Pamasich @ Pamasich @kbin.social

Software Developer, Switzerland

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225

Joined

2 yr. ago

Check if any userstyle/userscript is hiding it maybe? It's definitely still there for me, and I'm sure @ernest would have said something if he was A/B testing removing it.

Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances.

The issue is, how does defederating not promote leaving for Threads or instances that federate with Threads?

I think it's a good argument against Threads federating at all, but a poor one for defederating from Threads.

If Threads produces 95% of content in the fediverse, and your instance defederates from them, then your instance just doesn't have access to those 95% of content. Threads and its friends will be a lot more attractive then because it has 19x the content of what you have access to on your instance.

I think this will still lead to people leaving for the threads fediverse.

Also, I get the argument for Mastodon, but does /kbin actually have anything at all to fear here? Sure, the user numbers and content would be way higher than the rest of the fediverse. But Threads is a Twitter contender, not Reddit like /kbin and Lemmy. We will only see their content in the microblog tab.

Is the microblog tab actually that important to most people, that the instance could become dependent on Threads for dominating it? I honestly don't see it happen, I feel like this is an imported issue from microblogging platforms that's just repeated here despite being a non-issue for us.

I understood OP to be talking about mobile specifically.

And that's why I said Firefox or Kiwi. Both of those are mobile browsers (the latter is chromium) that support extensions, so you can just install your favorite monkey and stylus and add userscripts/userstyles the exact same way as on desktop.

I really don't see the issue. So more users is bad? I thought our issue is the lack of users currently.

I've seen people complain about ads and data harvesting here. But instances can already do that. Meta joining would change nothing about that. Actually, being a proper legal company, it might be easier to sue them over misusing your data than random instances.

"Embrace. Extend. Extinguish"? Let's stop between the last two steps then, not before the first one.

Kbin would be crippled by the amount of Threads content? I thought federation only happened if one kbin.social user is following a user on Threads? Should be as easily manageable then as Mastodon is currently. Or am I misunderstanding how this works?

To me, big sites federating looks like a clear advantage. I don't really get the big problem.

Banners for magazines

You should be easily able to add a banner using the magazine CSS. Though that's not being federated currently, I hope magazine CSS federation gets added in the future at least between kbin/mbin instances.

This should give you a banner above the threads section:

    
main > header {
    /* Change both of these */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}


  

While this should give you one that also extends over the sidebar:

    
#middle:before {
    width: 100%;
    display: block;
    content: '';
    /* Change these two: */
    height: 100px;
    background-image: url(https://i.imgur.com/zWuVa7U.png);
}


  

Changing the #middle to #header would put it above the kbin header (with the logo, the threads/microblog buttons, etc).

Community Engagement

There is an Active People section in the sidebar.

I think the issue here is that kbin simply doesn't have a lot of users yet.

One of the reasons I believe for that is also because the platform feels very stale or dead in plain sight.

This won't improve if you show people "0 people are viewing this thread" on every thread. Actually, it would worsen the impression that the site is dead.

seeing "span" and other tags instead of the actual code block

If you're using Firefox or Kiwi, the Kbin Enhancement Suite userscript now has a fix for this. There's also a standalone version here.

Well, for the span tags, I haven't seen other tags being an issue. If you see a code block where the same issue occurs with other tags, tell me so I can update it.

If there is another Reddit exodus, for example, or if we get a surge due to the Threads thing, I feel like many will just turn back due to the UI alone.

I don't know if ernest's views changed since the last exodus, but iirc people joining the platform wasn't really his intention, it just happened. Kbin hasn't even had a proper full release yet, it's still beta software, so I don't think people bouncing off is that big an issue yet.

With the abandonment of Artemis (formerly kmoon), kbin is now only really usable by the mobile site.

That's the case for now, but app development is still happening with other projects:

• ernest has mentioned intentions to revive his kbin app project
• Lemmy's Lunar (ios) app is adding kbin support
• @jwr1 introduced their Interstellar app prototype for Android recently.

but maybe that was a short experiment

Could be, I don't click on Twitter/X links often so I could have easily missed that.

I don't know any other social media site that allows you that level of freedom of customization.

Reddit used to have custom CSS, still does if you use the old design via the settings or the old.reddit.com address. Check out /r/steam for a subreddit with heavy custom styling.

Sadly in later redesigns they threw that feature out in favor of a more professional but boring looking uniform design.

Some stuff like spoilers started out on the platform using custom CSS. Spoilers used to be done by styling links pointing to a specific address. The worldnews subreddit uses it to hide paywalled articles.

it looks like they decided to start forwarding x.com links to the twitter.com version now. That’s new.

That was always the behavior for me from the start. I click on an x.com link, it brings me to twitter.com. Never was any different.

Modern Bing is a lot more useful for me than modern Google.

It hasn’t happened, am I accidentally doing something awesome to evade their traps so far?

Probably A/B testing.

I'm using Adblock Plus on Edge and have the same experience like you. No reaction from Youtube yet to my adblocker.

Go to the Magazines tab in the top bar and then there's a collections tab on the page that opens.

I'm pretty sure they were using sarcasm.

I don't care if it's animated in 2d or 3d, I just want it to look good. And cgi doesn't automatically make the anime look bad.

What usually makes an anime look bad is obvious cgi used in an otherwise 2d anime. Not always though, Fate/Zero's Berserker is an example of obvious cgi that looked good.

I don't really mind full cgi anime. I'm loving the current Kamierabi, for example. But they look off to me for the first half or full episode before I get used to it. Even Houseki no Kuni was like that. There are of course bad looking full cgi anime, but in general they don't look worse than 2d anime to me.

I also don't mind cgi backgrounds in 2d anime. Dekiru Neko looked amazing and the backgrounds definitely contributed to that, not the opposite.

boosts

Boosts are originally Mastodon's version of Twitter's retweets. By boosting a post, you share it with your followers.

Behind the scenes, this is how they're implemented on kbin too right now. Though it seems incomplete, as there's not currently a way to view content boosted by your followed users without visiting their profiles manually.

kbin currently uses boosts to sort threads by top, rather than upvotes. Which might be what you were referring to there.

Writing this out now, I realize it might not actually be a difference worth mentioning while it doesn't add anything unique besides added complexity and Mastodon integration (which just goes back to microblogging being a thing on kbin which is already covered).

CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a language to describe the visual design of websites.

An older version of Reddit (old.reddit.com) allowed subreddits to specify their own custom CSS code which would be used when users visited those subreddits. They could completely transform the design of the site using that feature. Or they could hack in features specific to their subreddit. Many subreddits both big and small made use of that feature and are still using it even today.
Spoilers for example were done using links and custom CSS long before Reddit added their official spoilers.

Kbin takes the same approach as old.reddit. Magazines can specify their own custom CSS code to change kbin's appearance while visiting the magazine. Though I have only seen one magazine make use of that so far, so it's not nearly as widespread as on Reddit yet.

new comments

On kbin, there's a setting in the sidebar (the gear icon) to mark new comments in threads you've seen before (since turning on the feature). I think it defaults to off.

When turned on and visiting a thread, new comments since your last visit are marked with a yellow bottom left corner. This is a very recent addition and seems to only be clear enough with the Tokyo Night theme currently. On other themes the colored corner is very hard to see for me.

If by "spoiler alert" you mean

then it's supported now (ernest added it some days ago).

Win+. is a Windows functionality, yeah.

Some differences not yet mentioned are

• boosts (mastodon's equivalent to twitter's retweets)
• bookmarks / saving stuff (supported on lemmy, not yet on kbin)
• votes on kbin are public, while they're hidden on lemmy
• magazine/community css (supported on kbin, I think not supported on lemmy)

Does Lemmy mark new comments in posts? Since kbin just added that recently.

“Does it have an AniList or MAL page?”

So does that mean Chinese animation is counted as anime and thus permitted here? Since those generally do get both Anilist and MAL pages despite no Japanese involvement.