I mean this is because of a technical issue likely on Kbin's side. Which is not a shock.
Also I posted 2 threads to kbin communities recently, 1 got most of its activity from LW and the other got 4 favorites from different instances and no comments (and it did not federate to LW, though I don't think that was related to the temporary block). LW could be too big but kbin seems kind of dead for the communities that aren't constantly in the feed (likely because of the same people posting, in many cases). Though technical issues always could be part of it in one way or another.
Isn’t like every bigger gaming news posted over 100 times on different communities and instances over a period of multiple days, not even including all the reposts of every different gaming outlet?
He is doing an excellent job, and I do not mean to denigrate his work when I say the task is beyond any one person, no matter how talented and dedicated. Look at the issues that went on recently while Ernest was indisposed, and we had months of federation issues that led to communities migrating away and Kbin.social getting defederated by other instances.
This project is getting too large for any one person, and it’s far too important to have one point of failure. And even someone as great as Ernest needs an understudy.
Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven't kept up with most of mbin's specifics.
Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information...
Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.
You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text -- but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the "@ user @ instance" syntax -- e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties -- e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called "kbinMeta" and this magazine as search results -- but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you're copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance's local version of a thread and that isn't the original source it probably won't find it. (I've had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)
@piotrsikora@ernest -- FYI searching for this thread by the exact title "Multiple questions regarding Kbin" does not find it currently but searching text like "as a new Kbin/Mbin user" will find it. Is that a bug?
@piotrsikora@ernest -- Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.
Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).
You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.
To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.
Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I'm not sure how to post them intentionally since I don't use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.
Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?
It's fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/fedia@fedia.io maybe? Sorry if that doesn't link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )
On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?
DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.
You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user's profile and clicking "Send Message" on the right side.
Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn't work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error -- is this a bug?)
Hope that helps!
@piotrsikora@ernest -- this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn't see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io's side or on kbin.social's side)?
@piotrsikora -- FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.
Thanks for putting in something awesome, @ernest! Not sure if you want feedback, but functionality is as full as I know it to be. Maybe better. It is really fast right now! Hope you are on the mend.
Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind -- with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.
I'm assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side -- 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you're unfamiliar) -- but it'd be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what's going on rather than guessing.
In particular, it'd be helpful to know:
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies -- or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all -- knowing if there's federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between "no one saw this", "no one liked this", and "people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn't made it to kbin yet")
Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?
Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?
I don't mind waiting for things to be fixed what with life interfering with things, but I can't find any activity from Ernest lately. He hasn't been, like... hit by a bus or anything terrible like that, has he?
The nature of software development and internet communities has always been transient - frameworks and projects and websites have all come and gone. Despite how unlikely it may seem, even Facebook is not immune to becoming dust in the wind someday. God knows I've started my fair share of hobby projects and left them behind in states ranging from broken to buggy, so I should be the last person to throw stones. I know how it feels to just hit a complete motivational brick wall, or to have so many other things come up in life that my little project is the last thing on my mind.
For as long as I can remember, from the days of PHP bulletin boards to Reddit to kbin, I've never had only a single profile. So I think it's not a bad idea to prepare for the possibility that kbin doesn't last forever - literally nothing does. Nor do I think that's a foregone conclusion! But even if Ernest has moved on, or he's tied down by other matters, I think what he built is inspiring. I legitimately believe that kbin is cool tech, far far cooler than Bitcoin or VR or AI. Maybe someone else spins up a kbin instance, or mbin becomes the new de facto standard, but I don't mind running this account for as long kbin.social sticks around... no matter how many 503's I see lol.
I recognize each and every other commenter in this thread, y'all are prolific contributors. So if you are leaving, at least link your new profile in your bio.
Looks like Kbin is running a pretty huge federation backlog, as it's taking several hours for comments to federate out. I'm not knowledgeable about how these servers work, but is it teetering on collapsing or something?
Hell I've had magazine deletion requests sitting around for months, since before ernest disappeared lol.
I run @SquaredCircle here and with all this never-ending breaking I've been spending the last 3 days testing out Federation between 4-5 other lemmy and mbin instances trying to find a place to move my account and the community as a whole.
I'll try to reproduce this and look into tightening the error handling. A 404 error should imply that the magazine is not available at the remote. Are those magazines available at the target instance? Agree that those should at least be added to the log--perhaps should add a third category for "Unavailable." Remember that it will also navigate you to the magazines list at the end for visual confirmation.
When you said community subscription, were you referring to something in particular, or just using this term generically to refer to magazines?
I haven't tried all of them, but the ones I did check were ones that had not had posts on them at their source instance for quite a while. A few random examples:
I had 43 failures and 111 successes, so visual inspection wouldn't really help. I kept copies of the error log and the script output in a text file to figure it out later.
I assume that this means these communities haven't had activity since fedia.io opened, and so fedia.io doesn't know they exist? I've always wondered how the first person to subscribe to a community on an instance is able to do that.
And yeah, I'm using "community" to refer to "magazine".
Reading Diane Lacey's open letter about the (self-)censorship scandal of the Hugo Awards, the impetus of collusion/slating from Chinese publishers stood out. zionius actually dug further and presented evidence that the guilty party appeared to be Science Fiction World, which was involved in the Worldcon. So I thought I'd type up...
Yeah, I’m just convinced that the designers actively hate the martials classes. Even in the playtest for the new edition, after 10 years of people pointing out the martial/caster disparity, it took them over a year to write a somewhat decent skill set for martials.
(Link away! I’m always interested in homebrews for DnD. You should also consider posting it in the c/dndhomebrew community if you want more visibility. I still don’t know how to link Lemmy communities to users from different instances, but you should be able to access it from my post history.)
I mean isn’t that how it’s supposed to be done? You post to all relevant communities? Lemmy even has a feature to deduplicate posts in your feed that have the same link URL, to reduce the repetition in your feed
If it’s still annoying then maybe the software needs to handle it better, because I don’t think only posting to a single community is good. Everyone else gets left out, especially when you consider some communities will be on defederated instances.
I’m not the biggest fan of Lemmyworld, I prefer thematic instances such as Mander.xyz. Maybe we can consider this community as broader than strict astronomy?
I also prefer thematic instances, but try to find appropriate communities within those instances. Just because it’s coming from NASA, doesn’t make it astronomy.
Depending on which aspects of the project you think are important and want to discuss there are a few communities here that might be relevant.
Earth Science includes environment, and environmental impact seems to be the most popular talking point so far.
Noise and other forms of pollution are public health issues and there is a local community for that, although I’m not sure it’s really a great fit there.
Physics might be another choice due to the fact that a lot of physics is going into the engineering of something that reduces sonic booms.
Or maybe you just need to find the right thematic instance. For example, I’m registered on slrpnk for my climate, energy efficiency, and anarchism fixes.
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.
my subscriptions have been mostly coming through posts about new communities.
when someone posts a link to a remote, they are formed in such a way that my mbin instance automagically searches for, creates and dumps me into that newly created remote community. im sure its just a part of its search/routing.
at that point, the instance is subscribed to the remote community.
then i click 'subscribe', which subs my specific account.
edit: yep, theyre crafting the links to force it through the processor like this
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.
I noticed that many magazines stoped federating and lemmy comments also. Sometimes one community federate with my kbin instance but other doesn't even in situation when both are from the same lemmy instance.
Lemmy.world has gone read only to us (kbin.social) angielski
We'll still get their content but be unable to interact.
Star Wars Outlaws' $110 and $130 editions prompt a collective sigh from potential players tired of season passes and ill-advised early access periods (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Just more nickel and diming of gamers…
Do the "Ernest needs to add more maintainers to KBin!" comments remind anyone else of the xz social engineering malarkey? (kbin.social) angielski
Comments such as:...
Multiple questions regarding Kbin (fedia.io) angielski
Hi, as a new Kbin/Mbin user, I have some questions regarding its use. I hope you can help me out....
/kbin is feeling great right now (kbin.social) angielski
Thanks for putting in something awesome, @ernest! Not sure if you want feedback, but functionality is as full as I know it to be. Maybe better. It is really fast right now! Hope you are on the mend.
Temtem will stop (most) development later this year, monetization will be removed at a later date. (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Is Ernest still here? (kbin.social) angielski
I don't mind waiting for things to be fixed what with life interfering with things, but I can't find any activity from Ernest lately. He hasn't been, like... hit by a bus or anything terrible like that, has he?
We cannot concede cultural commentary to the far right (Pluto: otherwise titled as "Crisis of culture in the U.S." on cpusa.org) (www.cpusa.org) angielski
cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/1976670...
We cannot concede cultural commentary to the far right (Pluto: otherwise titled as "Crisis of culture in the U.S." on cpusa.org) (www.cpusa.org) angielski
cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/1976670...
Federation Delays (kbin.social) angielski
Looks like Kbin is running a pretty huge federation backlog, as it's taking several hours for comments to federate out. I'm not knowledgeable about how these servers work, but is it teetering on collapsing or something?
EXIT 0.1.0: Export subscriptions across kbin/mbin instances (kbin.social) angielski
"EXIT" -- Export Across Instances Tool...
Former editor at Science Fiction World, Chi Hui, reveals bullying, misogyny, stealing of wages and credits, and more at the magazine (fedia.io) angielski
Reading Diane Lacey's open letter about the (self-)censorship scandal of the Hugo Awards, the impetus of collusion/slating from Chinese publishers stood out. zionius actually dug further and presented evidence that the guilty party appeared to be Science Fiction World, which was involved in the Worldcon. So I thought I'd type up...
What's your big "Oh, THAT'S how I do that" moment? angielski
I remembered a good brainfart of mine and wondered if anyone else had one to share....
Riot Games Now Requires Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Software for League of Legends, Following Valorant's Implementation (tuta.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/10958052...
Combating spam on kbin - some thoughts (kbin.social) angielski
Have been thinking about what kbin can do to combat spam accounts, which are currently on the rise again on kbin.social....
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Nasa unveils quiet supersonic aircraft in effort to revive commercial flights (www.theguardian.com)
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/10656840...
Could we get something like PieFed's "Add Remote" button? (kbin.social) angielski
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)....
Last few days are the least functional kbin has been for me since the July exodus. Just me? (kbin.social) angielski
Just curious if it's somehow got to do with anything on my end. I'm generally desktop-only, firefox-only.
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