving away personal information like thier phone number…

Here’s one (possibly dumb?) idea I just had: implement a shadow ban for a period on new accounts so moderators can check what they’re posting before they’re allowed to post.

iquanyin,
@iquanyin@lemmy.world avatar

i like this one! seems smart.

OpenStars,
@OpenStars@kbin.social avatar

When I signed up it was email + captcha. I cannot find even an option for voluntary 2FA.

I don't know the details but people who wanted to work on Kbin and looked into it say that it is a much less developed platform overall (i.e. not fully a beta and more like still in alpha, e.g. lacking a true API), but it does offer benefits socially (to further disconnect from the originators of the Lemmy software) and to have another codebase that offers federation.

thisisawayoflife,

Yeah it seems like it’s grown organically from a POC, which I think is sort of what Lemmy did too. I feel like this concept is ripe for a platform which has been designed from the start then implement.

anlumo,

Lemmy is also more of alpha-quality software. The admin tools are pretty much non-existent. On my own instance, I’ve had to go into the database to fix issues a lot using straight SQL, and I have like ten users on the platform. One of those issues caused my admin account to no longer being able to log in, another caused the whole instance to be down.

OpenStars,
@OpenStars@kbin.social avatar

Oh that's interesting. Kbin lacks a formalized API (or at least it did - possibly this next update was going to address that and yet Ernst did say something about shifting priorities so maybe that's bumped now) so I got the impression that Lemmy was further along, but yeah they both have a ways to go to catch up to the decade or so of work put into Reddit. Although the latter manages to find new & innovative ways to break itself constantly anyways so maybe both Kbin and Lemmy will meet it somewhere in the middle sooner than we might think? :-P (and yet slower than most people would like I'm sure:-D)

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Heya! Not really. It’s just a few communities that are being spammed really hard, so only those are removed. I think the work you’re doing by flagging these spam accounts is already very helpful to Ernest and his team. He himself was kind enough to join us in this thread and give us some more information. For now all we can do is wait…

Thank you for your patience and understanding :)

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Hi - got a note from a user that @13thFloor isn't federated over there any more as of yesterday. Looks like @scifi, modded by @inkican, was as well. Was there a reason these communities were defederated?

antik, (edited )
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Defederated is only on instance-level. A community can not be defederated, but it can be removed or purged. So far the only action we have taken is removing some of the Kbin communities (or magazines as they are called on kbin).

Your community is still available on lemmy.world/c/[email protected]

If you want to see which instances we are currently defederated from you can look that up here.

So no, we didn’t block your community. But I do see some posts are not showing up on Lemmy World. Not sure why that happens, there haven’t been any changes on our end. We will update to Lemmy 0.18.5 tomorrow which resolves some federation issues.

Edit: It actually was removed. now restored. Passed info to other admins.

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Thanks for the update. I'm still getting the following error across multiple browsers when I hit https://lemmy.world/c/[email protected]:

Error!
There was an error on the server. Try refreshing your browser. If that doesn't work, come back at a later time. If the problem persists, you can seek help in the Lemmy support community or Lemmy Matrix room.

Hoping it gets resolved with the update - was worried we'd screwed something up and gotten on your removed list.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Huh. I’m sorry I have to check what happened but the 13thfloor was actually removed. I must have missed the ‘removed’ tag earlier. I restored it and I’ll make sure the other admins know not to remove that community. So it should be ok again.

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Thanks much! That fixed it for the 13thFloor. FYI, looks like @scifi is still blocked, and they're generally pretty cool without spam issues.

antik,
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Restored that one as well !scifi

Arotrios,
@Arotrios@kbin.social avatar

Awesome - thanks!

Hegar,

Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about what's going on.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Quick reminder that kbin was still fairly early in development when the reddit exodus began and sped things up much sooner than anticipated. A few teething issues are to be expected and Ernest, the dev, has been open and communicating about what’s going on.

Given that kbin is written in PHP, I honestly don’t see much of a bright future for it. It’s not like hobbyist developers line up to write PHP.

MrSpArkle,

For me the tell was the lack of an API.

manapropos,

Modern PHP is pretty pleasant once you learn the syntax IMO. It’s not 2005 any more

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Modern PHP is pretty pleasant once you learn the syntax IMO.

And yet whenever programming languages come up, Rust comes out as a more popular whereas PHP is the “My job requires it but it’s not what I’d do for fun” language.

zeppo,
@zeppo@lemmy.world avatar

Far more people already know PHP than Rust, though. They’re also very different languages. While the syntax for Rust is nicer than other languages used for systems programming, there are people who question whether it is really appropriate for a web app. Certainly nobody questions whether that’s what PHP is good for.

TCB13,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

Only if PHP and Rust could even be compared. lol totally different tools for different jobs.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

And yet one is used for kbin and one is used for Lemmy and somehow both kinda achieve the same things of a Fediverse Reddit-like.

Anonymousllama,

The system is based on the bleeding edge of the PHP stack, using PHP 8.3x and Symfony 6 as the framework. There’s plenty of devs out there, especially symfony ones. The main issues I’ve found is pulling in people who are interested in the ActivityPub side of the project.

I think a few more months and most of the user-facing UI/UX issues will be improved. The moderation side, along with quality of life admin tools are definitely lacking though.

Seraph,
@Seraph@kbin.social avatar

Thanks for not defederating us! -Kbin users

Ernest is working on a major update for Kbin but it might be still a couple weeks out.

lwadmin,
@lwadmin@lemmy.world avatar

We are well aware of what’s going on with kbin and the development team. That’s why we don’t defederate because we have hope that they will fix things soon.

ernest,
@ernest@kbin.social avatar

I apologize for causing you trouble. I'm trying to resolve the situation as quickly as possible, but apart from the usual spammers, there have also been organized campaigns where, for an hour on Sunday mornings, our instance was flooded with spam from hundreds of accounts. This, of course, is causing federation issues. I've changed my priorities regarding the roadmap, and additional tools will be released soon. I will also ensure additional moderation. I will also get in touch with admins from other instances - my absence was due to personal issues I mentioned recently. Thanks for your understanding, and best regards.

antik, (edited )
@antik@lemmy.world avatar

Hey Ernest,

Having dealt with spam waves ourselves we are certainly understanding of the situation! I read your status updates and what has been going on. That is also why we choose to close the problematic communities/magazines instead of defederating.

We really hope that you find the time and peace to resolve these things. There is no bad will here, we know that these things need time. If there is anything we can do to help feel free to reach out.

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