My thinking re: closing registrations for a time, is that if currently the only person that can action warranted sitewide bans (e.g. users actively using hate-speech in multiple posts in multiple magazines) is ernest, then there may be a point where there’s simply too much to keep on top of, given everything else he has going on.
These concerns may well be completely unwarranted, and I’m well aware that even if kbin.social were to be defederated from a number of instances, that once “the situation” was under control, they could be re-federeated if agreed with the other instances. It would just be a shame to hamper our own community by being relatively powerless against a potential influx of bad faith users whilst ernest is busy being awesome and actively improving kbin as a whole.

Thanks for clarifying! Was the choice to defederate mainly down to a flood of content from other instances drowning out the fedia.io community, or the nature of content coming in, for example?

lemmy users want to stay on lemmy. they don’t want to come to kbin (even to troll). and I think the few that might end up here will just be drowned out by good faith kbinauts.

Given the much higher number of Lemmy instances, you may well be 100% correct on that, that is, even trolls may just decide to ‘stick with what they know’ and continue to use a Lemmy based instance.

if someone has an issue with kbin being open to everyone, then they will naturally block us no matter what we do.

Also correct, however, I understand that if a post is local to kbin.social, and had comments from lemmy.world users, in addition to kbin.social users, and a beehaw.org use came to the post, they wouldn’t see any of the comments from the defederated users. That is to say, so long as one instance doesn’t federate with another, they will never see posts from that instance, regardless of where they are.

I’m not saying that won’t still prevent people defederating with kbin.social purely because we’re open / federate with another community they specifically defederated from, but there’s less reason to if kbin.social maintains a quality userbase.

I think that spirit and culture is far more important than whether or not a few bad apples start getting other instances wanting to defederate.

If a large amount of “beehaw haters” start flooding kbin and changing the culture to be one of toxicity and vitriol, then I do think we’d start having a problem.

Another agreement from me here, however, the point of this post is to start a discussion around whether or not we can prevent being overwhelmed with bad apples too early on in the platforms lifespan (although I appreciate we’ve already addressed this above).

As has been said, at this point, it’s entirely up to @ernest, but I think it’s worth looking at potentially taking a couple more people on to assist with the moderation side of things.

That’s actually federated users. The official count of kbin.social users can be found here.

I may have missed the mark on my point in the main post to be fair; It’s not about fearing defederation from beehaw.org, it’s more about ensuring we don’t get overran by people with ill-intentions before the dust has settled, and whilst the site doesn’t have the manpower in place to keep things like that under control.
Currently there’s nothing stopping someone from the communities beehaw has defederated with from signing up here and going on a fullblown hate campaign because they disagree with the ideals of the beehaw admins. Everywhere they go, those local instances are then looking at “[email protected]”, and if nothing is done to prevent that, then it colours the rest of kbin.social users in a bad light. The more bad users you get, the more likely you are to experience widespread defederation, and lose out on a lot of what should make the concept of the fediverse great.

To be fair, I think there’s an issue with the obfuscation / blurring on a lot of the NSFW posts, i.e. people are tagging their post as adult only, but the thumbnail still shows “in all it’s glory”, I’ll add an example below (don’t worry, I’ll still obfuscate):

Obfuscation not working properly (SFW)

I also feel like the blur isn’t aggressive enough for some posts I’ve seen; I’d prefer something less… subtle… Sync for Reddit would just straight up show you a red box as the preview unless you went into the post.

I’m far from an expert on this sort of thing, but I would wager that the only voting data available through Reddit’s API is the current number of up and downvotes, the overall vote score, and whether the account requesting the information has up or down voted, for any given post / comment.
It can do that because the data is centralised, and every account exists in one place, whereas federation has to say “[email protected] upvoted this comment, and so did [email protected]”, because there’s nowhere to store that data centrally, other than the post itself.

I think the point is for the votes to be federated, the instance has to know who has actually voted. The issue being that information is then on the instance the post is hosting, and due to how posts propagate, there’s nothing stopping another instance putting who voted on what front and center, and just pulling that data from the host instance.

well taking up the whole thread is not an issue or is it? I quite enjoy talking with you to be honnest.

If the thread is relevant to the topic at hand, then no, and I think this is relevant.

you could have just ignored them and do nothing.

I could have, but I chose to downvote a handful of comments that I didn’t think were adding anything to the discussion, and I felt could have been seen on any top 100 reddit thread.

but I understand that we don’t share the same value as what downvoting mean, and I’m ok with that.

I’m ok with that as well, and I appreciate that we can have a civil discussion about it. Like I’ve already said, it wasn’t a personal attack or me saying “shut up”. If I wanted to do that, I’d have commented that, and likely been deservedly downvoted into oblivion, because that’s just not productive.

Edit; My first reply sounds a bit authoritarian, I think, and that’s not what I want to convey- I’m not saying there can’t be discussions that slowly veer off the topic of the post, but at the same time, if you’re clicking into post comments, you don’t want the first thing you see to be a 50 comment chain that winds up in a heated name calling argument, or two people just talking about PS1 emulators on your @knitting post, especially when there’s no way to collapse comments currently (officially).

I understand what you’re saying, but at the time, would you have rather I replied to each of the comments with ‘I disagree’, ‘I don’t like this’, etc? That’s just opening things up for unnecessary arguments that end up taking over a whole thread, which is sort of what’s happening now.

Myself, and a handful of users by the looks of it, disagreed with the content of some of your posts, or thought it wasn’t relevant / contributing to the discussion. I certainly didn’t downvote the entirety of your contribution to that thread, and I don’t intend for you to think it’s a personal attack.

If you’d like to have a discourse on why I downvoted 4 of your comments, I, like many others aren’t looking for the ‘redditification’ of another site, regardless of how similar the premise might be, and that’s what I felt those comments were promoting, particularly ‘gesundheit’. I understand wanting things to be ‘just as good as they were’, etc., but this is new, things can be better, and I personally don’t want to see the site become reddit 2.0 just because there’s been a big influx of users after the blackout started. You’re entitled to want kbin.social to become something else, of course, and that’s arguably what the voting system is there for.

People are allowed to disagree with things, although I understand if someone is just spamming the entirety of a thread with downvotes for no appreciable reason.
I’m in agreement with @eatmoregreenfood, that displaying your votes should be opt in, if available on the front end at all.
On a social basis, I don’t think it matters; Whilst it would be preferable that someone explains why they disagree with something (assuming it is actually a disagreement, and not just malicious), I don’t think anyone should be fearful of downvoting because the OP might call them out on it and expect them to explain, or forever see nothing from that user again. Disagreement isn’t inherently negative.