sab

sab, 6 months ago

I think joining an instance that's defederated from Hexbear and Lemmygrad could be a good starting point for an enjoyable experience here. You don't even need to hold right wing opinions, being an anti-authoritarian leftist is enough.

sab, 6 months ago

I was agreeing with you that there are too many tankies and Putin fanboys around here, making it sometimes annoying even if you don't belong to the idiot brigade of right wing Americans.

sab, 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Since Kbin was still at what Ernest refers to as a proof of concept stage when the project reached peak popularity, and I think at the time (and probably still) it was really not particularly easy to run an instance of. That's probably part of the reason why so many of the early Kbin instances died off.

According to FediDB, the biggest instances other than kbin.social are Karab.in and Kbin.cafe. Karab.in is run by Ernest who also runs kbin.social - it's just the Polish instance. As developments are happening fast (see !kbinDevlog), it's to be expected that instances not run by Ernest lag a little bit behind in development.

It seems the administrator of kbin.cafe is @barista. I'm not sure how actively maintained it is.

Considering the fast pace of development, I think it makes sense for the time being to either use kbin.social or an mbin instance.

sab, 6 months ago

Oh shoot - I read your post, but then I just skimmed it again after checking fedidb and lost track of the context.

I think the point still hold that kbin is not at a point in its development where it makes too much sense for people to open independent kbin instances. By the way I understood it, mbin seeks to patch some of these problems, while the kbin development is focusing on improving the infrastructure on a deeper level. The drama is a bit silly, but I think forking is not always a bad thing and the differences in development between kbin (deep changes to the code base) and mbin (patches to make things work) are enough to justify parallell developments for the time being.

It's also worth noting that not a single new kbin instance has been created since September this year - I think for now you're unfortunately not likely to find an actively maintained instance beside the two run by Ernest.

sab, 6 months ago

Not that you'll be able to see content posted to Threads from Lemmy anyway - you cannot post threads (in the Fediverse sense) from Threads (the platform), and microblog posts are generally not visible from Lemmy. So it might make sense as a matter of principle, but it's not going to change anything for you.

sab, 6 months ago

The link in the notifications would always lead to the first page of a comment thread. If the linked comment was not on the first page of the thread, you'd have to look for it manually.

sab, 6 months ago

Not sure if this is a known bug, but any time I'm signed in and try to enter the "all content" view (on any page) i get the "We are working on resolving the issues" error.

If I sign out of kbin it works fine, so it seems related to the fact that I'm signed in as me.

Sorry for reporting bugs here - I realize it's a bit lazy and not ideal!

sab, 6 months ago

Of all the points on which I support children's rights, their right to own a cell phone is not exactly a priority. I'd say it should be up to the parnts to decide whether their kids should have cell phones - at which point it's the right of the parents, not the children.

That said I think there might be something broken about how it is solved now - I would probably be in favour of a law banning certain types of software on the phones of children, such as abusive social media or games with microtransactions.

sab, 6 months ago

Then take a look at comparative incarceration rates around the world, and ask yourself who these numbers are made up by.

It's pretty clear who is picking the cotton even today.

sab, 6 months ago

I think we just happen to have created a system that favours narcissist man childs. Anyone somewhat decent will net get that rich in the first place.

sab, 6 months ago

Unlike the Vatican of course, which has plenty of space ;)

sab, 6 months ago

Bitter coffee is also cheaper for a reason, as you can use worse beans and burn them. These beans need to be used as well, so it's a good thing people like it bitter.

When it gets weird is when people pay for expensive bitter coffee.

sab, 6 months ago

And discoverability, it still has ways to go on the social networking integration. I still don't know how to go from watching a peertube video on a peertube instance to liking/boosting it on another fediverse service, even if I wanted to.

That said, I have been following Peertube for a couple of years, and the progress has been incredible. It makes sense to create a solid foundation for video playback first, and a lot of people seem to not understand the extent of the innovation Peertube has made in that regard. Social media tools obviously come second after providing a solid service, and I have no idea it will develop in great ways in the coming years. :)

sab, 6 months ago

This is largely my experience as well, but when I told someone that I had this impression they looked at me like I was from a different planet.

I think those of us using the Fediverse as our primary social media platform might be a bit sheltered from just how bad it gets elsewhere. Sure, things can run hot here as well - it's Israel/Palestine after all - but I've never seen anything remotely as bad on the Fediverse as what is promoted by the fucking owner of X.

That's not too say the hateful shit doesn't exist here - it's just not actively promoted, which makes all the difference in the world.

sab, 7 months ago

Very weird, considering federation with Mastodon is working. But it seems there are systematic problems with the federation communities, not only to lemmy but also to mbin (or, at least, fedia.io).

Here's a tiny overview of delays as of the time of writing:

Kbin.social:

!Ukraine_UA (last thread 20 minutes ago) :

• sh.itjust.works: 2 days
• lemmy.world: 2 days
• fedia.io: Not federated

!tech (last thread 2 hours ago):

• sh.itjust.works: 2 days
• lemmy.world: Not federated (!?)
• fedia.io: 2 days

!news (last thread 12 hours ago):

• sh.itjust.works: 3 days
• lemmy.world: Again, not federated
• fedia.io: 2 days

Fedia.io:

https://fedia.io/m/FloatingIsFun (I have no idea what this is, but it's the most active fedia.io magazine with the last thread 9 hours ago):

• sh.itjust.works: ~1 day (newest thread is missing)
• lemmy.world: Up to date
• kbin.social: Up to date

So, based on this limited sample, it seems like Kbin/kbin.social is currently struggling to federate its communities to both Lemmy and mbin, and that it has been having these problems at least since this weekend. Mbin/fedia.io is not having the same problems, or at least not to the same degree.

sab, 7 months ago

This is already supported in kbin! Press your icon in the top right corner and enter the settings, and select the languages you're interested in under the "Filter languages of threads and posts" setting (somewhat counter-intuitively under the "Appearance" heading). Seems to be working great for me at least :)

sab, 7 months ago

At least where I'm from, the teenagers are beginning to shy away from emojis as well, with the exception of one or two that are considered culturally acceptable. Which ones they are seems to fluctuate, so if you're out of the loop you're better off not trying.

sab, 7 months ago

I find it easy to read, but in terms of constructive feedback I would try to write the letters larger. As there's a lot of whitespace in the speech bubbles, the text could be made quite a bit bigger without even needing bigger bubbles.

sab, 7 months ago

I don't know anything concrete, but Ernest is giving a lot of updates over at /m/kbinDevlog. He's apparently testing the API implementation more or less as we speak. :)

sab, 7 months ago

I used to like it, now I avoid it at all cost. The problem is that the algorithm is never neutral, even if it's made with good intentions it can be gamed and manipulated, and it traps you in a spiral where what you interact with is what it shows you is what you interact with is what it shows you...

I never really used Twitter or any similar service, so I never had this happen to information shaping my opinions. I did, however, feel that the music I was listening to became shaped by the Spotify algorithm, and that I ended up listening to less rather than more diverse music than when I was sticking to vinyl. That's absurd - you have all the music in the world at your fingertips, and you end up limiting yourself more. That was my experience of course, other people probably have different ones. Anyway, I cancelled my subscription.

If there's a risk for music streaming services narrowing your field of vision, platforms shaping your opinions are downright scary. Algorithms can be tricked into showing you content, which is what russian troll farms excelled at. Tech bros tend to believe the solution is in adding more and more complexity to the point where nobody understands how it works - this is the opposite of how I want the content that helps informing me about the world to be curated.

I'm obviously not diagonally opposed to algorithms. The choose your own algorithm approach might have some merit, and I look forward to seeing more experimentation with this in the fediverse. But I do not trust corporate interests with any of this - nor do I trust a bunch of tech-optimistic rich man's sons.

sab, 7 months ago

I quite disagree. Of course interoperability is not going to be a perfect one to one - that's in the nature of these being different services. You don't want threads from a link aggregater taking over your microblogging feed.

Yet it's normal for Mastodon users to join in on the conversation here. From their perspective they never left Mastodon - from my perspective, I never left kbin - and you, for your part, think it's all happening within Lemmy. But it's really not. So these things happen all the time, it's just that you don't necessarily notice unless you check the domain of the person you're responding to. Mastodon users of course often leave in the @-tags, making them a bit easier to identify.

Lemmy is a bit more isolated than Kbin, as it is not integrating microblogs at all. That's a decision on the side of the developers, not a weakness of the ActivityPub protocol.

sab, 7 months ago

What do you mean kbin doesn't really support microblogging?

The only real issue I can think of right now is that it does not display videos or polls yet, but for being an early version of a software developed primarily by one guy as a hobby project those are pretty minor omissions.

sab, 7 months ago

The option to keep followed users and subscribed communities separate in the feed will be great!
Really impressed by the pace of progress lately - it's very much appreciated. You're building something special here. :)

sab, 7 months ago

Somehow it strikes me how two copies of the Quran and a box of dates takes up half the space of the evidence. Makes you question the thought process behind it all even more. "Sweet, juicy dates - yup, we can firmly establish that arabs have been here!"

sab, 7 months ago

Very excited that there is progress towards enabling the API! @hariette has done a great job with her Artemis app, will be great to be able to use it properly. :)

sab, 7 months ago

The situation is complex, but one of the few things that are relatively simple is the matter of Netanyahu. He should have been in a prison cell rather than in office for a while now.

sab, 7 months ago

It bothers me more than it should that people think the fucking Israel Palestine conflict is somehow even remotely simple. This shit goes back thousands of years, it didn't start in 1947 no matter how much the British fucked up and made everything worse.

These morons will proclaim that this is a genocide in one sentence, and shout death to Israel in the next.

If you truly care about genocides it shouldn't be too difficult to see the problem here.

It makes me almost miss a few weeks ago when I was being called an antisemite any time I wrote anything critical of Israel online. These days I apparently don't care enough because I don't believe in answering one genocide with another one.

That said, the Israelis did repeatedly vote for their genocidal leaders. Anything they've thought about the people of Germany throughout the decades should be coming right back at them.

sab, 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

This I am not so sure. We are talking about a country that managed to develop nuclear weapons in secrecy, and whose secret service is known for killing off people all around the world. It would be surprising to say the least if they didn't participate in information warfare at all.

That said, American evangelical Christians seem happy to act as their disinformation footsoldiers free of charge...

sab, 7 months ago

Since the URL is pretty vital for federation (users from federated instances would follow for example [email protected] in order to join a community), it's probably worth getting the domain up and running before you start federating anyway. Even though it's a frustrating wait for sure!

I think there's potential for a bird instance - I've heard rumours the birdwatching community is pretty active over at Mastodon.

sab, 7 months ago

I also think Kbin is way ahead of Lemmy in terms of integrating with the Fediverse at large. It's not perfect for sure, but in my opinion it builds on a better starting point. The real test of Mastodon integration for me will be when Mastodon finally introduces groups - it will be interesting to see how they integrate with communities in the Threadiverse.

I honestly also struggle to get an overview of what's happening in Lemmy development, to me Kbin seems more transparent. But both platforms are obviously fine, and Lemmy is still more mature for sure.

sab, 7 months ago

She last wrote in the end of September that she has been having health issues, but that she wants to get back to working on Fediverse stuff. I guess her health problems might have gotten worse again, or maybe life just got in the way.
https://tech.lgbt/@hariette/111111786205981208

In other news it looks like Ernest is currently experimenting with potentially enabling the API on the main branch of kbin:
https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/635737/kbin-RTR-16-Update-on-kbin-social-performance-improvements-considerations-for-enabling

sab, 7 months ago

Ernest is looking into enabling the API this weekend, which would be the final step needed in order to get Artemis up and working. :)

https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/635737/kbin-RTR-16-Update-on-kbin-social-performance-improvements-considerations-for-enabling

sab, 7 months ago

My advice is to join a cental hub in the network if you're interested in a very broad range of content, and a specialized hub if you have more particular interests. The relationship between for example lemmy.world and startrek.website is a great example.

I think a lot of the perceived complexity of the fediverse is that it's not just a social network, but a network of social networks. You'd want to start out on a node that reflects your interests; if that interest is merely "more content", make it a central one.

If you want to be on a tiny or self hosted Mastodon instance it might even make sense to build the base of your network on a central network hub first, and then migrate when you already have rooted yourself in the network.

sab, 7 months ago

Are there any good and well known examples of this at a large scale, beyond Wikipedia and it's projects?

Not that Wikipedia is not evidence in it's own right that it could work, I'm just curious.

sab, 7 months ago

That's a great example. Expensive to operate, entirely non-profit, and been around since forever.

sab, 7 months ago

Really though, read up on the Columbian peace process of you're genuinely interested in peace, war, and human rights.

These issues are complicated as fuck, and there are many bad things to be said about the Colombian context for sure. But their peace treaty if a marvel of modern diplomacy; it's to diplomacy what the Hoover dam was to engineering.

sab, 7 months ago

I see I use both in my comment - it's one of the embarrassing pitfalls I keep falling into in English when writing in a hurry. Oops.

sab, 7 months ago

I dislike all the algorithms being pushed on Spotify. I just want to listen to albums and that's it.

The radio function is nice in theory, but it tries too hard to guess what I want to listen to to the point where it felt like any radio I played ended up being variations of the same thing. It is just not a good way to discover new music in my experience.

These days I have cancelled my subscription in favour of actual radio. Fip.fr is brilliant.

sab, 7 months ago

Yeah, when I tried YT music a couple of times (unpaid) I actually did discover some new stuff, partly perhaps because they have no idea what I usually listen to. Then again I have come to dislike Google enough that I'm not going to pay for their services no matter how good some of them might be. Once YouTube stops working with adblock I'm out of there too.

sab, 7 months ago

Good to know, thanks! I tried it out back when it was known as Wimp, but jumped off the wagon during all the controversies. I'd really rather not use anything owned by Jack Dorsey, but I might be a bit too principled for my own good haha

sab, 7 months ago

The worst thing that can happen for a project like this is that it becomes a burden on its maintainer. Success in open source can be a double edged sword.

So indeed, super happy to hear that it is still bringing joy!

sab, 7 months ago

Science is also creative writing. We do research and write the results, in something that is an original product. Something new is created; it's creative.

An LLM is just reiterative. A researcher might feel like they're producing something, but they're really just reiterating. Even if the product is better than what they would have produced themselves it is still more worthless, as it is not original and will not make a contribution that haven't been made already.

And for a lot of researchers, the writing and the thinking blend into each other. Outsource the writing, and you're crippling the thinking.

sab, 7 months ago

But that sounds like work. It's a lot easier to shit on other people's volunteer efforts than to actually contribute anything constructive yourself.