Technology Connections (@techconnectify.bsky.social)
bsky.app
So, unfortunately when I go to Mastodon these days it's a bit of a ghost town. And I say unfortunately with sincerity - there are some things I really liked about the ethos behind it. However, the reason I'm posting this here is that I couldn't put it there without getting instant shit. 🧵
  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    On the off chance that you are not joking (or worse, trolling), that is very much the fault of Ernst, the Kbin.social instance admin, for having abandoned the instance that he created for months at a time and allowing spam to flood the entire Fediverse through that server. He had multiple extenuating circumstances, which he profusely apologized for, but aside from that I don’t blame other instances from defederating with it in the slightest. I also still have an account there, and I too have not been able to access the website in about a year, and I too have blocked the entire instance, bc it was virtually the sole source of all of the spam that I was getting across all of Lemmy.

    You can read more about it here: https://pawb.social/post/2658114 (original).

    I did not downvote your comment here, but I will say please don’t be so eager to spread misinformation on the Fediverse. I found the above link simply by clicking the circle button and searching for the phrase “Kbin.social”, and I even confirmed that you are able to do so on your instance. Leaving the default sorting options in place, this was the 4th hit and the 1st one that immediately jumps out upon human inspection of the titles as being the most highly relevant.

    You will do as you please ofc, and people will learn to ignore / block you as a result if necessary, and only very very rarely someone may attempt to correct you (at least in a gentle manner:-) as I’m trying to do here, and as I would have wanted done for me. But if you correct yourself before speaking, then others don’t have to go to that trouble, and your words will carry more weight. I offer this as food for thought anyway.:-)

    • hono4kami@pawb.socialOPEnglish
      1·
      4 days ago

      I wasn’t trolling, my response was geniune and I was disappointed. My comment wasn’t clear, please don’t take it the wrong way.

      This was when kbin.social was REALLY active. IIRC probably around June 2023? When Ernest was still active maintaining the kbin.social instance. The Mastodon instance I was talking about is mastodon.art. And if I search around, I’m still right that the instance seems to REALLY like to defederate without valid reason, I will link some thread that talks about this below [1].

      I wrote about the detail of this in kbin.social, but kbin.social is no longer active so I’ll admit I kind of forgot the detail.

      As far as I remember the reasoning stated in mastodon.art federation status is that “right wing” or something along that, at the time. I knew at that time that was wrong. I don’t really care about right wing or left wing (I am just a Southeast Asian, that dichotomy of politics is kinda unrelatable to me, but that’s topic for another time). But kbin.social was definitely not “right wing”, in fact it was one of the “leftist” place I’ve seen on the internet.

      Even then, the reasoning feels kinda off to me, other than the fact that it wasn’t true, why would you defederate instance over difference of opinion? If the instance was spamming your agenda to your instance then it’s probably justifiable. But it clearly wasn’t at the time. [2]

      And regarding “keeping people away from fediverse”, I was talking about the UX of fediverse.

      That time, I wanted to follow someone from mastodon.art as said person is an artist I really like that was disappointed with Twitter and trying out several alternative social medias. Somehow they chose to join mastodon.art. I was happy and wanted to follow said artist. I tried following them but I remember I had a hard time doing so.

      Turns out my instance was defederated.

      At this point, I’m sure most non-tech-savvy user would have given up. But I still tried following it anyway. I tried creating mastodon.art account, and, it turns out, mastodon.art sign up requires approval. At that point, I kinda given up. It’s gonna take lots of time until it gets approved, so why bother?

      The admin behavior somehow actually made me doubt that I will get approved too (though to be fair, it ended up being approved). And then, why would I use the mastodon.art account, when the instance is defederate-happy, making it actually hard to discover another artist to follow (in an app that already have some problem with discoverability)?

      Since then I started using less and less fediverse. I was kind of annoyed by this experience.

      Defederation perhaps is necessary.

      But it is prone to abuse by admins. And that degrades user’s experience.

      1. https://beehaw.org/post/6853561 , https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/4695219 ↩︎

      2. Going off topic for a minute, this is yet another part that I don’t like about some folks in the fediverse. It seems similar to my observation of US domestic politics. They just want to stay in their own bubble and doesn’t want to compromise and hang out with people with different opinion. That isn’t how I was taught to live. I hang out with people with different beliefs–be it religion, politics, ethnics groups, etc-- all the time. These kinds of behavior made it hard to have some actual discussion. Those people lacks nuance. ↩︎

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        2·
        4 days ago

        Oh I hear you. Back on Reddit, I was not liking the idea of joining a place made for and run by supporters of Russa, China, and North Korea (I mean, software is just code, but still…), so I was ALL ABOUT Kbin!:-) Ernst let himself down - and with good reason, due to his job and his family and his overall life - and thereby all of us, by not sharing his instance admin duties with anyone else who could take over. Especially when he announced that he was going to the hospital (and then did not respond to anyone for weeks afterwards), THAT is when the spam started, I noticed, from communities where the mods had abandonded them. The big waves did not happen until later, but I noticed earlier waves even then. That much at least might not the fault of Ernst, but it became his duty at that point to shut those communities down, and yet he refused (or was unable to, either way), and so the spammers had a field day with his negligence. (Also, to be honest, the mods abandoning it really was his fault as well - I myself could not log into the server for multiple WEEKS at a time, and when we did get in it was so slow as to be practically even if not wholly non-functional. Mods only abandoned an already sinking ship at that point. And yes it did rally back a bit, and then sunk again, repeating a few more times before it finally went down and just never came back up again.)

        It actually serves as quite the lesson for us all. Too bad it is at Ernst’s feet, but it is what it is - the guy was somewhat heroic I thought, for taking on the project of starting up an entire alternative codebase to Lemmy, and Mbin today is somewhat fantastic still! And yet… he was not perfect, nobody is:-|.

        I am aware of quite a few examples of defederation - just go to any instance and search for that word and you’ll see many:-). But I’ve never seen one that did not cite a very specific reason, that without researching further I thought at least naively sounded reasonable to me. Also I’ve actually caused an example of defederation: see my Petition to defederate from hexbear.net, which also offers several links to other petitions from instances that did the same quite awhile ago. Here’s an interesting one from Beehaw to Lemmy.World and sh.itjust.works: https://beehaw.org/post/567170 (and then their response in return: https://sh.itjust.works/post/129725).

        But yeah, Mastodon has been going stronger than Lemmy for longer iirc, and I’ve heard that it it plagued by defederations, so I definitely need to preemptively agree with you that defederations for no reason are bad. It might be like talking about divorce: always bad, yet other things are worse sometimes, so sometimes the least worst choice, while other times perhaps done too readily, and either way a very very serious issue that should be given the most serious of thought. I’m with you there.

        I also agree that Kbin.social was not right-wing: on the other hand I can kinda understand that one better, having heard similar thoughts before. The USA as a whole is more right-oriented than e.g. the EU that is more left-oriented, so e.g. for myself inside the USA, Bernie Sanders seems quite the leftist compared to every other politician I’ve even heard of here, and yet compared to those in the EU he would be considered centrist or even right-wing. i.e., much like introvert vs. extrovert, the standard of comparison is relative to where someone is located at, currently.

        Even so, why should one instance defederate from another instance purely due to personal preferences like that? (precisely as you said) Reasons to defederate that are fully valid, imho, are when one side is not engaging in good faith argumentation. Which I don’t recall ever happening on Kbin.social. Therefore, the side defederating from it was likely to have been engaging not in good faith? So perhaps good for you to have gotten away from it then? (Though to be clear: conversely, the fact that Kbin.social later was sending out spam all across the fediverse is a perfect reason to defederate from it.)

        The UX of the Fediverse is really quite poor, which is part of why so many are flocking to the likes of BlueSky even as they leave Reddit + X + Facebook, rather than Lemmy/Mbin/PieFed(/Sublinks?) + Mastodon + Friendica. A major part of the reason where Lemmy at least is concerned is the lack of cross-instance moderation ability, which severely hinders people who are not all lumped together onto one single giant instance (one Lemmy dev, Nutomic, put this onto the roadmap, but not until software version ~0.20, whereas the most recent version is currently only 0.19.7, so this won’t be for perhaps another half to full year before that eventually gets added? especially considering delay also from after the sourcecode is released until it is installed, e.g. Lemmy.World that has literally ~80% of all Lemmings on it is still on 0.19.3, and they were outright EAGERLY awaiting 0.19.6)

        A bit of a tangent: I wonder if the more Threaded conversation style, where you follow “topics” rather than “users”, gives Lemmy the edge in terms of UX? Like, even if you cannot follow one person - although defederations seem more rare here in the first place - you will still get access to so much great content of a similar theme.

        About your tangent regarding politics: I hear you, and I sympathize. If it helps, remember that (1) America is going through a REALLY rought time right now, like repeal of the 50-year-old protection to have abortions is literally a matter of life or death for a good half the population, and also (2) we are vulnerable to disinformation campaigns being waged against us from foreign powers as well as internally, and people are just like sheep, wanting to be lead, so the problem comes when someone arises who offers to do that but has a nefarious motive:-(. And yes, there are very many internet trolls who lack nuance entirely or in part - with those you cannot converse, you are right about that, and THOSE are good targets for defederation imho, not b/c of “politics” but b/c of “trolling”, the former being a mere difference of opinion but the latter being the most important criteria there is on the internet: lack of good faith in discussions. :-)