I recently made a major update to my Improved Channel Select Menu userscript, which adds your subscribed magazines and liked collections to the channel select button in the header....
I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thanks again for all you do for Kbin, and I hope things get better!
I'm not really a fan of nuggets in general. I've always been much more of a tendies human. By and large, I find the texture of processed chicken to be extremely revolting. Even as a kid, I thought they were vile and Dino nuggets always seemed to be particularly low-quality....
100% with you on tenders being better than nuggets. In general, nuggets have always been kinda eh (sometimes solid, sometimes awful), and dino nuggets are the worst of their kind.
Interesting. I might be somewhat of the opposite — I think barbecue's great, but I'm not a fan of barbecue potato chips. I'll maybe eat some if there's nothing else around and I'm hungry, but I've just never liked them.
kbin.social is being overrun with spammers. Can we disable registrations on this instance so they can't keep creating new accounts? Every day I log on, I have to spend the first 20-30 minutes, reporting and blocking a bunch of new accounts....
This might be a good idea, at least until Ernest gets back. To my knowledge, he's the only instance admin, so as long as he's inactive, the spammers won't get dealt with (especially on magazines he moderates, like /m/tech).
Ideally, there could be another admin or two to deal with this stuff when he's not available, but ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
A serial comma (or Oxford comma) is an optional comma used before the last item in a list. For example, "bread, butter, and tax evasion" uses a serial comma, whereas "bread, butter and tax evasion" does not....
I think the point is more that without the serial comma, the last two items in the list aren't separated like the others, which (imo) feels like omitting the last bullet point in a list.
This has been an issue since the beginning of Kbin tmk, but when you make a post, it won't appear under sort by hot unless it has an upvote. This means that if someone forgets to upvote their own post, it just won't appear on the default sort. There are plenty of posts I've missed because of this....
Given that we're so small at the moment, why should a post need an upvote to be at all visible on the default sort? It can the only post of the past two weeks, but if there's no upvote, it doesn't get seen. It's very impractical.
And even if we go with this logic, why should the criterion for a post being seen be whether OP remembers to upvote their own post? It doesn't make sense. If you think that posts should only be seen if someone opts to go through new and give it an upvote (because otherwise it's not a "hot" post), OP shouldn't be able to do that.
Right now, we have a system where a major factor in post visibility is, "Did OP remember to click the upvote button?" It's just not beneficial.
Yeah, having posts automatically upvoted by OP would be great. I think that Lemmy automatically starts with an upvote count of 1 regardless of OP's vote, so I think Kbin should do the same. I get that Hot is meant to factor in activity and time, but it just feels super off for the only post in the past month to not appear. Surely a post that was made an hour ago is hotter than a post was made weeks back.
I've been using kbin since the Reddit exodus and I still don't really know the path to finding my way into a specific community/magazine I've subscribed to. I usually search for the name using the search function, then hope I find a thread from there in the results where I can just click directly into it. Surely there must be a...
You can go to "Settings" or "Profile" and you'll find a subscriptions tab.
Alternatively, you can install a userscript that adds a faster way of accessing them. Here's one I recently made and one made by raltsm4k.
This past weekend, I tried my hand at JavaScript. I ended up making a helpful userscript for Kbin, and I'm working on adding some features like settings.
Since Geometry Dash 2.2 released, I've been playing around with the game's level editor. Currently working on my first level, and I'm pretty happy with how it's going so far.
Sweet. I've found that trying to make solutions to problems is always a great way to learn more about a programming language or to introduce yourself to a new one. I imagine you'll definitely learn a lot from this (alongside the more important achievement of making something you can use to maintain your health).
Sounds fun. I've messed around with Godot a bit myself, though I unfortunately don't have the work ethic to make a full game out of it. Great to see more people using the FOSS option!
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.
One of my most wanted features as of late has been for the channel select menu to have my subscribed magazines and liked collections. Right now, it just contains some general feeds, but I thought it'd be super useful to also have your mags and collections there for easy access! However, given that Kbin development priorities are...
A super helpful feature that PieFed (a new fediverse thread aggregator like Lemmy & Kbin) has is an "Add Remote" button on its communities page. This button allows you to get a community on another instance to appear on your PieFed instance (and thus get the PieFed instance to start getting posts from that community)....
i get all kinds of new communities by just clicking into the remote community, and then clicking subscribe
Maybe you misunderstand what I mean. Right now, if I were to create a new community on lemmy.world called /c/thatonekirbymainisawesome, it wouldn't show up if I searched for it here on the kbin.social magazines page. That's because kbin.social currently doesn't know that this community exists and thus isn't fetching anything from it. The same goes for any other two instances. If you want a non-hypothetical example, go to sh.itjust.works and search "geometrydash". You won't find /m/geometrydash (or at least I didn't at the time of making this comment). If you go to https://sh.itjust.works/c/geometrydash@kbin.social, you just get an error, because sh.itjust.works doesn't know about geometrydash@kbin.social yet.
To fix this, someone needs to essentially tell an instance, "Hey, this community over here exists, and you should start fetching stuff from it." On Kbin, this is done by putting the community's address in the general search bar. So if I were to search "thatonekirbymainisawesome@lemmy.world" on kbin.social's, that community would finally appear, and I'd be able to subscribe from it and see any posts made after that point.
What I'm suggesting is that instead of having to type the full community address in the normal search bar (which can be unintuitive), there should be a dedicated interface for adding remote communities (i.e., letting your instance know that communities on other instances exist). PieFed does this with its "Add Remote" interface, and I think it'd be nice for Kbin (and Lemmy as well) to have something similar.
True, and the same happens here on kbin.social. However, in the case where there isn't a link to automatically do the search for you, I still think it'd be helpful to have something more intuitive than the community only appearing when the exact address is put in the general search bar.
EDIT: To give an example where this would be useful, what if you're someone on a newer Kbin instance and want to add an existing community? You'll have to know the method of doing it, and if you don't, you're out of luck. Having a dedicated button and interface for this would make it much more intuitive. When I saw PieFed's "Add Remote" button, I immediately got what it did, whereas I still have no clue how to make Kbin communities visible on most Lemmy instances.
When you're in the All Content view, the arrows on the page select always act as if you're on page 1. I.e., the left arrow never works, and the right arrow always sends you to page 2. Not sure why this is.
Thinking of leaving Lemmy for kbin or mbin to have Mastodon integration. Mastodon is my favorite place in the fediverse and it looks like kbin/mbin will allow me to interact with EVERYTHING under one account rather than have a Lemmy and Mastodon account.
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.
Welcome! Yeah, the All Content view is great — probably my favorite feature added in the past few months. I have my home page set to Subscriptions (All Content), and it's the best. I see threads from my favorite magazines and microblog posts on tech & fediverse stuff.
Image uploading on microblog posts should be fine. Right now, Kbin's image uploading UI doesn't actually give any visual feedback when you click the upload file button, but it does upload.
In general, Kbin (and by extension Mbin) is quite early in its development, so you'll run into a good few bugs and odd UI issues. They should be resolved in the near future, and as I mentioned earlier, you can go to /m/kbinDevlog to follow progress.
The image icon in the bottom left corner of image posts can be clicked, showing the image at a larger size (i.e., what you'd get if you were to enable "Auto Media Preview" in the sidebar). There are a couple of userstyles that make this more button-like, such as kleanbin and (my own userstyle) idkbin.
It's a new year — about 6 months since that Reddit migration occurred — and Kbin progressed a ton in 2023. What are your thoughts on it? How much value have you gotten out of it, and what would you like to see in the future?
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.
It's nice to see more Kbin and Mbin instances popping up. I'd love to get to the point where the majority of Kbin users aren't on one instance, though that's probably a long while away.
@ernest
I've noticed this week that I'm currently seeing no visual indication that the boost button is active. No underline, color, or anything.
It seems that a now-broken userstyle I'm using expects there to be an "active" class applied to the element, but it isn't anymore. Is that intentional?
Figured I should point this out to you in case you don't know already.
@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.
Essentially all of the ones that I used. r/Minecraft, r/minecraftsuggestions, r/conlangs, r/vexillology, r/pixelart, etc.
The thing is that all of these have communities and magazines on the fediverse — it's just that there's little, if any, activity on them. I don't think you can really say that these communities are here if they have one person posting on them regularly.
The only communities that actually have a solid amount of activity here are ones about memes and news. If that's all that you used Reddit for, then the fediverse is doing great, and such people will act baffled at how anyone could stay on or miss Reddit. But for everyone else, the content just isn't there.
Yeah, it'd be nice to see an active Geometry Dash community given that 2.2 just released. /m/geometrydash is in the abandoned magazines section, so I might request ownership and try to get a bit of activity going there.
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.
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.
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.
One of the things I find cool about Kbin is the fact that it's a platform for both thread aggregation and microblogging. How much do you use the latter side of things? Do you make microblog posts, actively browse the microblog tab, view them in your home feed, or rarely touch them?
Understandable. I personally don't care quite enough about microblogging to use a dedicated app for it. Much prefer using it in bits and pieces alongside threads.
Yeah, aggregate view is the best, and I think it's currently one of the big advantages Kbin has over other fediverse platforms. Hopefully we see more improvements to microblogs once Ernest is done with the new ActivityPub module.
Improved Channel Select Menu 0.3.0 — Turbo mode support, kbin.earth compatibility, and an Mbin version! (kbin.social)
I recently made a major update to my Improved Channel Select Menu userscript, which adds your subscribed magazines and liked collections to the channel select button in the header....
RE: Is Ernest still here? (kbin.social)
I check in here quite often, but for now, I'm just focusing on clearing spam and keeping the instance alive. In January, I was working on the AP module, and there has been significant progress in the work, which hasn't been publicly published yet. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the year, I developed a skin condition that...
Do any of you eat and actually enjoy dino nuggets? (kbin.social)
I'm not really a fan of nuggets in general. I've always been much more of a tendies human. By and large, I find the texture of processed chicken to be extremely revolting. Even as a kid, I thought they were vile and Dino nuggets always seemed to be particularly low-quality....
What food or drink do you dislike that a lot of people like? (kbin.social)
What the title says. Feel free to get into fierce food debates in the comments....
So… what's going on? (kbin.social)
Since the beginning of the year, there's been a bit of a pattern over on @kbinDevlog:...
Can registrations on kbin.social be disabled to stop spammers (kbin.social)
kbin.social is being overrun with spammers. Can we disable registrations on this instance so they can't keep creating new accounts? Every day I log on, I have to spend the first 20-30 minutes, reporting and blocking a bunch of new accounts....
Do you use a serial (Oxford) comma? (kbin.social)
A serial comma (or Oxford comma) is an optional comma used before the last item in a list. For example, "bread, butter, and tax evasion" uses a serial comma, whereas "bread, butter and tax evasion" does not....
What are you reading right now? (kbin.social)
What the title says. What books are you reading? Or if not books, what are some interesting articles you've read lately?...
Issue with sort by hot (kbin.social)
This has been an issue since the beginning of Kbin tmk, but when you make a post, it won't appear under sort by hot unless it has an upvote. This means that if someone forgets to upvote their own post, it just won't appear on the default sort. There are plenty of posts I've missed because of this....
What's the quickest way to find a magazine/community you've subscribed to? (kbin.social)
I've been using kbin since the Reddit exodus and I still don't really know the path to finding my way into a specific community/magazine I've subscribed to. I usually search for the name using the search function, then hope I find a thread from there in the results where I can just click directly into it. Surely there must be a...
What's something cool that you've started doing lately? (kbin.social)
Requirements:...
Two requests for microblog incorporation into the main feed. (kbin.social)
First off, I absolutely love that microblogs are a part of my main feed now....
Improved Channel Select Menu 0.2.0 — Makes your subscribed magazines and liked channels more accessible (greasyfork.org)
One of my most wanted features as of late has been for the channel select menu to have my subscribed magazines and liked collections. Right now, it just contains some general feeds, but I thought it'd be super useful to also have your mags and collections there for easy access! However, given that Kbin development priorities are...
Could we get something like PieFed's "Add Remote" button? (kbin.social)
A super helpful feature that PieFed (a new fediverse thread aggregator like Lemmy & Kbin) has is an "Add Remote" button on its communities page. This button allows you to get a community on another instance to appear on your PieFed instance (and thus get the PieFed instance to start getting posts from that community)....
The page select arrows don't work in the All Content view (kbin.social)
When you're in the All Content view, the arrows on the page select always act as if you're on page 1. I.e., the left arrow never works, and the right arrow always sends you to page 2. Not sure why this is.
Kbin or Mbin? Which do you prefer?
Thinking of leaving Lemmy for kbin or mbin to have Mastodon integration. Mastodon is my favorite place in the fediverse and it looks like kbin/mbin will allow me to interact with EVERYTHING under one account rather than have a Lemmy and Mastodon account.
What are your thoughts on Kbin now that it's 2024? (kbin.social)
It's a new year — about 6 months since that Reddit migration occurred — and Kbin progressed a ton in 2023. What are your thoughts on it? How much value have you gotten out of it, and what would you like to see in the future?
What communities do you miss from Reddit that wish existed here? (kbin.social)
Don't miss one, I want to hear it all.
Why is kbin so full of empty stuff? (kbin.social)
I'm not asking to be snarky or anything... I'm subbed to plenty of magazines that I enjoy reading....
Comments getting doubled? (kbin.social)
For some reason, my comments occasionally duplicate when I post them. Only started experiencing this issue today.
How much do you use Kbin for microblogging? (kbin.social)
One of the things I find cool about Kbin is the fact that it's a platform for both thread aggregation and microblogging. How much do you use the latter side of things? Do you make microblog posts, actively browse the microblog tab, view them in your home feed, or rarely touch them?
Woooo collapse conversation button (kbin.social)
Not sure how long it's been there, but it's finally there. Nice QoL improvement.