@ernest runs it, I think

@piotrsikora – FYI in case you can do anything about it or have insight

Let me preface my response by saying: my answer is kbin specific. It might or might not also apply to mbin since they may have changed things (or kept older features that kbin changed) since they forked. I know a few of the differences between them, but I haven’t kept up with most of mbin’s specifics.

Also, if anyone stumbles into this in the far future: note that this post is from March 2024. If that seems like a long time ago, check for newer information…

Can searches be made more specific? On Lemmy, you could define whether you wanted to search for communities/magazines, threads, comments, users and urls.

You can search for magazines specifically from the magazine page. The general search searches in microblogs, thread text – but not the thread title(?), and comments/replies, I think. You can search for exact user profiles as well with the “@ user @ instance” syntax – e.g. searching for @TamperTanuki@fedia.io shows a link to your profile as the result. (That also applies to magazines/communties – e.g. @kbinMeta@kbin.social will find both a user called “kbinMeta” and this magazine as search results – but searching for magazines from the magazine page is probably better for most use cases.) You can sometimes also find the local version of a federated thread if you search for the original post URL. Note that searching for a post on another instance may not always work; if you’re copying a link to a thread you found in a comment post and someone linked to their instance’s local version of a thread and that isn’t the original source it probably won’t find it. (I’ve had decent luck with it in practice though. For the latter problematic case, load the post on the instance and then find the fediverse link which should take you to the original source and then search for that to find it on your instance.)

@piotrsikora @ernest – FYI searching for this thread by the exact title “Multiple questions regarding Kbin” does not find it currently but searching text like “as a new Kbin/Mbin user” will find it. Is that a bug?

@piotrsikora @ernest – Searching for a URL that is not a thread causes a 50x error.

Lastly, you can change the result order (newest/controversial/oldest).

You can change newest/top/hot/active etc. for the results on kbin by clicking on the tabs above the search results.

To send toots/tweets, do I have to specify a magazine? I seem to be unable to send a toot without specifying a magazine first, although I only try to adress a mastodon user directly.

Unclassified microblogs (e.g. from Mastodon users) usually end up in random, but I’m not sure how to post them intentionally since I don’t use the microblog feature much. Hopefully someone else can chime in with an answer for this.

Is this even the right magazine to ask these questions in? Is there a dedicated kbin support magazine?

It’s fine for kbin questions but you might get a better response for details about your specific instance (which runs mbin) on a local magazine like /m/[email protected] maybe? Sorry if that doesn’t link correctly; I rarely link anything other than lemmy communities. (EDIT: https://fedia.io/m/fedia )

On Lemmy, users can send each others direct messages. It seems like Kbin/Mbin has no way of displaying those direct messages. Is that correct or is there a way to show direct messages?

DMs do not work between kbin and lemmy as far as I know. I have a lemmy alt linked in my profile in case lemmy users want to DM me.

You should be able to send messages to local users on your instance though by going to a user’s profile and clicking “Send Message” on the right side.

Trying to access the send message interface for your account from kbin doesn’t work here, so I doubt mbin/kbin DMs work. (@ernest this seems to redirect to login and then immediately to the home view instead of opening the message page or showing an error – is this a bug?)

Hope that helps!

@piotrsikora @ernest – this thread did not show up on other instances (e.g. I couldn’t see it from my alt on reddthat.com despite being subscribed to this magazine from there as well) when I found it originally. I upvoted it here on kbin.social and now it shows up on reddthat. Is that a federation bug (either on fedia.io’s side or on kbin.social’s side)?

@piotrsikora – FYI: I got a lot of 50x errors trying to edit this comment.

Hi @piotrsikora. Great to see that kbin is responsive again and returning to usability. If possible, could you please give an update on what is going on currently with federation? It looks like some things are getting through (e.g. I can see this thread on reddthat) but threads from most lemmy instances are not showing up in a timely way in /newest still and at a quick glance it looks like communities in my collections are maybe a half day behind – with many threads from the past week or more missing entirely.

I’m assuming some of that may be on the lemmy side – 0.19 has a major issue with sequential message distribution as seen with lemmy.world <-> reddthat.com federation (see this bug report and this comment if you’re unfamiliar) – but it’d be best to hear from someone who has access to the infrastructure about what’s going on rather than guessing.

In particular, it’d be helpful to know:

• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments we create here to show up on Lemmy communities?
• What kind of delay should we expect for threads and comments other people create on Lemmy/mbin/etc. instances to show up here? (Obviously this may vary from instance to instance, but in general are things cleared up now on the kbin side for receiving new threads quickly?)
• Are comment notifications still delayed from local kbin replies – or has that been fixed with the infrastructure changes?
• Are federated upvotes propagating quickly? (It is very discouraging if you post something and it gets no interaction at all – knowing if there’s federation delay in upvotes would help with distinguishing between “no one saw this”, “no one liked this”, and “people probably saw it and maybe liked it but the response hasn’t made it to kbin yet”)
• Is federation still playing catch up and old missing threads/comments will be backfilled eventually, or have they been dropped to get things back in working order?
• Have any major instances defederated with kbin.social during the recent problems?

Also, should we @ you in addition to @ernest if we encounter problems on kbin.social?

Thank you!

I don’t. I use the timer on my microwave.

I boil water in a sauce pot on the stove. Slosh it into my mug. Plunk in a tea bag and set the timer on my microwave for 3:30 so that I don’t forget and over-steep it. No milk. No sugar.

What I’d do is set up a simple website that uses a little JavaScript to rewrite the date and time into the page and periodically refresh an image under/next to it. Size the image to fit the remaining free space of however you set up the iPad, and then you can stick anything you want there (pictures/reminder text/whatever) with your favorite image editor. Upload a new image to the server when you want to change the note. The idea with an image is that it’s just really easy to do and keeps the amount of effort to redo layout to a minimum – just drag stuff around in your image editor and you’ll know it’ll all fit as expected as long as you don’t change the resolution (instead of needing to muck around with CSS and maybe breaking something if you can’t see the device to check that it displays correctly).

There’s a couple issues to watch out for – e.g. what happens if the internet connection/server goes down, screen burn-in, keeping the browser from being closed/switched to another page, keeping it powered, etc. that might or might not matter depending on your particular circumstances. If you need to fix all that for your circumstances, it might be more trouble than just buying something purpose built… but getting a first pass DIY version working is trivial if you’re comfortable hosting a website.

Edit: If some sample code that you can use as a starting point would be helpful, let me know.

Didn’t the GDPR have a data portability rule requiring that sites provide users the ability to easily export their own data? Does that not apply to Lemmy for some reason – or, am I misremembering it? (I remember account data download being a big deal a while back on reddit, but it’s been a few years…)

Yeah; I also tried subbing in case that kicks off federation and searched a few titles to see if they ended up in random incorrectly as well (stuff like that happens sometimes with kbin). The magazine has seen a few microblogs mentioning the channel, and it clearly picked up the avatar/icon, description, etc. somehow, but doesn’t seem to be getting any videos as threads/posts and I couldn’t find any floating around disconnected either. I think kbin most likely doesn’t understand what PeerTube is publishing through AP, but there could always be federation weirdness or something.

Doesn’t seem to work right on kbin, unfortunately, although it does show up as a magazine: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]

[coreutils-announce] coreutils-8.31 released [stable]

stat now prints file creation time when supported by the file system,
on GNU Linux systems with glibc >= 2.28 and kernel >= 4.11.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/coreutils-announce/2019-03/msg00000.html

(found thanks to this blog post titled “File Creation Time in Linux”)

Any ways to get around the download failing

I did this incredibly stupid procedure with Firefox yesterday as a workaround for a failing Google Takeout download:

• backup the .part file from the failed download
• restart the download (careful – if you didn’t move/back it up, it will be deleted and you will have to download the whole thing again; found this out the hard way on a 50GB+ file… that failed again)
• immediately pause the new download after it starts writing to disk
• replace the new .part file with the old .part file from earlier (or – see [1] below)
• Firefox might not show progress for a long time, but will eventually continue the download (I saw it reading the file back from disk with iotop so I just let it run)
• sanity check that you actually got the whole thing and that it is usable (in my case, I knew a hash for the file)

[1] You can actually replace the new .part file with anything that has the same size in bytes as the old file – I replaced it with a file full of zeros and manually merged the end onto the original .part file with a tiny custom python script since I had already moved the incomplete file to other media before realizing I could try this. (In my case, the incomplete file would still have been useful even with the last ~1MB cut off.)

There are probably better options in most cases – like Thunderbird for mailbox as other people suggested, or rclone for getting stuff from Drive – but if you need to get Takeout to work and the download keeps failing this may be another option to try.

We don’t need to depend on federated downvotes to judge what does or does not belong on kbin. In fact, I think it’s probably better if we don’t. People are downvoting the bots here. I have yet to see an account with negative rep. on kbin that wasn’t a spammer.

Regardless, rate-limiting incoming posts will limit the damage and annoyance to us.

I wonder if there needs to be some kind of “governance board,” like the NATO or EU of the fediverse, where major instance admins meet and set agreed upon standards of instance behavior.

I’m not sure that would help with this particular issue – and there’s already a fair amount of bad relations between instances so I don’t think a wider fediverse board is likely to succeed even if it could help somehow… I guess instance admins that do agree on general moderation principles could help co-admin each other’s instances to cover better for when they’re offline (maybe some of them already do?), but we shouldn’t have to depend on remote admins being responsive to deal with an issue affecting our instance.

Some ideas for anti-spam measures that might help:

• block users who post flood – e.g. if an account makes 10 posts a minute, it’s a spammer
• block accounts that end up massively in the negative shortly after they start posting – e.g. an account at -50 within 15 minutes of making its first post is probably a spammer (exact thresholds may need some tuning). Note that this is different from blocking new accounts that go into the negative since people can register accounts in advance of an attack and wait until later to cause disruption.
• block users who post repetitive comments/links excessively – e.g. if the same link is in 10 comments/posts from the last hour or they’ve submitted the exact same comment a dozen times, the account is probably a spammer (again, thresholds may need tuning); that won’t catch all the bots (one of them added a bunch of random words) but will catch some of them. More clever filtering could catch the other bots.
• block new posters who are reported many times by established accounts in good standing – at least until an admin can check what is going on

Photoshop would probably be easier if you have it (or are willing to pay for it), but I think it may also be possible to do with tools like Krita and some of the generative AI plugins people have made for it – e.g. https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion

I haven’t messed with it personally, but it’s on my list of fun looking AI things to try out eventually if/when I finally get a better GPU.

It just got added last week. This is the post demoing it in the devlog: https://kbin.social/m/kbinDevlog/t/651148/RTR-22-Further-improvements-interspersed-with-code-refactoring

I’m poking around at it now. I’m guessing it’s probably something to do with JavaScript – which I block by default via NoScript. (That’s kind of odd though since I thought it was generating a /\ HTML block server side, but maybe it’s doing it on the client and I just happened to have JS unblocked when I saw it before?)

Edit: It looks like it is coming from this webpack’d JS file currently which I think is built from this JS source file; there is a handleSpoilers function defined which manipulates details/summary elements. Oddly, there is also PHP code for manipulating details/summary like I thought.

@ernest can chime in on if that’s a temporary thing or what, but yeah, it seems to not work for me because I block JavaScript.

Ironically, that doesn’t work for me at all. (I have seen other spoiler blocks recently though, so not sure why not.)

It probably makes more sense to host your novel somewhere else and post links to it chapter by chapter.

I’d suggest doing one of the following:

1. Host the images on a site that already supports image galleries and link to that. Most image hosts are kind of annoying, but this is an understandable way to do it if you don’t want to run a website. (Maybe someone can chime in with a suggestion for whatever they think is the least annoying image gallery host in 2023.)
2. Host the images yourself on a simple website. Webcomic artists have been doing that for many years, so there are lots of examples to draw from. (e.g. Gunnerkrigg Court)
3. Zip the images up chapter by chapter and either self-host the zip or toss it on a file host like catbox.moe. If you structure it as a .cbz (i.e. zip up a folder with the images named in order like 1.jpg, 2.jpg, 3.jpg, … and just change the extension from .zip to .cbz) then a number of document viewers (like evince) can be used to view the image sequence – or people can just unpack the images and use their favorite image viewer on their computer.

I’ve shared my “MS Paint”-like sockpuppet parody impressions over at !sockpuppetsociety as well as my own twists on memes and anime screenshot comics and such in !animepics, !animemes, etc. If I can post this and this and this and this, you can post something you made too.

Just find the right community for your art and maybe some people will enjoy it.

Don’t be surprised if people blow raspberries at your work though; that’s just kind of what people do with art. :p

I think they’re specifically wondering if using @@ mention syntax will result in a notification popping up for the user on Lemmy.

I’ve been wondering that too (in the context of threads though) – and if it does work, are there limitations regarding visibility between instances that people should be aware of. e.g. what happens if I @ someone in a post to a community on a lemmy server that is defederated from their home instance? Or, in a community that no one on their home server has subscribed to? Will they still get a notice?

I guess I don’t really have a good mental model for how @ works on the Fediverse.