Fiber arts. SoCal. Social justice. Snark.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, it’s a 100% self-imposed moratorium just because I don’t want to appear to have a modding bias. There was a period where I was trying to enliven the community by posting a few articles each day, especially from sources not submitted to our mirror community on lemmyworld, but then my real life job was draining my soul for 3 straight months, so that endeavor fell by the wayside. Also, unless it’s an article dumping on one key player, our user base doesn’t tend to comment on news articles. It’s a weird phenomenon I’ve observed.

    I will add though that my hobby communities that I belong to never make it to my feed, which seems to imply that those communities are stagnant, too. I would probably comment more in those spaces, but it’s rare that new threads are created, I guess.


  • Ah - yikes. I was really not anticipating you seeing my mini pity party here, ernest. I know you and the team have been really working hard on kbin and I’ve seen massive changes with the modding panel and functions as a result of the latest instance update. I have a ton of respect for what you all are accomplishing on the fediverse and I was originally a very vocal early adopter after the first reddit migration in June. I trust that you all are shouldering a major responsibility with this instance, and I’m grateful for the fediverse at the very least. I hope when you read this you didn’t get the sense that I had any criticisms of kbin as the particular user interface I use for the fediverse - just that even across the federated instances (mostly lemmyworld), my ability to doom scroll for hours a day outpaces the userbase.

    I think I feel a personal sense of failure(?) or disappointment(?) that I wasn’t able to usher in a similar sense of community and activity to the sub I moderate compared to reddit. I think moving over here, it felt like my sub would be the natural beneficiary of inheriting the volume of users and content that existed on reddit, but our mirror community on lemmyworld got the lion’s share and it isn’t even scratching former reddit heyday numbers. Also, the people in their community are… suspect. I don’t care for the comments section.

    I hope you didn’t take umbrage to my comment. I’m eager to see what new features the kbin dev team will roll out.


  • Haven’t even directed my browser to reddit since migrating to kbin in June, but it’s never fulfilled the same dopamine hit for me. I’ve supplanted my online addiction with YouTube now, which because of what I flit past and what I actually pay attention to has been extremely educational because of the algorithm!

    Pretty early on, I ended up becoming the head moderator for a magazine on kbin, which then made me feel an ethical sort of guilt about commenting there anymore, so really the only place I wanted to be part of the dialogue is now gone for me here on kbin. Our magazine has a much larger mirror community on lemmyworld, so our magazine is barely holding on by a thread even after an initial burst of new subscribers. Discussion is almost non-existent in the magazine, and I’m not sure if it’s because we tried to instate common-sense community guidelines early, or if because we missed the momentum of growing userbase after the rexxit since most people migrated to lemmyworld instead of kbin.

    I’m not even sure why I keep my account. (I know I sound like Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh in this post.)





  • I appreciate that ringing endorsement, but I feel like it’s a losing proposition. So perhaps this is the insight I can share: this maybe speaking only about this one instance (kbin.social), but users can technically submit content from outside the magazine, or from never even having visited the magazine for a first time, so I’m feeling hard-pressed to hold content submitters accountable to the magazine’s rules or side bar.

    And for federated users, I think it gets even more tricky because the sidebar may not fully load up (maybe they see the description but none of the rules or community expectations) if they federated prior to those being published; and not at all if they federated or created accounts after the pinned post was published.

    I’ve stepped back significantly from policing submission rules because of this, but I’m beside myself with the quandary of how do you grow a community? > You create a place for healthy discourse by adding structure. > You create structure through moderation and community guidelines/rules. > Rules are de facto unenforceable because of federation. > How do you grow a community then?






  • There is a single user who is posting dozens of times a day in my magazine (for which I am a moderator). Another mod on my team has raised the alarm about the user, like surely they’re going through a personal crisis to be so terminally online and posting so frequently.

    I’m realizing now they might be a bot. The sources of articles are varied, and quality of article is like 30/70 serious/bullshit. The user occasionally comments on the submissions and I’m realizing the comments are generic rabble rousing instead of being complex language or referencing complex details from the articles shared.

    Could anyone speak more to how to identify bot accounts? Many thanks!



  • I understand your larger point that technically Ernest could pull the plug on kbin.social (the instance my magazine is on) and we lose it all. In that sense, he is sole proprietor and owner of all the magazines on this instance. I get that point.

    But to your point about who is going to pick up and move the magazine to a different instance, that’s me or one of my colleagues on my mod team. I’m listed as the owner of the magazine, and until the next core rollout, I technically have higher privileges than the rest of the mod team (which I didn’t expect nor ask for).

    I’m responding to your idea here, which is if our instance ever got the plug pulled on it, I personally will not take the time to uproot the data from the magazine and set up shop elsewhere.