This is just a prototype, there will probably be some errors to fix ;-) But I want to see how it performs in practice and over time, I will refine the whole thing, and that will take a bit more time.
Yeah, I favorited my private collection (not sure why I did that...) and it seems to have permanently made it public, no big deal in this case, but I feel bad 'squatting' on collection slug.
Actually, I named it incorrectly. I treated as private collections those that don't appear in the listing, but you can still share them with friends. I changed it so that they are truly private, and I will add another status someday - non-public.
I noticed today when setting up a "Fediverse" collection, that another collection already existed with that name. When I went to view my collection, it was showing the other /fediverse collection instead. I changed my name to "FediNews" and that cleared it up.
So, going to https://kbin.social/u/box464/c/Fediverse goes to the other /fediverse collection - actually it still does! Not sure how that is happening since I don't have that name reserved now.
Regarding Collections: I'm wondering if it might be useful to allow transfer ownership of collections as well? Probably low priority, but this could be useful if:
The owner becomes inactive
A #kbin magazine or #lemmy community becomes problematic + has inactive moderators
Other magazines/communities become more/less relevant over time, thus the collection needing adjustments
Re 1:
Could be mitigated on kbin magazines due to magazine ownership transfers, however, may pose an issue on federated magazines from lemmy
Also could be mitigated by the creation of a new collection, hence probably low priority
Re 2:
Could be low priority in regard to certain magazines/communities becoming inactive over time, however, the chance to miss out on discussions and threads should possibly be considered
However, this is also mitigated by also creating new collections -- I just think people generally like to avoid migrating when followings settle in.
Transferring collection ownership could also be excessive/unnecessary? Thoughts? Does the status of an official collection change automatically based on the user count?
Also regarding collections: After following a collection -- going to a collection's page and attempting to unfollow is described as "delete". This may give off the wrong impression to unfamiliar users. Perhaps "unfollow", or "unfavorite" may be better suited? I also wonder if it may be more appropriate to have favorited collections appear at the top of the collections view so users can quickly find the collections they follow in order to avoid being buried by the popular ones. This could also potentially be solved by giving subscribed collections its own tab in the navbar next to magazines? Is that perhaps too many tabs in the navbar?
Anyways, thank you so much Ernest. I know some people were unhappy about /kbin's development progress for awhile, but I'm really glad I stuck with it. Despite the challenges that came your way, watching you get back into the swing of things and /kbin's growth has been a joy to be a part of. The consistent communication and having our feedback be heard is also a big plus. As always, looking forward to what else is on the way.
Edit: Also, really glad to hear you're prioritizing sustainability, balance, and a strong foundation for the future. I hope you're able to get the support you're looking for, so you can give this project the time and effort you think it deserves. It's clear you care a lot about this project.
The pace at which you have been improving things and adding new features have been impressive this past month! Thank you and I hope you are taking some breaks in between for yourself!
Agree, in the great reddit migration everyone came over and just created communities for everything. Now that the dust has settled we have hundreds of one person communities and so many similar ones.
Personally I’d like to see the admins go through their communities and say if there is only one member or if the only mods have been dormant to lock the communities and pin a post saying the community is up for adoption. At the very least that’d stop some of the hemorrhaging
Yeah, I know there’s just no way for users to do it. If there’s only one mod and they’re dormant then there’s not a lot of options, and there are people who probably would want to take over the communities. There should be a “vote of no confidence” option, but obviously that could be abused. That’s why just scanning and seeing which ones are dead first might be nice.
@scrubbles Kbin now has an automated process so if a community owner has been absent for a month, another person can just take over, and either revive it or delete it. Abandoned communities are also listed as abandoned. Would be really good if Lemmy could have something similar!
!movies started great and has over 4,000 subscribers, but suffered from an absent mod for a long time. Recently I made myself its owner and am slowly bringing it back to life.
That's why I was a little bemused at first when @Blaze (who I somehow mistook for a bot!) started crossposting all our new posts, but I actually don't think it's a problem. Interestingly, I've checked the list of upvoters for those crossposted articles across the two communities and it's not the same people in each. And only 21 people from my instance subscribe to moviesandtv.
I think it's good for mods to have these conversations. As the fediverse develops and discovery gets better (e.g. publicly shareable multi-feeds) things will start to grow or disappear organically and different communities will have different rules and flavours.
To take the example of movies again, already !movies has a somewhat different flavour than !moviesandtv which includes television.
Fragmentation can be cleaned up, but I also think decentralization is one of the important strengths of the fediverse, and we should be patient with small communities.
You are welcome! We should probably decide which community to keep at some point, it might be more interesting than crossposting everything both sides ha ha. Would you like to help us mod !moviesandtv ?
@Blaze thanks for the invite, that's an interesting idea - but I don't know if federation currently allows us to cross-moderate between Lemmy and Kbin yet?
We should probably decide which community to keep at some point
https://lemm.ee/c/moviesandtv is obviously the bigger/main community on the threadiverse so definitely it needs to be kept!!!
Also everyone already migrated here once after the old instance shut.
Kbin is a relatively small instance, but I'm still committed to helping it maintain some basic communities because I think it's an important aspect as it grows. So I'm thinking for now, keep little !movies going too, maybe lean into theory/art/history type stuff over there a bit more.
Back when I was on reddit I used to enjoy both the big movies sub and the much smaller ones like flicks and truefilm, and now that Kbin has multi-communities that seems promising in terms of access.
@Blaze thanks for the invite, that’s an interesting idea - but I don’t know if federation currently allows us to cross-moderate between Lemmy and Kbin yet?
Yes, unfortunately you would need a Lemmy account to be able to mod :-/
!moviesandtv is obviously the bigger/main community on the threadiverse so definitely it needs to be kept!!!
Alright, let’s do this!
Also, I agree that small communities are also nice, but probably too early for now
@ernest, you are doing amazing work! I hope you're taking care of yourself, too. :)
In a future update, do you think you could add the ability to set a default sort? I prefer to set my home feed to Top, 1 Day, and it's easy enough to just bookmark https://kbin.social/sub/top/1d on my PC, but I primarily use kbin as a PWA on Android and AFAIK, there's no way to set a custom home page. It would also just be convenient to open kbin to my preferred sort on any platform. :)
Will there be a way for communities to opt-out from being listed in a category?
I think there is a lot of abuse potential in this and even if well intended, a single word or so can’t really describe what communities are about, and as a result those categories (similar to the “all” feed) will bring a lot of off-topic comments and trolling from people not engaged with the communities at all otherwise.
On Mastodon with hashtags the original poster can at least make a conscious choice of being listed under it or not. But this seems fully third party driven and I fear it will increase moderation workload significantly.
I don't understand how content grouping can be used for potential abuses, to be honest. Collections are related to the user, so it will be subject to instance moderation in case of such an attempt. The community can also switch to private mode - then this content will not be aggregated in collections. Moreover, from what I know, there are already external tools that do similar things.
Most trolling and brigading is fairly low effort, and having a sharable collection of communities to troll makes it much easier to organize lots of people to do just that. Edit: yes external tools for that exist but having it built in makes it much easier to abuse and rope in people to do the trolling that otherwise would not bother.
But my main concern is that this isn’t opt-in for communities. Having a sharable and subscribable link with for example “meme” communities means that all of them are seeing a constant barrage of random people commenting that are not members of that community and do not have any idea what the community is about other than that it is somewhat loosely related to “memes”. It basically hides everything that is vital about the communities and actively damages attempts at community building.
I understand now, I'll think it over during the weekend. I haven't really considered it before because the fediverse is still a relatively small and close-knit community imo. Excluding a specific instance would likely involve PR proposal to Lemmy's repository, but that's fine. Thanks for the feedback.
lol I had the same thought. This was one of my most wanted features! Idk if Artemis is still being worked on at this point, but I hope support for collections is added there.
@ernest nice! One of the biggest problems I found with KBin/Lemmy was the duplication of very similar communities across them. This goes a long way to fixing that!
I did not expect to see the #collections/#categories feature be implemented so quickly after mentioning it in only two threads ago. It's really exciting watching #kbin develop. However, when I tried making a private and public test case, both returned with 50x error. Even though some actions are successful despite showing this error, I couldn't find my attempts at using this feature under Settings > Collections or Magazines > Collections. Regardless, your work is certainly appreciated.
I think it complements federation too. Suddenly you can have a collection of magazines sharing a name/topic from different instances all listed together in one place. That's really quite cool!
Random stuff from all over the fediverse
Activo