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.

@PugJesus weren’'t you looking for a spot to perform baptisms?

It is on Kbin. Lemmy doesn’t have that capacity yet as far as I know. It’s one of the main reasons I recommend the former - Kbin bridges the gap between Mastodon and Lemmy, and includes functionality from both types of instances. Following users increases your feed content here exponentially.

Great username. Worth a follow.

"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Spezymandias, Admin of Kings;
Look on my Reddit, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

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.

The news here is that, contrary to popular belief, 5% of NFTs actually still hold some value.

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.

Only that it knows about to start, but I think that once it gets subscriptions to the domain, it starts pulling more automatically. I could be wrong, however - I’m not sure which activities aside from posting are federated.

EDIT: I was wrong - the domain only grabs Threads, so Mastodon posts will likely not show up this way. They may get indexed if they’re sent to a kbin magazine using the @magazinename@kbin.social format

@daredevil @neatchee - Looks like the linked post is what did the trick. I posted here to the Fediverse community to let them know about your instance (it’s pointed at your pinned intro post).

As such, this link is now working for daredevil:

https://kbin.social/d/urusai.social

And will allow subscriptions.

@neatchee @daredevil I think perhaps someone has to post a link hosted on your instance for it to appear. For instance this works:

https://kbin.social/d/mastodon.social

but smaller instances like this:

https://kbin.social/d/pagan.plus

…don’t seem to, generating a 404 because no one has created a link or thread back to a pagan.plus post (although their users post over to kbin often). Possibly posting link (in the url field of Add a Link on Kbin) to an urusai.social hosted post will do the trick.

Not sure what’s going on with the kbin.social/d/ view of urusai.social, but I was able to find posts (not threads) here:

https://kbin.social/search?q=urusai.social

This led me to @neatchee, who is the instance owner. You might try following them, but I agree, that’s an odd bug.

Oddly enough, even users I have already followed do not have their content federated to these magazines at times, even though I have checked their history and seen them use the tags I’ve assigned to the magazines. I could simply be doing something wrong, but I’m not sure what it is.

Yeah, posting to Kbin from Mastodon instances is a challenge. Kbin filters and tries to assign incoming hashtags to existing magazine hashtags.

If a post contains a hashtag that is taken by another magazine, that magazine usually gets the content instead of yours. Your magazine’s hashtag has to appear first in the text. Your Japanese forum is probably catching all of the #japanese posts before they get to LearnJapanese.

Second, it’s random which of your magazine hashtags will pull content and from who. The order of the hashtags doesn’t appear to affect this.

The only way to ensure a post gets from Mastdon to Kbin or Lemmy is to put @yourmagazine@kbin.social in the post tag. This will make sure it shows up on Lemmy, and will get your post to the Kbin Microblog of the magazine 90% of the time. If you want to be extra sure, do it like this:

@yourmagazinename@kbin.social #yourmagazinename (then any following hashtags)

Hopefully the update will clean this up a bit.

Just wanna say I agree - it can be a frustrating process to figure it all out.

In some cases, trying to follow a user takes me to an error page, and repeated attempts prove unsuccessful.

This confused the fuck out of me until I realized that Mastodon instances have the option for users to allow or deny follow requests. Basically, if you click on someone’s follow and nothing happens (or you get an error page), what’s happened is that you’ve sent them a follow request that they have to approve. Kbin’s interface fails here (hopefully will improve with update) and does nothing. If they do chose to let you follow them, you’ll see their account update.

In some cases, I can’t even find particular instances that users post from via kbin.

Go to the poster’s account, and follow them. If Kbin hasn’t actively federated the site yet, it usually does so pretty quickly after a follow. This usually also lets you link to the community they posted to.

more content will #federate to the #magazines I moderate.

Check your magazine’s Microblog section - you may be getting more content than you realize. Your magazine tags will determine what additional content (aside from #yourmagazinetitle) your Microblogs pick up. Everything from Mastodon users shows up there on Kbin.

@readbeanicecream Hashtags are really hit or miss in general across instances.

I found that most Mastodon instances only collect posts from other Mastodon instances under hashtags (definitely the case with mastodon.social). I suspect this is because they are sharing the same posting format.

The long form posting format that Lemmy and Kbin use for Threads has a 25k character limit, too big for most Mastodon instances. This long form post is truncated into the posting limits of the Mastodon instance, but the conversion protocol is not sophisticated enough to read the JSON file to flag the enclosed hashtags as data fields defining the post.

The user-facing presentation layer then adds hyperlinks to what it can determine as hashtags (as it does to anything with a # preceding it), but the federating instance itself thinks the entire post is just post content.

Related notes - I found that when posting to Kbin from Mastodon, the order of the hashtags determines which Microblog the post appears under. Also, Lemmy strips hashtags placed in the “Tags” section of a Thread or Link when content makes its way there.

Ahh gotcha. The add Pics function never worked very well for me, so I haven’t used it in a bit (mainly rely on Links and Threads). I’ve also noticed that kbin pictures only occasionally make it through Federation (seems to happen on other kbin instances as well) - seems really random whether or not they appear on the federating instance.

Dammit - you’re one of the best posters here.

Odd that comments are working for you. During my previous issues I did note that there were posting differences when I used the “Add Link”, “Comment” and “Post” functionality (which worked) versus the “Add Thread” and “Add Picture” options (which didn’t, or worked partially after throwing an initial 500 error). Given that you can still comment, you may have some posting access with the other options.

If you’ve got domains blocked, that might be causing the error. Domain blocking seems to gum up posting and comment visibility. Removing my domain blocks cleared up the issues I was having about a month ago.

Depends on the instance in my experience - mastodon.social usually posts within seconds. Note that due to spam issues, kbin.social has been dealing with a recent wave of defederation, so if you’re not seeing your posts appear, that might be the cause.