I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, Kbin is the Jamaica of the Fediverse, a land of special people where champions grow.

Posted this on the other thread - but excellent work! Thank you!

For those having issues with the aforementioned downvote trolls, @some_guy and @YourContentSucks kindly showed up to illustrate the problem. These two accounts are accompanied by a third, @cre0 -all the same user. If you’re pre-emptively looking to protect your users from downvote spam, keep these accounts out of your magazines - he likes to try to dox folks. This is his theme song.

@inkican - Agreed - Kbin will live or die based on its content. One thing that should be mentioned to those on the fence about contributing is how powerful Kbin is as a publishing platform in comparison to either Mastodon or Lemmy - this is one of the few places where you can post and get your content on both style of instances.

There are a couple of factors degrading contribution that could be alleviated by more stringent moderation - particularly the bot networks and downvote spammers. I’ve seen a couple of instances where folks have gotten bullied out of trying to run a forum, and Kbin’s flaws in blocking (a blocked user can still downvote your posts and message you), make ongoing harassment an issue for contributors. No one wants to submit something to have it shat upon.

The other factor is that a number of users set up magazines, grabbing popular names from Reddit, then did nothing to maintain them. I think removing or reassigning these ghost magazines to interested moderators would go a long way in improving the content quality here now that the dust has settled from the Reddit collapse.

From a moderator standpoint, if you’re looking to expand the reach of your magazine and get new subscribers (and thus, hopefully, more contributors), one thing I’ve found that helps expand the audience is using a Lemmy account to crosspost, as the cross-posting functionality is built into that architecture and provides a link back to the original. This both expands the range of the content, and draws subscribers from Lemmy that normally wouldn’t see you on Kbin to subscribe to your magazine. Mastodon is similar - a single supportive account there boosting magazine content expands your reach dramatically.

Side note: I run @13thFloor and wanted to say if you or your users ever feel like cross-posting our scifi content from there, or cross-posting your content to our magazine, feel free to do so - we fucking love scifi over here.

I think the Fediverse.observer stats for the 19th are off - it’s showing that drop across all software categories - Mastodon and Kbin show the same dip.

The instance owner determines what’s on their “public” tagged activity feeds. If they remove the “public” tag from a post or user account, it’s restricted from non-authenticated requests from outside servers. You’re correct that this shouldn’t grab user IP addresses, but they could if an instance owner is including that information in what they mark as “public” profile feed data. I should reiterate that I know of no instance that does this, but the capability is there in theory (and I do know that certain forum software packages outside the Fediverse collect and publish this level of information, although it’s a dying practice).

I’m not advocating instance owners turn everything private, but it’s clear they’re going to have to examine what they’re providing through their feeds to Threads if they’re serious about their users’ security and privacy. The safest bet is to defederate from Threads until it’s clear what Meta’s intentions are (aside from their rhetoric, which is always deceitful when it comes to user privacy).

As to what Meta will do, they absolutely will scrape that activity data for marketing use, if they aren’t already. It’s what their entire business model on Facebook is built around - targeted ads based on user activity. Anything they say about protecting that data is lip service at best given their past performances and lawsuits. It also very likely that they’ll merge it with their existing data hoards, and do their best to de-anonymize accounts so that they can increase their data accuracy and thus their profit margin.

Looks like there’s a lot of FUD around this, so I decided to jump into the ActivityPub spec and see exactly what they can and can’t get with the spec as is.

First off, they cannot get a users individual IP unless the instance owner publishes it in the profile data as part of a “public” activity stream. I don’t know of any instance that does this currently (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong).

It looks like what Meta is looking to do is scrape the information in the “public” tagged activity streams:

In addition to [ActivityStreams] collections and objects, Activities may additionally be addressed to the special “public” collection, with the identifier https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public.

Activities addressed to this special URI shall be accessible to all users, without authentication.

This is similar to what most instances do to show the posts of a user or community - they send a request to get “public” tagged data to publish to their end users. Within this data is all the activity information on that post - who upvoted what and who, and who commented. Again, this is the same way federation works now - your server has an activity stream of all your followed and followers that it can make available to view by tagging their activity as “public”. Many instances have this information tagged as “public” as a default.

Now, this system works fine if you’re dealing with small actors that don’t have nefarious designs on the network, or the resources to dominate it.

When you have a digital behemoth with grand AI designs that’s already embroiled in lawsuits where it was grabbing your medical data and regularly allows law enforcement to stroll through its records, it’s an entirely different situation. Meta has the power and capacity to not only engage in an “embrance, extend, extinguish” campaign against the Fediverse, but also to seriously threaten the privacy and well-being of Fediverse users in a way no single instance owner can.

I think the solution here will be for individual instance owners to harden their security and if not outright de=federate from Threads, ensure that posts are private by default and that their users are made well aware in the TOS that following a Threads user will result in sharing data about their profile that could (and most likely will) be matched back to their Facebook account.

Instances that don’t allow visibility control on posts, like Kbin and Lemmy, should look at adding an option to post only to the local server, or have the capacity to block threads.net outgoing publication based on user profile settings.

Instances that don’t allow follow request filtering probably should look at adding it (Mastodon has it implemented - Kbin and I think Lemmy would need to catch up) - otherwise users could be unaware that they’re sending their data to threads.net when someone from that service follows them.

I think it goes without saying that any data Meta gets will get the AI treatment - both to identify users and to sell your activity to marketers. That activity is the real goldmine for them - that’s a stream of revenue for marketing that rivals what Meta tracks on its own platform.

As such, it may be worthwhile for instance owners to look at removing voting and boosting counts from the “public” activity feed. This would mean more fragmentation for communities whose populations span instances (vote counts would be more off than they are now), but it would prevent bad actors from easily scraping that data for behavioral analysis.

All in all, though, I don’t believe it’s going to be a positive event when Threads does start federating. One of the nice things about the Fediverse is that the learning curve is high enough to keep the idiot count down, and I don’t really see our content or commentary here improving once Meta’s audience enters the space.

Lmao - gotta say it’s creative. There are trolls on my ban list that could use a multi-century sentence.

Aaaaaand it’s back as of 8:52 PST

Fun trick, if you write poetry to @BBCRD, you’ll get your profile and your post listed on their server.

Proof

Caveat: poetry may or may not be required, but is much appreciated.

Not by the BBC, of course, just me. I always appreciate your poetry.

I hear you - when starting out, you’re not presented with a front-page or /r/all, so you do have to actively look for content.

My suggestion to you would be start following folks, especially across instances, and be liberal with your subscriptions.

Once I got up to about 100 folks on my following list, I started finding a huge amount of active communities to subscribe to through their posts and threads (I’m on Kbin, so we get both Mastodon and Lemmy), which further increased the reach of my feed. Right now, with about 120 folks followed and a similar number of community subscriptions, my feed is beating the pants off of the sad stale crap Reddit is delivering.

Apparently I forgot my /s, apologies to anyone I inadvertently terrified.

Well, it’s definitely doing a number on Spez right now -let’s find out if some of that energy can be turned to stopping bad legislation - here’s the direct action link for those in the US.

@adam

Holy shit. Given the source, I think that’s best praise I’ve ever gotten in my life. I’m gonna go put that on my profile. @TokyoMonsterTrucker hit me up if you wanna go grab a beer to celebrate.

Seriously though, Adam, you need to take a step back and realize what your toy has become - you’re gonna end up with blood on your hands if you keep letting this hate spread. Maybe take a night off and watch The Fisher King - I think it speaks to someone in your position, and when you’ve got Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges in the cast, you know it’s gonna be good.

EDIT: A month later, and it’s become clear I’m the one of the few dozens on the Fediverse who actually remember who Adam Curry was. No point in wasting the real estate on my profile for a troll fading into obscurity.

And another childhood icon bites the dust…

Didn’t realize noagendasocial already had a reputation, thanks for the heads up. Thankfully kbin can block by domain, but I’m vaguely curious to see if he’ll respond.

<insert pigeon playing chess analogy here>

Blocked, kid. You ain’t worth the air I’d expend responding.

Dude, that’s a really stupid meme, not a counterpoint.

Oh look, the stupids are angry and have come out to play.

Dude, you’re literally hosting the propaganda of a Russian foreign agent peppered with flat out lies, antisemitism and anti-LGTBQ+ tropes. This isn’t a left vs right issue, this is you are literally hosting a foreign agent of a country that’s a declared enemy of the US and is committing genocide as we speak issue.

Grown-ups clean house kid, and yours should be condemned. There isn’t any such thing as free speech in Russia - there’s no reason to give them the right they actively deny to others. Read up on the paradox of tolerance - there’s a video there if you’re having trouble reading the big words. To give them a platform means you’re just as complicit in their crimes as they are.

F

Looks like lemmy.world is back up. vlemmy.net is still down.